Engineer our society for its ejection from the solar system

[Bomb#20]

We can't cooperate to preserve life and human society while we walk on the surface of the planet, so I find it difficult to believe it would be possible to do it underground.

 

[Bomb#20]

Suppose a rogue star were to come barreling through our solar system and as a result we get ejected from the solar system or are thrown so far into the outer orbits we are beyond Pluto. Our atmosphere would freeze. All life above ground would freeze. ... But we would also have thousands of years to prepare ourselves. Could we engineer a society to live under ground or maybe in domes on the surface? We just need an energy source besides the sun to keep us warm and toasty along with enough of the biosphere to sustain human life.

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.

How many years would we need to do it? 10,000? Might be hard to predict the exact timing of the star and its effect on our planet 10,000 years out but I would expect that’s when we would have at least spotted the incoming star.

We've spotted Gliese 710. It's currently about 60 light years out and it's projected to pass about 0.15 light years away from us, in 1.4 million years. Unless the object with our name on it is a black hole, sufficient notice should not be a problem.

 

[Jarhyn]

Beyond that, the real question is, why?

I mean, my strategy has plenty of reasons for why beyond an rejection scenario.

Technological apotheosis, something to do with the aeons, the power to put yourself on storage if you ever want to just... Fade... At least I told someone spins you back up out of need (they probably won't) or social interest (perhaps if you have descendants or were an author or a great inventor of ideas).

If you really wanted to you could try using the Aeons to make a planet habitable for yourself or others and going back around on the cycle.

If things are going to slowly for your interest, you could under clock yourself and watch a whole solar system be born and die like having a single eye open as you sleep (I did this, once, by accident; my open eye felt like it was going to shatter when I snapped out of it... omg it happened so quickly, watching a time lapse of the sun rising).

Sure, existence like that could get really lonely. But you would also be light-weight enough to bring possibly a whole city, nation, or world of friends and family.

As I see it the only real long term hope for any life in this universe at all, though, requires adapting to life in space, not by changing how we live as what we are, but by changing the basic package of what we are.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Suppose a rogue star were to come barreling through our solar system and as a result we get ejected from the solar system or are thrown so far into the outer orbits we are beyond Pluto. Our atmosphere would freeze. All life above ground would freeze.

It’s theoretically possible. The galaxy is apparently full of rogue planets that this happened to in some way or another.

But we would also have thousands of years to prepare ourselves. Could we engineer a society to live under ground or maybe in domes on the surface? We just need an energy source besides the sun to keep us warm and toasty along with enough of the biosphere to sustain human life.

How would we do it? Geothermal? Fusion? Other power sources? How many years would we need to do it? 10,000? Might be hard to predict the exact timing of the star and its effect on our planet 10,000 years out but I would expect that’s when we would have at least spotted the incoming star.

What are the impacts of "a rogue star ... barreling through our solar system?" What is destroyed, what is altered, what is salvageable? Do pieces of the Earth go somewhere else, what about Mars and Venus? I could say move underground, but then does the underground survive the initial catastrophe? Supposing it survives, how different is the underground environment pre-catastrophe from post-catastrophe? How well pre-configured is the post-catastrophe environment, and how well pre-tested is it?

I am not opposed to it, but it all sounds very risky and so I'd be in favor of more diversification of solutions. Underground Earth--okay. Underground Mars--try that, too. Spaceship Arks to eventually find other planets that can sustain life--why not?

 

[Bronzeage]

Beyond that, the real question is, why?

I mean, my strategy has plenty of reasons for why beyond an rejection scenario.

Technological apotheosis, something to do with the aeons, the power to put yourself on storage if you ever want to just... Fade... At least I told someone spins you back up out of need (they probably won't) or social interest (perhaps if you have descendants or were an author or a great inventor of ideas).

If you really wanted to you could try using the Aeons to make a planet habitable for yourself or others and going back around on the cycle.

If things are going to slowly for your interest, you could under clock yourself and watch a whole solar system be born and die like having a single eye open as you sleep (I did this, once, by accident; my open eye felt like it was going to shatter when I snapped out of it... omg it happened so quickly, watching a time lapse of the sun rising).

