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garmaine

> Could be an object at high speed, waiting for the right gravity assist directly into us?

An object larger than Jupiter doesn't change its course because of chance encounters with other random small bodies.

> Could be a strange object with capability to disrupt the sun somehow?

This doesn't make physical sense.

> Why would an object hitherto unbeknownst to us and close to the sun NOT be scary?

Because it's had no observable effect on us for the last 4.5 billion years of our solar system's existence, and we've postulated nothing that would change this stable dynamical relationship?

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Then I guess the morons with careers in astrophysics are investigating it for no reason then.

Beyond your wildly unfounded and I daresay naive assumption that the objects have had no effect on the solar system, perhaps they need to hear YOUR postulations.

If only they were reading all of your grayed out comments, I see your dismissive and arrogant condescending remarks are leading to such fruitful insights and conversations. /s

Feel better soon

New things are interesting, and astrophysicists like investigating interesting things. If these brown dwarfs posed the slightest threat to us they'd be even more interesting than they already are.

Sure, I guess it's just irksome to assume that they aren't dangerous PRIOR to investigation. I mean, you wouldn't assume a random plant in the jungle is safe to eat, right?

There's a lot of safe objects in space. There's a lot of safe plants in the jungle. Still, truth must be uncovered day by day.

That's all I was meaning to convey.

This somehow brings up the fact that we say "innocent until proven guilty" but we don't really treat people like that, see: arraignment amounts/remand, police interrogation, the fact that you both have to know your rights and have the money to at least get decent representation for most things.

Because it's had no observable effect on us for the last 4.5 billion years of our solar system's existence, and we've postulated nothing that would change this stable dynamical relationship?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Okay, but speaking strictly in the human timescales of the next few dozen or few hundred generations of our species, a complex interaction of celestial phenomena that hasn't led to any known cataclysms during the last 4 billion+ years could possibly change in a way that causes it to do so, but the chances of that happening specifically now or in the next few hundred generations of human development are vanishingly small.

It's like you climbing a volcano that has been dormant for 1000 years, and it suddenly, explosively erupting right while you're walking towards the peak. Could happen out of the blue right during those few hours, sure, but it really, really probably won't.

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