Rogue planets could outnumber the stars
phys.org
phys.org
I'm not sure how likely they are as candidates for life to emerge spontaneously, it seems like there's a very high energy input requirement over billions of years (Sol -> Earth) to get anything close to human civilization... but it's cool to think that, perhaps, some future humans could settle a planet eternally cloaked in darkness. Adapt to the reality of that planet over generations... and be unable to acclimate to life near stars at all.
Also, post-Andromeda collision, is this a necessary future for posthuman life? [1] Billions of cold worlds will be flung into the far reaches of the Universe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...
Just like asteroid fields in movies are way too dense, it's easy to overestimate what the collision means. It's two _galaxies_ that collide, but their parts don't. Their individual star systems may all pass around each other quite well, for the most part.
As of 2006, simulations indicated that the Sun might be brought near the centre of the combined galaxy, potentially coming near one of the black holes before being ejected entirely out of the galaxy.[11] Alternatively, the Sun might approach one of the black holes a bit closer and be torn apart by its gravity. Parts of the former Sun would be pulled into the black hole. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...
Saying that they are mostly empty space seems like a way of rhetorically obscuring the common sense idea that close encounters and collisions would become more likely.
Also the statistical distribution of velocities would be more heterogenous, wouldn't it? Bimodal? That ought to have some noticeable effect on dynamics. You also have, I assume, a second central black hole doing something, maybe disrupting an otherwise stable system.
It's just weird to say, although it seems to be somewhat popular, that objects in space don't collide, when on the one hand, anyone can look at something like the Moon, and asteroids that look like rubble piles, and we also "listen" to much larger things colliding via LIGO, and I assume people in astronomy related threads know about the central black holes in galaxies that grew to millions of suns.
If we consider ourselves stationary in our milky way orbit, then an external force (incoming galaxy), would sway us quite a bit by altering orbits slightly and with lasting effect.
Every time I read a comment like this I wonder if people have actually taken the time to consider what living off the Earth would actually be like.
The quality of life for anyone living off the Earth would be abysmal. Think of the most barren, hostile, nearly uninhabitable places on Earth, they're still magnitudes higher in habitability than anywhere we're likely to find outside Earth.
Then if somehow we actually manage to find a place with a climate similar to Earth, that may even have some life or organic material, there's the issue of compatibility.
Look at the issues humans have just travelling from one side of the world to the other. Pathogens, the environment, even the food can cause problems, let alone a place with entirely alien life.
Take something as simple as the prion that causes mad cow disease, it's a protein.
What kinds of bacteria, virii, amoebas, fungi, parasites etc. Will we encounter? Would we even know we're infected until it'a too late?
Maybe some kind of strange prion or virus that systemically and harmfully alters humans in a way that's undetectable until the whole population is infected?
I mean this happens still here, with life on our own world.
But, before all that is the endless darkness, entire generations living like nomads in the cold, black emptiness of space. Entire generations seeing nothing, living their lives only so their children's children's children can maybe someday see something.
Overall though, the idea that we can just escape the Earth someday so it'll be fine just leads to shortsighted neglectful actions that destroy the planet.
That colonial, we can just expand and keep growing indefinitely and just move to a new place, mindset stopped being reasonable the moment we spread across the world. Moving to a new planet is not the same as just hopping in a ship and sailing across the ocean. It's not a reasonable backup plan, it's not a reasonable solution.
We have one home, Earth, we are all made from this place, someday we go back to it. No other place we ever may find will be our home the way the Earth is. The idea we should just use and abandon the Earth is just so incredibly backwards to the way we should be thinking.
I agree with the general sentiment of your post, however, this may not be necessarily true. If you have a shelter that provides adequate conditions for life, that's it. Sure, no more walks in the park, but still doable. Plenty of people have not left their homes at all in the past few months and they seem to be ok-ish.
We humans adapt our environments to our needs. There is no reason this would not occur off Terra Firma.
>If you have a shelter that provides adequate conditions for life, that's it.
I mean so do prisons, generally, or well they're supposed to, most people wouldn't choose to live in one though.
Sure, it could (and likely would!) be hard to make it not suck to live in a place like that. But if we're going to indulge in wild future space colonization fantasies, we certainly don't need to stop and get mired in the economic feasibilities of the potential lifestyles there to the point that they become depressing.