Sure, existence like that could get really lonely. But you would also be light-weight enough to bring possibly a whole city, nation, or world of friends and family.

As I see it the only real long term hope for any life in this universe at all, though, requires adapting to life in space, not by changing how we live as what we are, but by changing the basic package of what we are.

This is beginning to read like a van with "Birds aren't real" painted on the side.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I think the hardest part of the hypothetical isn't can we survive but can we make it worth living in. No sun, no fresh air, no weather.

Why are we surviving?

 

[Politesse]

Suppose a rogue star were to come barreling through our solar system and as a result we get ejected from the solar system or are thrown so far into the outer orbits we are beyond Pluto. Our atmosphere would freeze. All life above ground would freeze.

It’s theoretically possible. The galaxy is apparently full of rogue planets that this happened to in some way or another.

But we would also have thousands of years to prepare ourselves. Could we engineer a society to live under ground or maybe in domes on the surface? We just need an energy source besides the sun to keep us warm and toasty along with enough of the biosphere to sustain human life.

How would we do it? Geothermal? Fusion? Other power sources? How many years would we need to do it? 10,000? Might be hard to predict the exact timing of the star and its effect on our planet 10,000 years out but I would expect that’s when we would have at least spotted the incoming star.

Just? The sun is the only significant source of energy in the solar system, everything else is secondary.

Such an event would destroy both us and our food, and the temperature is only one of the many problems ejection from our solar system would cause. We're no Jupiter or Saturn, when it comes to size and internal heat, our atmosphere would slowly freeze to our ground surface, as happened to Pluto for instance. One could imagine some sort of life persisting deep within the oceans, etc, but humans need more than gentle warmth and drifting nutrients to survive, so you'd be better off as a tube worm in this scenario. The loss of our entire global ecosystem would not be something salvageable in a short period of time.

 

[SLD]

Suppose a rogue star were to come barreling through our solar system and as a result we get ejected from the solar system or are thrown so far into the outer orbits we are beyond Pluto. Our atmosphere would freeze. All life above ground would freeze.

It’s theoretically possible. The galaxy is apparently full of rogue planets that this happened to in some way or another.

But we would also have thousands of years to prepare ourselves. Could we engineer a society to live under ground or maybe in domes on the surface? We just need an energy source besides the sun to keep us warm and toasty along with enough of the biosphere to sustain human life.

How would we do it? Geothermal? Fusion? Other power sources? How many years would we need to do it? 10,000? Might be hard to predict the exact timing of the star and its effect on our planet 10,000 years out but I would expect that’s when we would have at least spotted the incoming star.

Just? The sun is the only significant source of energy in the solar system, everything else is secondary.

Such an event would destroy both us and our food, and the temperature is only one of the many problems ejection from our solar system would cause. We're no Jupiter or Saturn, when it comes to size and internal heat, our atmosphere would slowly freeze to our ground surface, as happened to Pluto for instance. One could imagine some sort of life persisting deep within the oceans, etc, but humans need more than gentle warmth and drifting nutrients to survive, so you'd be better off as a tube worm in this scenario. The loss of our entire global ecosystem would not be something salvageable in a short period of time.

Sure. But in my scenario, you’ve got thousands of years to prepare. As pointed out, there are alternative power sources from nuclear, to fusion to geothermal. We could use hydroponics to grow our food. We wouldn’t need to go far underground. We could have trips to the surface routinely, or perhaps domed cities on the surface. Imagine the stars from such a vantage point. We wouldn’t need a space telescope. We could still have satellites and venture further into space. We might have large tunnels to connect us around the world or maybe humanity would gather in one stable geographic spot.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Suppose a rogue star were to come barreling through our solar system and as a result we get ejected from the solar system or are thrown so far into the outer orbits we are beyond Pluto. Our atmosphere would freeze. All life above ground would freeze.

It’s theoretically possible. The galaxy is apparently full of rogue planets that this happened to in some way or another.

But we would also have thousands of years to prepare ourselves. Could we engineer a society to live under ground or maybe in domes on the surface? We just need an energy source besides the sun to keep us warm and toasty along with enough of the biosphere to sustain human life.

