Getting tired of talking about gun control, so thought I’d try and get the best (and worst) minds on the board engaged in saving humanity. Scientists have discovered that a neutron star is headed towards our solar system, and the effects of that star will start to be felt in 75 years. They aren’t sure exactly how it will play out, except that the Earth will certainly be destroyed, along with the solar system. It’s doomsday in 75 years.
So, what do we do? Giving up is not an option…we must do something to save what can be saved. All life on this planet, including our species, depends on coming up with some answer (so, IOW, please no ‘we are screwed, might as well give up’ type posts…I realize that’s most likely the answer, but it’s no fun). How do we do it? How much, if anything, could be saved on this time table?
(this is based on a NatGeo show that is currently playing, btw, but I wanted to get the thoughts of 'dopers on this)
Otherwise, I guess we could start working on a generation ship…capable of self-sustaining life for the multiple generations it would take to have a chance of reaching a habitable planet.
We are proper fucked. If the problem was merely a pulsar irradiating the Earth you could try to bunker down and outlast it, but if it’s going to destroy the solar system, it’s going to destroy anyone trying to flee too.
Short of building craft that can sustain a habitat for us in deep space and also travel faster than the speed of light I think our best bet is the Flanderouses bombshelter.
…that is then directed toward the oncoming neutron star to slingshot everyone toward a potentially habitable planet…
…or we orbit the neutron star at a safe distance and in the correct orientation until it passes our solar system. We then slingshot back towards Earth.
Thanks for the responses so far. Anyone following along and watching the show on NatGeo:
For anyone who has seen the show, how predictable was it that all the richest people on earth were killed instantly on the launch pad in a spectacular failure
Project Orion is the concept to propel a ship with nuclear charges. It works well in space–but works even better as an ultra-heavy lift vehicle. You could lift millions of tons to orbit using a few hundred well-placed nuclear detonations. It’s not even that dirty, all things considered (we had plenty of above ground nuclear testing, and we’re still alive), but at any rate it doesn’t matter since the Earth is doomed.
With that much mass, you have a lot of flexibility. Most designs for generation ships require near-perfect recycling of waste, but that’s something we might not figure out in 75 years. Water is fairly easy; food, not so much. A large mass also allows a lot of redundancy, spare parts, etc.
Of course the ship might not help depending on the circumstances. Best case is that the neutron star sweeps the solar system of planets, but leaves the Sun more or less intact–in that case, you probably want to stick around and figure out what kind of orbit keeps you in the vicinity while staying away from danger.
If the Sun is toast, you probably want to move on eventually, but it’s such a long trip to the nearest star that you’d probably want to put it off for a while. Harvest what’s left of the solar system (asteroids, etc.) to build up a bit, and go when the time is right. Interstellar space has no resources to speak of–better harvest as much local stuff as you can.
Yeah, I think an Orion engine is probably the only option. I’d go with mass production of as many standard sized nukes as could be made and then start looking for good asteroid candidates. Building a huge ship seems a waste of resources when you could carve out space on a few fairly good sized asteroids…they would already have water and mineral resources on them after all, and some of them have at least micro gravity. If you could tether two together and figure out how to spin them then I suppose it’s plausible you could get enough gravity so that the folks you were trying to save wouldn’t lose all their bone and muscle mass. Push research into suspended animation, or perhaps genetic modification for resistance to radiation and the effects of micro-gravity, then build up a seed bank for all the plant species we could save, as well as something for the animals we could save along the same lines, record all the data you could, and then send them off into either a long elliptical orbit (if the sun would survive) or perhaps to one of the near stars, if any of them look promising wrt habitability or at least resources that could be uses. According to the show, an Orion ship, if it’s able to toss out a nuke every 3 seconds for a few weeks could get up to 5-6% of the speed of light, so you could make it a few light years in a human lifetime…or if you could do the suspended animation thing then it wouldn’t matter as much.
I saw that National Geographic and one mistake that irritated me with increasing severity every time it was repeated was the “countdown” part they threw in before the commercial breaks (or after, I forget). It would typically run like this:
71 Years, 1 Month
71 Years, 0 Months
70 Years, 0 Months
The third line should have been “70 Years, 11 Months”. They did this over and over - no wonder time was running out, they kept losing a year!