Imagine "Halo", not "HAL"!
For a contemporary example, people pay a premium to go to the mall. Just scale it up - not even a lot, 10x or 100x, and you basically have paradise. Far from abysmal.
I never said that. Sorry, I didn't know you were throwing a tantrum. I thought we were having an honest discussion.
I can tell you, for sure, that there are people on this earth which are living under an overall worse standard of living than the one you would probably find in early mars colonies; and they outnumber people like us, with food, clean water, internet access, etc... That obviously sucks, but to say that life on Mars is going to be necessarily worse than life on Earth is an argument that is quite easy to disprove.
Not the parent, but it made a good point, so I'm curious about yours.
"Around 9 million people die every year of hunger and hunger-related diseases"
"A child dies from hunger every 10 seconds"
and also, by the end of the article:
"2.5+ billion people in need of water"
I don't care if its a "slum" or not, it could be happening in Switzerland and it wouldn't make a difference for me as I'm not discussing the "aesthetic" side of the argument. If people on a Mars colony have enough food and water (which they almost certainly will), they will be doing better than the ones referred to at in the article.
0: https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty...
Consider early European settlements in what became the USA. Death, dearth, and disease were the facts of life. Easy to speculate since this is likely way past any of our lifetimes, but I anticipate it will be common for entire colonies to be wiped out by starvation or disaster. Space colonization will be much easier said than done.
The problem we face isn't thinking that we can throw away the earth and get another one it's the fact that we are short lived and short sighted.
You are taking pot shots at exactly the wrong people.
These fantasies tend to come from technocrats and transhuminists.
Transhumanists very much would like a world where everything is sterile and manmade, where the natural world doesn't get in the way of human technological progress and advancement.
The belief that humans are very much above nature and the world around them and that it needs to be controlled and manipulated to suit our whims, whether that's exploiting it for resources, or trying to manipulate it to some ideal state.
The idea that we can leave this world and turn space or some other world into some 'humanified' place that's suitable to us stems from this same idea of human superiority over our own world and the universe and that somehow, we can make it better, more suitable for us.
Assuming you live in a house, car, tent, lean-to or any other kind of shelter, you're calling yourself a "transhumanist" with this extremely broad definition.
I wouldn't call myself such, but I think if humans do colonize anywhere off of Earth, it will require modifying what a "human" is to where it is possible to live with much less technology in today's sense.
I am of a different group concerned for the environment. It is our home, we should take care of it. We are also tied to it for a very long time so we should maintain it. I do want humans to colonize other habitats outside the earth. It will not be easy and it will take a long time, but we should move some eggs to another basket. We may do some degree of terraforming of those new habitats but we are also likely to modify ourselves to better fit the new homes.
Show me a journal bearing that is good for 10 km/sec velocity difference on the outside and you could 'pack' the habitable section with a non-rotating structure that holds it in and then you can imagine a 'small ringworld' similar in diameter to the Earth but with much better ratio of living area to mass.
Either way that is a large environment that people could make the way they like.
If one wants to live on a 'planet', I would picture the base on Luna will be one of those SpaceX starships turned on it's side somewhere near iron deposits and soon it will be joined by steel cylinders made by indigenous material. Oxygen and Iron will be abundent, but I worry about Carbon and Nitrogen. Either way the cylinders will be buried under a few meters of soil -- it will be like spending all your time inside widebody airliners but having to be careful not to jump too high or you'll hit your head.
Parent is explicitly refering to human life post-Sun:
>> extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol.
It took us only a few million years to get off the trees and invent Bitcoin.
If, by some chance, civilization once called human will exist at that time (2000x longer than current span of human species), all the problems you described should be trivial for them.
And if by then, by some chance, due to countless generations of people sharing your view on the matter, they don't set off for the stars - they deserve to burn.
The most logical objection to interstellar travel, which I don't see you making, is that once you have your generation ship, another star is only an unnecessary risk and an infinitesimal chance of a congenial planet. If you can live without a solar system, why do you want to camp next to an unshielded nuclear reactor and poke around the surrounding debris?