How would we do it? Geothermal? Fusion? Other power sources? How many years would we need to do it? 10,000? Might be hard to predict the exact timing of the star and its effect on our planet 10,000 years out but I would expect that’s when we would have at least spotted the incoming star.

Just? The sun is the only significant source of energy in the solar system, everything else is secondary.

The Sun is #1 by a long short, but after the sun, our molten iron core would be a sufficient source of energy long after we are gone (hence the burrow under ground solution).

Such an event would destroy both us and our food, and the temperature is only one of the many problems ejection from our solar system would cause. We're no Jupiter or Saturn, when it comes to size and internal heat, our atmosphere would slowly freeze to our ground surface, as happened to Pluto for instance. One could imagine some sort of life persisting deep within the oceans, etc, but humans need more than gentle warmth and drifting nutrients to survive, so you'd be better off as a tube worm in this scenario. The loss of our entire global ecosystem would not be something salvageable in a short period of time.

The question becomes how large a population could we sustain? Lots of problems have solutions. Obviously burrowing underground requires us to develop solutions to radiation shielding, managing water sources to keep them from freezing, water and wastewater treatment, air recycling. Then managing vertical hydroponic vegetable growth, and gaining an appreciation for algae.

It can probably be done, but for how many, and why? We didn't evolve to live in this situation and it'll likely end badly after some psychotic episodes.

 

[Politesse]

Suppose a rogue star were to come barreling through our solar system and as a result we get ejected from the solar system or are thrown so far into the outer orbits we are beyond Pluto. Our atmosphere would freeze. All life above ground would freeze.

It’s theoretically possible. The galaxy is apparently full of rogue planets that this happened to in some way or another.

But we would also have thousands of years to prepare ourselves. Could we engineer a society to live under ground or maybe in domes on the surface? We just need an energy source besides the sun to keep us warm and toasty along with enough of the biosphere to sustain human life.

How would we do it? Geothermal? Fusion? Other power sources? How many years would we need to do it? 10,000? Might be hard to predict the exact timing of the star and its effect on our planet 10,000 years out but I would expect that’s when we would have at least spotted the incoming star.

Just? The sun is the only significant source of energy in the solar system, everything else is secondary.

The Sun is #1 by a long short, but after the sun, our molten iron core would be a sufficient source of energy long after we are gone (hence the burrow under ground solution).

Such an event would destroy both us and our food, and the temperature is only one of the many problems ejection from our solar system would cause. We're no Jupiter or Saturn, when it comes to size and internal heat, our atmosphere would slowly freeze to our ground surface, as happened to Pluto for instance. One could imagine some sort of life persisting deep within the oceans, etc, but humans need more than gentle warmth and drifting nutrients to survive, so you'd be better off as a tube worm in this scenario. The loss of our entire global ecosystem would not be something salvageable in a short period of time.

The question becomes how large a population could we sustain? Lots of problems have solutions. Obviously burrowing underground requires us to develop solutions to radiation shielding, managing water sources to keep them from freezing, water and wastewater treatment, air recycling. Then managing vertical hydroponic vegetable growth, and gaining an appreciation for algae.

It can probably be done, but for how many, and why? We didn't evolve to live in this situation and it'll likely end badly after some psychotic episodes.

Gettimg ourselves to a warmish burrow is one thing. Finding a way to meet our omnivorous nutritional and mineral needs once there, post- the extinction of most life and the death of most people on the planet, is quite another.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

10K years from now, what would be the relative loss as compared to the surface environments? Think the oceans, air, weather, other waterways, ... plastics, fossil fuels, people may have started to hide underground by then anyway, maybe in some old fracking sites where in a thousand years there are underground fracking mining communities that come about...I mean who knows really. Then, how much time would we spend in the real world as opposed to virtual worlds anyway? Or would we have actually gone backward by then technologically? After catastrophes?

