Department of Useless Information

[alexpgp]

Recent news from the world of astronomy suggests bad news: the star Gliese 710 is on something of a collision course with our Solar System.

It's actually not all that bad, of course. "Collision" in this usage means "will approach within 1.1 light years of" us, and even better, it will occur about 1.4 million years from now. The long(er) term implications of this passage of stars in the, um, night are, IMHO, moot.

The thing that caught my attention in all of this is that Gliese 710 is currently located about 63 light years from Earth, and since a "light year" is a pretty far piece (the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles), I got to wondering just how fast this star is traveling with respect to humanity's cradle, so I took out the napkin to do some estimation magic:

[63 (light years) x 6 x 10¹² (miles/light year)] / 1.4 x 10⁶ years = ~250 x 10⁶ miles/yr

250 x 10⁶ miles/yr = ~20 x 10⁶ miles/month = ~667,000 miles/day = ~30,000 mph

That's about twice as fast as the ISS travels in its orbit around the Earth, except directed in a straight line, pretty much right toward us, for a persistent 1,400,000 years.

Ah, well, I'm sure Congress will have bankrupted us by then, anyway.

Cheers...

A tip-o-the-hat to LJ friend rfmcdpei for his brief note on the subject.

Comments

[joeymichaels.livejournal.com]

I am curious about what humanity's options would be if the schedule for Gliese 710's arrival was significantly sooner. Let's imagine we had a fifty year warning. Furthermore, let's imagine that 1.1 light years is enough to do irreversible damage to our solar system.

I can't help but think that the best case scenario for us would be some sort of "Battlestar Galactica" situation, where we focus our entire world on creating a number of enormous escape crafts and select a certain number of people (presumably the very wealthy and the technically savy) to survive.

Furthermore, I imagine the people who are not selected to escape would likely rise up at that point, possibly to the point that they actually destroy the survival program.

Of course, Congress wouldn't just bankrupt us - they would hold up the entire effort so they can get two-six more year terms by pandering to the folks that aren't selected, thus ensuring our extinction.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

A Galactica solution may be the best case scenario, but our current technology isn't up to the job, so humanity would have to make some incredible technical progress in that short time.

And that'd be if the political class kept to themselves instead of rewarding all their friends under the guise of making the "best" decisions for the salvation of humanity.

With such a bleak future, I would expect folks would divide among roughly the following lines, and in no particular order:

(a) those who commit suicide now to avoid the rush;
(b) those who wish to live in peace, find God, and meet death with dignity;
(c) those who want to live in peace and meet death with dignity;
(d) those who will dig deep, store provisions, and hope to ride out whatever-it-turns-out-to-be;
(e) those who want to have a helluva carouse before they go, and don't care who they step on - or kill - to have it.

Did you ever read Exit Earth! by Martin Caidin. I read it years ago and recall it was a pretty good yarn.

Cheers...

[joeymichaels.livejournal.com]

Have not read it. There's a film called Last Night (featuring Sandra Oh, one of my favorites) that is based on the premise that the world is ending and there's nothing to be done. The people in it do behave in ways very similar to that which you describe.

The last moment of the film is wonderful.