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Engineer our society for its ejection from the solar system

bilby said:
DBT said:
What would it even mean to 'manipulate time and space?' Time travel? Warp drive?
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Being able to go from Sydney to London in a day, rather than several weeks? Being able to talk to someone in Manhattan from your office in Los Angeles in real time, rather than wait for an exchange of letters, or of telegrams?

All of human progress since the Industrial Revolution has been underpinned by the minimisation of the time constraints imposed by spatial distance, culminating in high bandwidth fibre optics, supersonic air travel, and containerized multi-modal freight.

Communications have now run into physical law - The latency between antipodal sites cannot be much further reduced. Even if we develop neutrino based communications that can travel a straight line rather than hugging the surface of the planet the saving is tiny. Reducing latency from ~60 milliseconds to ~20ms is hardly comparable to reducing it to ~60ms from 250 days (21,600,000,000ms), which is how long it took to get a message half way around the planet a mere 250 years ago.

Transport of people and goods still has some more significant potential for improvement, though we seem to have been going backwards ever since Concorde was retired and not replaced. New York to London in seven hours is significantly slower than the same trip in three hours.

I would certainly be much happier if I could visit my family via a ten hour supersonic flight, or a two hour sub-orbital one, rather than spending 24-30 hours on subsonic aircraft. But at least it's not eight months on a ship anymore.
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Sure, but the remark Kratsios made suggested something well beyond any of that, the stuff of science fiction or fantasy, but sadly, no details.
 
Bomb#20 said:
Loren Pechtel said:
Bomb#20 said:
This assumes we survive the encounter, which may not be realistic. A sun-like star that comes close enough to mangle our orbit that much would certainly be close enough to fry us to death. Not sure about a red dwarf. A black hole could do it, but a black hole we wouldn't see coming.
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Yeah. A while back I was playing with a space simulator looking at what would happen. High speed flyby by masses of sun and up. It wasn't easy to get Earth ejected. Things would almost always be ejected if the intruder passed between them and the sun, might be if the intruder passed between their orbit and the sun and they were on that side of the sun, but most attempts left the Earth in what was probably a habitable orbit even while ripping off the outer planets.

I think we would see a black hole's effects on the interstellar medium before it actually got here. An old neutron star would be a more likely candidate.
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A problem with all these scenarios is precision. If you can infer a black hole from its effects, that doesn't mean you know its location with any accuracy. And even if you can spot an incoming neutron star or red dwarf in a telescope, you won't know the distance. Parallax uncertainties for nearby stars are on the order of a hundred AUs. So even if we know a disruptive object is headed down our throat ten thousand years in advance, we won't know when it's going to arrive, and therefore where we'll be in our orbit, until it's practically on top of us.
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If it's close enough to be a threat we should be able to get a good parallax by observing it over a year.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Bomb#20 said:
A problem with all these scenarios is precision. If you can infer a black hole from its effects, that doesn't mean you know its location with any accuracy. And even if you can spot an incoming neutron star or red dwarf in a telescope, you won't know the distance. Parallax uncertainties for nearby stars are on the order of a hundred AUs. So even if we know a disruptive object is headed down our throat ten thousand years in advance, we won't know when it's going to arrive, and therefore where we'll be in our orbit, until it's practically on top of us.
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If it's close enough to be a threat we should be able to get a good parallax by observing it over a year.
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Let me just back-of-the-envelope that. Alpha Centauri is expected to pass by us in 30,000 years at a distance of 3 light years. So it's closing at a rate of about 1/20000 c. So if it were coming right at us, when it was 10,000 years out it we'd be observing it from half a light year. That's about 1/10 its current distance, so the parallax over a year would be ten times what it is now, so the uncertainty in its distance would be ten times less, or roughly 10 AUs. That's 80 light minutes, making the uncertainty in arrival time 1,600,000 minutes, or three years. No way to know if it's going to pass between us and the sun and kick us out of orbit. But 100 years out, the uncertainty would be down to about ten days and we'd know.

(Of course all this assumes 2025 parallax technology. If a star were headed down our throat there'd probably be a crash program to improve on that...)
 