 

[Politesse]

10K years from now, what would be the relative loss as compared to the surface environments? Think the oceans, air, weather, other waterways, ... plastics, fossil fuels, people may have started to hide underground by then anyway, maybe in some old fracking sites where in a thousand years there are underground fracking mining communities that come about...I mean who knows really. Then, how much time would we spend in the real world as opposed to virtual worlds anyway? Or would we have actually gone backward by then technologically? After catastrophes?

Surely. Batteries don't last indefinitely.

 

[bilby]

Just? The sun is the only significant source of energy in the solar system, everything else is secondary.

The Sun is the only object in the solar system, to a reasonable degree of precision. As Arthur C. Clarke said, the Solar System consists of the Sun, Jupiter, and assorted debris.

Those "secondary" parts of the Solar System include such insignificant trifles as nuclear fission, radioactivity, and the residual heat of formation of our planet - A planet which is itself a "secondary" part of the Solar System.

Without the Sun, we likely couldn't support the current population of billions of humans. But H. Sapiens has survived being reduced to only a few thousand individuals in the past, and came through.

We are like cockroaches; It's easy to kill a lot of us, but it's very difficult indeed to eradicate us completely.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Suppose a rogue star were to come barreling through our solar system and as a result we get ejected from the solar system or are thrown so far into the outer orbits we are beyond Pluto. Our atmosphere would freeze. All life above ground would freeze. ... But we would also have thousands of years to prepare ourselves. Could we engineer a society to live under ground or maybe in domes on the surface? We just need an energy source besides the sun to keep us warm and toasty along with enough of the biosphere to sustain human life.

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.

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.

 

[DBT]

This sounds like quite a claim, if it has any substance.

"White House Director of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios on Monday suggested the United States has technology that can “manipulate time and space.”

“Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space,” Kratsios said. “They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.”

Trump admin science director says American tech can 'manipulate time and space'

White House Director of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios on Monday suggested the United States has technology that can “manipulate time and space.”The co

abc3340.com

 

[steve_bank]

White House says it has tech that can "manipulate time and space"

A speech by science adviser Michael Kratsios has attracted attention from people who think he means the U.S. now has time travel technology

www.newsweek.com

The viral interpretation of Kratsios's comment reflects the growing impact of social media in framing public understanding of government messaging.

While the White House has not issued a formal clarification, the speech's wording suggests the phrase was metaphorical—intended to refer to the transformative nature of modern innovation, not literal manipulation of space-time, or the invention of time travel.

What To Know

Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, made the remark during a policy address at the Endless Frontiers Retreat in Austin, Texas on April 14.

"Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity," Kratsios said during prepared remarks published on the official White House website.

While the statement was likely intended as aspirational language about technological progress, it has since circulated widely online, with some interpreting the comment literally.

In the speech, Kratsios emphasized the importance of American leadership in emerging technologies and criticized regulatory burdens that, in his view, had slowed progress. "We have weighed down our builders and innovators," he said. "But we are capable of so much more."

 

[DBT]

What would it even mean to 'manipulate time and space?' Time travel? Warp drive?

 

[Politesse]

Just? The sun is the only significant source of energy in the solar system, everything else is secondary.

The Sun is the only object in the solar system, to a reasonable degree of precision. As Arthur C. Clarke said, the Solar System consists of the Sun, Jupiter, and assorted debris.

Those "secondary" parts of the Solar System include such insignificant trifles as nuclear fission, radioactivity, and the residual heat of formation of our planet - A planet which is itself a "secondary" part of the Solar System.

Without the Sun, we likely couldn't support the current population of billions of humans. But H. Sapiens has survived being reduced to only a few thousand individuals in the past, and came through.

We are like cockroaches; It's easy to kill a lot of us, but it's very difficult indeed to eradicate us completely.

Just because we managed to scrape by for a paltry 300,000 years does not mean we are immortal, still less to the point of outliving our entire planetary biosphere.

I'll grant you that cockroaches may well survive for a while, though. Provided we manage to build some of the magical mystical underground bunkers that keep getting mentioned in this thread, they'll provide some decent habitat for the little blighters, at least until all the tunnels collapse.

 

[Bomb#20]

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.

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.

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.

 

[bilby]

What would it even mean to 'manipulate time and space?' Time travel? Warp drive?

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.