"Resonance in the planetary system HD 110067" - https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2023/04/six-planets-in-res...
"We have come to warn you. In your effort to create space for node_modules, you will consume the galaxy."
But humanity is dissatisfied. With no existential threats arising, people cannot find value in life. AI-generated entertainment satisfies no one, and because no algorithm can quantify "originality," no machine would ever advise additional human involvement.
There is only one area of human civilization where AI is not involved, and that's designing the CSS specification. "But what if I want to position this element so that the ultraviolet radiation is displayed with variable additional intensity based on the size of the 3d projection on the latest gen virtual assistant, but only on Tuesdays? You can't possibly make me use javascript to account for something that common," bemoans one forum poster.
What follows is chaos. Everyone has an opinion, some thinking that the treatment infrared got in 2190 was unfair to people with unmodified vision, others believing that the accessibility option prefers-visible-spectrum more than makes up for it. Still others want more robustness than simply prefers-visible-spectrum; there should be a native way to specify the exact wavelengths of light that one can see. Minimalists argue that when experiences are delivered directly to your brain, none of this matters, but no one likes that argument.
The world hasn't experienced this large a conflict in hundreds of years, and it is unprepared. As people flock to the Great CSS Debate, they finally find a cause to believe in, even if they have no real opinion on the matter. Tempers escalate and battle lines are drawn. The AI don't possess enough training data to deal with the situation.
In the midst of the final collapse, a package is delivered late. Just one package, and just one hour late, but such a thing is unheard of. Distracted from the CSS Wars, people flock to real-time trackers of all mail delivery. Are the weather models breaking down? Did Moore's Law finally stop, and as a result the AI infrastructure cannot keep up with the power needed in today's world?
This new drama captivates the world's population so deeply that the apocalypse is avoided. And the scientific outpost of the Vrexon goes back to observation mode to await the next crisis.
Signals from such a transmitter placed on a planet spinning around a foreign star would drift in time when observed from Earth, "the same as when an ambulance goes past you, the sound of it shifts from very high to very low"
What's wrong with saying Doppler, frequency, or pitch maybe?
And if we go for a gas giant and two small planets, there are probably many of those out there. We almost got one such trio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
You want L4 and L5 for that.
Is there any statically stable shared orbit for planets though? The first wobble and they start accelerating toward each other don't they?
At equal mass the separation increases until they are all equidistant from each other assuming a completely circular orbit.
Edit as a general response: Question answered, multiple times, thank you! Also, there my basic physics knowledge resurfaces, thank you for that as well!
One of the best way to get an intuition for orbits is to play Kerbal Space Program for a few hours :).
I am just afraid to touch Kerbal Space Program, I really cannot afford another time sink at the moment!
As one time ovner of a Star Wars RPG PC whos secret super weapon was his tremendous Astrogation skill, I really should so I guess!
The only way to vary the speed is a powered orbit, and that's not likely to happen with a planet.
Make a big disk, punch the vacuum cleaner's pipe through it, put a blanket over the whole thing, add a chair on top. Turn power on, you have a hovercraft. A staple of city science fairs where I live.
[Citation Needed]
If you're K2 just take the star and solar system with you. Stellar engines can be used to move stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
Shkadov thruster:
> After a period of one million years this would yield an imparted speed of 20 m/s, with a displacement from the original position of 0.03 light-years. After one billion years, the speed would be 20 km/s and the displacement 34,000 light-years, a little over a third of the estimated width of the Milky Way galaxy.
Caplan thruster:
> Caplan estimates that the Bussard engine would use 10^12 kg of solar material per second to produce a maximum acceleration of 10^−9 m/s2, yielding a velocity of 200 km/s after 5 million years.
Svoronos Star Tug:
> The Svoronos Star Tug can, in principle (assuming perfect efficiency), accelerate the Sun to ~27% the speed of light (after burning enough of the Sun's mass to transition it to a brown dwarf).
If the point of a Dyson sphere is to collect energy, wouldn't it be enough to just use it or store it?
A stellar mass black hole might be an interesting "cold end" in this regard… if you can find or make one, but to do that you'd need to start with a Dyson swarm.
I don't think these semantic games are productive. Thermodynamics says you can transform energy. "Collect" in this context means using energy in a way that allows you to retrieve it in the future. For example, charging a battery or condenser with light with a PV panel, powering a motor that accelerates a flywheel, coiling a spring, heating a material, etc.
If this kind of thing appeals to a group with meaningful control over a Dyson swarm, given that Dyson swarms and the capacity to make them can also be used to build and power a rapid, direct, and near-simultaneous colonisation of all galaxies in our future particle horizon (with significant levels of redundancy, though obviously we can't determine if "significant" is "sufficient"), you should anticipate the first such group turning almost every star in the universe into a red dwarf (or brown dwarf, for those they don't care to colonise just yet) in very short order.
I don't know if anyone's been looking for signatures of this specific thing; though I am told that "1 AU sphere of room-temperature metal" would be quite easy to spot, if you downsize the stars first then the size of the corresponding room-temperature sphere gets smaller, and I don't have a quantifiable number for "quite easy" nor any sense of scale for how much effort is going into such searches.
A Dyson swarm will keep you safe from any threat smaller than another Dyson swarm — and while you may not be able to "pack it up", you can use one to run to other galaxies… in fact, almost all of them… at close enough to the same time that light cones matter… and get the settlers moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light… and have a lot of redundancy.
https://xeelee.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ring
Mind you it might not count as it's a means of escape, not a place to live.
Spaced-out resonant triplets of bodies in the same plane are often dynamically stable - an imperfect ratio is damped by various orbital forces until it approximates a perfect ratio.
Why they'd do this, though, would be a mystery.