One will have to use the Earth's interior heat as one's source of energy:  Geothermal power
Estimates of the electricity generating potential of geothermal energy vary from 35 to 2000 GW depending on the scale of investments.[3] This does not include non-electric heat recovered by co-generation, geothermal heat pumps and other direct use. A 2006 report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that included the potential of enhanced geothermal systems estimated that investing US$1 billion in research and development over 15 years would allow the creation of 100 GW of electrical generating capacity by 2050 in the United States alone.[15] The MIT report estimated that over 200×10^9 TJ (200 ZJ; 5.6×10^7 TWh) would be extractable, with the potential to increase this to over 2,000 ZJ with technology improvements – sufficient to provide all the world's present energy needs for several millennia.[15]

At present, geothermal wells are rarely more than 3 km (2 mi) deep.[3] Upper estimates of geothermal resources assume wells as deep as 10 km (6 mi). Drilling near this depth is now possible in the petroleum industry, although it is an expensive process. The deepest research well in the world, the Kola Superdeep Borehole (KSDB-3), is 12.261 km (7.619 mi) deep.[21] Wells drilled to depths greater than 4 km (2.5 mi) generally incur drilling costs in the tens of millions of dollars.[22] The technological challenges are to drill wide bores at low cost and to break larger volumes of rock.

Geothermal power is considered to be sustainable because the heat extraction is small compared to the Earth's heat content, but extraction must still be monitored to avoid local depletion.[7] Although geothermal sites are capable of providing heat for many decades, individual wells may cool down or run out of water. The three oldest sites, at Larderello, Wairakei, and the Geysers have all reduced production from their peaks. It is not clear whether these stations extracted energy faster than it was replenished from greater depths, or whether the aquifers supplying them are being depleted. If production is reduced, and water is reinjected, these wells could theoretically recover their full potential. Such mitigation strategies have already been implemented at some sites. The long-term sustainability of geothermal energy has been demonstrated at the Larderello field in Italy since 1913, at the Wairakei field in New Zealand since 1958,[23] and at the Geysers field in California since 1960.[24]
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One will have to live in enclosed cities with self-contained ecosystems, like what is proposed for living elsewhere in the Solar System: the Moon, Mars, and free-flying space colonies.
 
 List of countries by energy consumption per capita and  List of countries by electricity consumption

The electricity consumption rate for an industrialized country is around 1 kilowatt, and the total energy consumption is around 10 kilowatts.

Our own energy consumption is typically 2000 food calories per day or 100 watts.

If one can get 1 terawatt of geothermal energy, that means 10 billion people if one could plug directly in, 1 billion people for electricity consumption and 100 million people for total energy consumption for typical supplied energy.

Another form of energy that we must consider is energy to grow our food. For typical crop plants and farm animals, the amount of land per person is roughly 1.5 hectares, and with 200 watts per meter of arriving light energy, that is 3 megawatts per person, with an efficiency of 1/30,000. One can reduce the necessary area by living lower on the food chain, by being a vegetarian. To go further, one must grow bacteria that live off hydrogen, and one must make that hydrogen by electrolyzing water. Like this: Solar Foods

With 10% efficiency, this technique requires 1 kilowatt per person, and with 1%, 10 kw/person. I think that such efficiencies are feasible for this technique, because of avoiding some big sources of ineffeciency:
  • Light not arriving on crop-plat leaves
  • Light being scattered off of them.
  • Photosynthesis having low efficiency, about a few %
  • Having to keep the crop plants alive
  • Having to keep farm animals alive (skip by being a vegetarian)
 
