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Comment by cetico | Hacker News Reader

And I used to worry about asteroids..

Looking forward to the Hollywood movie in which heroes have to stop a STAR from hitting Earth.

Armageddon 2: Starmageddon. Bruce Willis has to land on the surface of a star, drill down into it and release a hydrogen bomb. The fusion reaction will cause the star to blow up even though it’s already full of fusion. He’ll wear a suit made out of diamonds and have a spaceship made of diamonds, and an Aerosmith rendition of twinkle twinkle little star will play as the star explodes and diamonds rain from the sky. Now seeking story credit for this script.

Already stole the idea and have the rights secured.

All the best, - Hollywood

Codename: Brucy in the Sky of Diamonds.

But.. but diamonds are made of carbon and so can burn.

But ignorance is bliss...

The diamonds are cooled by ice water

Your script is missing how Bruce managed to escape exploding asteroid.

The explosion propelled him through the Milky Way at 5 million miles an hour until he came back around to earth.

Or how he managed to get to it. Any start exploding close enough for non-FTL technology to be a reasonable mode of transportation would also turn the Earth into dust or a molten ball of rock.

No problem... it turns out we reverse engineered a primitive FTL drive from the debris at Area 51, so we stick it onto a Space Shuttle, but it also turns out to be the only thing powerful enough to blow up the star, so it has to be detonated, sacrificing the ship.

However,the explosion also creates a wormhole that Bruce Willis bounces back into after blowing the star up, which lets him land safely back on Earth in a cool pose like Iron Man at the end.

He was propelled out of the explosion at 5 million mph.

Bruce burrowed into a floating piece of the asteroid and now has a sick man cave. Remember he is the best oil driller in the world.

spoiler alert: he dies

The film begins with government agents unearthing a refrigerator from the Nevada desert; the only known conveyance to have successfully protected a protagonist from the full brunt of a nuclear explosion.

Diamond is the best known solid conductor of heat.

Bruce would get cooked.

I'm on board with diamonds raining from the sky, tho'. Maybe on Europa. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2061:_Odyssey_Three

There is nothing you could do with any conceivable technology. Even if a star would just traverse through the solar system it would probably throw the planets out of their orbits which would also be quite unpleasant.

Evacuation involves conceivable technology.

Conceivable, but not remotely available at the moment, or on the horizon. Not to mention, evacuation to where? The whole solar system would be thrown into disarray, and we don’t know of any Earth-like planets in other systems. We’d be toast, end of story. Maybe in a few hundred years, and given a lot of warning we could save some small fraction of humanity.

Shotgun approach: anywhere we think we might have even a remote hope of colonizing, prioritized and weighted (in terms of number of passengers) by likelihood of success.

It's amusing to think on two such populations of this human diaspora surviving to eventually reunite one day, probably tens of thousands of years after the original colonization event faded from their collective cultural memories.

Reunite? Knowing humans they'd likely battle to mutual annihilation because their toenails were different colors.

One would hope having one's solar system murdered by a rouge star might help a species grow up but right now I'm skeptical.

This was a Star Trek plot that helped explain why most of the aliens were humanoid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...

> After studying the ambiguous number blocks for hours, the discovery is made that these fragments are compatible DNA strands which have been recovered from different worlds all over the galaxy. The crew eventually believe that they have discovered an embedded genetic pattern that is constant throughout many different species, and it is speculated that this was left by an early race that pre-dates all other known civilizations. This would ultimately explain why so many races are humanoid.

Pretty sure if today's scientists had access to a dozen alien populations, DNA analysis would be one of the first things they set about. I'm not a trekky, but I would think that this should have happened chronologically much earlier in the canon.

>I'm not a trekky, but I would think that this should have happened chronologically much earlier in the canon.

Unfortunately, that was a two-part afterthought and the canon in that respect was never really explored. You could set an entire season or series around it, and Star Trek had a lot of dropped ideas with potential like that.

This is almost the plot to the Killzone franchise: as in, separate populations of human colonists at war with each other, long after they forgot their common ancestry.

That is also the plot to all of actual history. It's a pretty general plot.

Good point. Here I was thinking I stumbled onto something novel...

Well, that is not standing in the way of a good story. Interstellar solved that problem already.

Where do you want to go if planets are thrown off orbit? You need to plan that years or most likely decades before. We also have no evidence that we are capable of surviving off Earth long term.

Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest explores this idea, mostly to point out that there is no acceptable method to choose who gets evacuated and who stays behind. The author argues through his characters that any attempt at evacuation would create immediate and violent conflict between humans.

See also Seveneves[1], where a similar evacuation does indeed have some downsides. It's also a theme in one of my favorite Ted Chiang stories, "Mono no Aware"[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves

2: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mono-no-aware/

Seveneves and the Dark Forest series are literally the last two (sets of) books I read and they are so wonderful. The last book in the Dark Forest series in particular has some of the most mind-blowing concepts I've encountered in SciFi.

I havent read Dark Forest but I also enjoyed Seveneves. If you want more mind blowing sci-fi I can't recommend _Diaspora_ by Greg Egan enough.

Looks great -- putting it on the list!

Violent conflict hasn't stopped things from happening in the past; it seems overwhelmingly unlikely to stop an evacuation either.

I find the idea of a stat zooming through the Milky Way to be so hilarious, but I can’t really explain why. Stars just aren’t supposed to be going on high-speed solo adventures through the galaxy in my mind. Although perhaps a better movie would be about a black hole hurtling towards earth, as they’re also supposed to be traversing the galaxy.

All stars are zooming through the Milky Way. :) The Sun does a full orbit in 225 to 250 million years. Although I have no idea why we can't calculate it more precisely than that.

Short of moving Earth out of the way, there's not a whole lot you can do in that case…

The mere presence of another star anywhere near earth would have catastrophic effects on the solar system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dJEhPYfJ5U

My comment was meant as a poor attempt at humor of the impossibility of the task. You think Hollywood cares about the effects of the star's gravity? The only thing that matters is when the star collides with Earth.

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