On the other hand, if something the size of the K-T asteroid or larger was headed for Earth and there was a substantial amount of time to prepare (say 1000 years) then it doesn't matter if people want to abandon it. And I think in that time, it's reasonably possible.
Dreaming of the stars is one of the most natural and wondrous human experiences. It's the only constant across hundreds, thousands of generations; a single canvas we've pointed to and asked questions about for millennia. Do not mistake optimism for our species as a dismissal of the problems we face today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
Why cold fusion specifically?
I think that's most people's understanding of "fusion", generally, Matter -> Energy, but "cold" is the qualifier of, "we've created fusion reactions before. We just haven't sustained them in a net-positive fashion."
What you're referring to is simply... practically useful fusion (beyond commercial breakeven). Which is obvious from the context and does not require an extra qualifier. The same way as fission isn't referred to "controlled chain reaction fission" in casual conversation.
This depends on the nature of the planet. Some planets with internal heat sources like Earth or Jupiter wouldn't be frozen. They wouldn't have liquid water on their surface, but they might have warm and habitable conditions somewhere in the planet for certain definitions of "habitable".
Passages in the Void is a set of stories from Kuro5hin where I first read about rogue planets sustaining life: http://localroger.com/ They were written by the same author as Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect and are interesting sci-fi.
The only way this is unlikely to be the case is if planets remain strongly-bound to stars.
> The mission will stare at the a dense star region toward the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy to observe microlensing events.
So you have a series of images of a field full of thousands (tens of thousands?) of stars, and you ("you" meaning "a great honking bunch of computer logic") compare one image to the next looking for _one_ of the stars to have briefly doubled, or turned into a little ring. And then you derive a lot of info from that brief distortion event.
[1] https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/faq.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_microlensing
Edit: I meant "yes, someone with more knowledge please answer this question". Not "yes, it could be dark matter"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object
(that doesn't mean it's categorically wrong, just decided to be so unlikely to be correct that it's not worth our time)
So that could be a dense cloud, or a very, very large but diffuse cloud of gas or dust, and there are a couple of galaxies that rotate too quickly for the number of stars we can see, and don't have enough visible dust to explain why they don't fly apart.
We're talking about needing to find something like 20 times as much stuff in order for the universe to make sense with the physics we have. And while I expect finding more stuff will improve the signal-to-noise ratio, at some point we should be looking for new physics, because new physics is where we find ways to do things the old physics says are impossible.
[Edit] I think it was actually baryons which are composites of an odd number of fermions if my memory of college physics is right
Life requires an energy source and the only energy sources a rouge planet has, are leftover heat from its formation process and nuclear decay.
The energy released by geological processes is too localised and too little to allow for widespread higher lifeforms.
Even the comparatively active Earth doesn't generate enough heat on its own to keep its oceans liquid (e.g. 100mW/m² at the oceanic crust and <70mW/m² at the continental crust) or a gaseous atmosphere of any kind.
In order to generate enough heat to keep a liquid ocean and an atmosphere (both are required for higher lifeforms as of our current understanding), the planemo needs to be quite large or have at least one big moon in a close orbit.
The first case is very likely to generate an ice giant like Neptune or Uranus, both highly unlikely to harbour any kind of life.
The second case is probably very rare - the event that led to the ejection of the planet would've also affected any moons. In addition, close orbits either rapidly decay (see Deimos on Mars) with the moon crashing onto the surface within just a few million years; or they recede over time due to the exchange of angular momentum between the two bodies (see our Moon).
In conclusion, while planemos may indeed harbour microbial life in the form of extremophiles living in their crust, any multicellular life is very unlikely to have survived the ejection event and subsequent loss of a host star.
Formation of life on a free floating planet is very improbable and "super advanced" life requires stable conditions over billions of years and sufficient energy, which simply isn't available for the reasons mentioned above.
Feel free to correct me if I got something wrong, though.
I don't think we've detected a single rogue planet, so this theory would seem novel to me.
(edit) Linked from the same article, a confirmed rogue planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSO_J318.5%E2%88%9222
And if it's so obvious that we should've known this 50 years ago, you could've gone down in history as the scientist who discovered this truth. But instead you're complaining on the internet about other people trying to prove it.
Things have become a lot clearer in the last couple of decades. I guess it's easy to take our current knowledge for granted.