Bomb#20 said:
Loren Pechtel said:
Bomb#20 said:
A problem with all these scenarios is precision. If you can infer a black hole from its effects, that doesn't mean you know its location with any accuracy. And even if you can spot an incoming neutron star or red dwarf in a telescope, you won't know the distance. Parallax uncertainties for nearby stars are on the order of a hundred AUs. So even if we know a disruptive object is headed down our throat ten thousand years in advance, we won't know when it's going to arrive, and therefore where we'll be in our orbit, until it's practically on top of us.
Click to expand...
If it's close enough to be a threat we should be able to get a good parallax by observing it over a year.
Click to expand...
Let me just back-of-the-envelope that. Alpha Centauri is expected to pass by us in 30,000 years at a distance of 3 light years. So it's closing at a rate of about 1/20000 c. So if it were coming right at us, when it was 10,000 years out it we'd be observing it from half a light year. That's about 1/10 its current distance, so the parallax over a year would be ten times what it is now, so the uncertainty in its distance would be ten times less, or roughly 10 AUs. That's 80 light minutes, making the uncertainty in arrival time 1,600,000 minutes, or three years. No way to know if it's going to pass between us and the sun and kick us out of orbit. But 100 years out, the uncertainty would be down to about ten days and we'd know.

(Of course all this assumes 2025 parallax technology. If a star were headed down our throat there'd probably be a crash program to improve on that...)
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I would strongly suspect that "2025" parallax technology is limited by how much money we want to throw at it. Off the top of my head: take that 2025 technology and put it in orbit about Mars. Your baseline is now 50% longer. (Going farther out would be even better, but that means Pu-238 for the power and that's in limited supply.)
 
Elixir said:
steve_bank said:
An old scifi movie. A rogue star is headed for the solar system.
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The “what-ifs” around that idea make me wonder about rogue planets - non-luminous bodies wandering around interstellar (or even intergalactic) space.
How common are they, how much advance warning could we expect if one was going to disrupt our solar system, and could we do anything about it?
I suspect we’d effectively be blindsided.
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It likely wouldn't matter though. We tend to forget how empty space is. A rogue planet wandering in the general direction of the solar system would likely cross through it in a single pass on a hyperbolic trajectory, unless it gets cast into a solar orbit by a close encounter with one of our own had giants. So it only gets one chance to get close enough to earth to significantly alter our orbit, and a very slim chance at that. Realistically, even if it gets extremely close by interplanetary standards, it would likely just throw its in an ender so slightly more eccentric orbit, with the year two days longer and the aphelion 6% forget from the sun or some such.
 
There was a large object that passed through the solar system. A rendering looked like a big turd.



A rendered image of ʻOumuamua, an interstellar object that passed through our solar system, shows it as a cigar-shaped object against a backdrop of stars. The object was first detected in 2017 and is considered the first known interstellar visitor to our solar system.
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science.nasa.gov

'Oumuamua - NASA Science

The first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua, was discovered Oct. 19, 2017.
science.nasa.gov science.nasa.gov

1747910606441.jpeg


Clark's Rendezvous With Rama?
 
SLD said:
But we would also have thousands of years to prepare ourselves.
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I'm not optimistic we wouldn't fail the test at the outset, given right now we can't even get together to solve pandemics. And we can't even get together to agree climate change is a problem. Realistically, people would probably just shrug, say "oh we have thousands of years to fix it" then not do anything when the problem arrives, and we would have to first convince people that there is a problem for any engineering solution to work.
 
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Jimmy Higgins said:
Curious about issues with the Moon if Earth were to be ejected.
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That would depend on what is doing the ejecting. If it's a star, then it will likely stay much farther away than the Earth-Moon distance, and the Moon will continue orbiting the Earth in close to the same orbit. But if it's a planet, then it will have to approach to within a few Earth radii of the Earth, and the Earth and the Moon will become separated.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Curious about issues with the Moon if Earth were to be ejected.
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I would think it would come along. It's fate is going to come down to the difference in the tug on Earth vs the tug on the Moon, but note that this is exactly the same thing as a tide. That means a brutal tide on Earth.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
Curious about issues with the Moon if Earth were to be ejected.
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I would think it would come along. It's fate is going to come down to the difference in the tug on Earth vs the tug on the Moon, but note that this is exactly the same thing as a tide. That means a brutal tide on Earth.
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I would think that if the star were close enough to impact the earth moon relationship we’d be toast. Literally. But even if not, the moon would be superfluous if we were frozen solid. There’d be no need for tides.
 
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