A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago • Hacker News Board

Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#91

Post by JKCalhoun » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 5:13 AM UTC

24gttghh wrote: post #9

I was going to ask if perhaps ancient humans saw this new red star and if it drove them to an elevated state of being superstitious and chaos but: >When Scholz’s Star was in the neighborhood, it would have been a 10th magnitude star (red dwarfs are very dim). That’s about 50 times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye at night. Under normal circumstances, it would be invisible. But because red dwarfs are m…

Thought this might be Nemesis:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(hypothetical_star))

....but the dinosaurs died much, much earlier than this dawrf star passed by.

Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#92

Post by ninkendo » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 3:06 PM UTC

ninkendo wrote: post #35

I'll take this opportunity to recommend Universe Sandbox[1], which is pretty cheap on steam and worth every penny. Turning on projected orbital lines in an N-body simulation of our solar system and seeing what happens when you toss a star in there is really enlightening... the rings all shift in tandem in a visceral way that really helps me "feel" what happens. There's a simulation that comes out of the box that simu…

Made a gif of this from the game:

https://imgur.com/a/6NXQ7

Re: A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

#93

Post by PopsiclePete » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

c-smile wrote: post #50

Again: as sooner we start our resettlement to other star systems - the better.

I think it's highly unlikely that we'll be able to move off this rock and survive, much less thrive. We are super-duper fragile. Space is extremely inhospitable, living on a space station for prolonged periods of time would wreck our bodies, potentially habitable planets are light-years away, and it's in our nature to be short-sighted.y

Perhaps one day our technology will advance to where we can create some kind of AI or AI/Human hybrid with a non-fragile body that can withstand zero gee and space radiation, but then you get into this deep existential thought of what it even means to be "human". I mean maybe Humans were never meant to colonize space, maybe our "job" as a species is to "create" a species that can, though.

I love this stuff.