XT-- Can you give us a run-down on what, exactly, is going to happen to the Earth/solar system in your scenario (sorry-don’t have NatGeo)? Is the Earth just going to be irradiated, but all planets will be left in their orbits? Are some/all of the planets going to be pulled from their orbits? Is the sun itself going to be destroyed/flung out into interstellar space? And if radiation is an issue, how far do we need to stay from the neutron star to keep even our escape vehicle from being destroyed?
75 years seems like it might just possibly be the bare naked minimum needed to develop the supporting technologies needed – a hell of a lot of crash research into life support and recycling, for instance.
It would be easier if all the world agreed. But I don’t see that happening. I’m afraid you’d have something more akin to the dramatic moments of the spaceship launch in “When Worlds Collide.” Crazy people would mob up and try to destroy the project; you’d end up having to spend a large part of the budget on security.
Ultimately, I think human infighting would doom the project. We simply couldn’t manage to agree.
I only skimmed, so if I repeated anyone, my apologies.
What I’d do:
Get used to the idea that no one who is alive today is going. Period. If you’re nine, you get 75 more years, make them count.
Instantly clamp down on reproduction. The numbers of people need to be reduced greatly. Set up a scheme where around 40 years before takeoff you’ll be giving birth to the generation of engineers and scientists necessary to carry out the mission.
Aim to get world population down to a million people by the redline.
For the next 75 years launch raw material into orbit. Work on the technology. Space elevators if it looks like they can work. Get mass into space. Send food, energy and raw materials into space as supply pods and set it on a long cometary orbit of the sun. Say a hundred years.
Create colony ships. Maybe a hundred, capable of carrying the million or so people that are left. Launch those people into space, load them onto the ships. Set those ships on a long cometary orbit of the sun. Design the supplies pods to meet up with the ships regularly. Over a hundred years the solar system is hammer-fucked and then man comes back and repopulates whatever is left.
Well, in all honesty it may do nothing or completely wipe the eath from existence, depending on how close it comes. If the latter, there’s no point in trying any colony ships because you can’t go anywhere. There’s little-to-no evidence of any habital planets out there, so you’re pretty much screwed. Technology isn’t the problem, although it is a problem. Everything about it, from the basic sciences on to sociology, means we’d be screwed.
On the up side, there’s not a lot of room between “utterly wipes out the eath” and “completely unaffected”, so we’d have a good chance of being A-OK. So I suggest we all pray really hard and hope for the best.
A sizable chunk of the show was about ramped-up exoplanet research, so at least the writers took that problem into consideration.
As an incidental note, I assume something similar happened in the Firefly universe, hence the number of habitable planets in a single (admittedly complex) solar system - before the colony ship was sent out, a massive effort was undertake to study all the neighboring systems, with this one being (by far, I assume) the most promising for “Goldilocks” planets.
When Worlds Collide is a 1951 science fiction account of this very idea. Humanity is pretty calm overall in the movie, which I think is naive. [/end hijack]
We’re screwed. I think about the best thing we could achieve would be to somehow document as much information as we can of human knowledge, culture and achievements in some durable form and launch it off into space, in the hope that some future civilisation might at least know we were here.
Basically the premise is that a neutron star is going to go right through the solar system. There is zero chance that the Earth or any of the other planets will survive in-tact if something like that happens. I’m not sure about the sun…I suppose it’s possible that the neutron star might go into orbit around our sun and a new equilibrium be established, with perhaps new planets eventually reforming…I don’t know enough about neutron stars to know how plausible that would be. But for our purposes, the Earth and the other planets in the solar system would cease to exist, so the only chance of humanities survival would be to get a viable breeding population of humans off the planet with everything they would need to continue to exist.
The show that sparked this thread posited that humanity would build a large (VERY large) cylindrical rotating ship powered by an Orion drive (built in orbit), and that we’d search for and find near by (less than 5 light years distant) stars with the most likely possibility of habitable planets and head there. They figured they could take perhaps 250,000 people in total on such a ship. If you haven’t seen the show, it was entertaining if nothing else…especially the pretty obvious ‘twist’ with the rival space ship.
Myself, I’d think that a better plan would be to hunt out good sized asteroids and use them as habitats. They would already have water and materials on them, as well as at least trace gravity. Maybe figure out a way to tether two large ones together for spin, and set up an Orion drive on the whole thing, perhaps with a solar sail as well for in-system travel. With humanity on the line (really, all life on this planet), I’m fairly sure we could figure out something to get at least a breeding population off the planet.
