What would be some of the challenges for a civilization the developed on a planet orbiting a rouge star?
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They would be isolated from the rest of the universe in some ways, but they'd also be going on a kind of tour that is beyond anything we'd ever have access to...
@futurebird They’d have a great view of the galaxy their star had been ejected from.
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@futurebird They’d have a great view of the galaxy their star had been ejected from.
It could be a sign that some aliens with very advanced tech don't want you around anymore.
Kind of shocking this hasn't happened to us. LOL.
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@futurebird Unless the star moved really fast, probably not much. About the only thing in our development that comes to mind is that you may not have a stable equivalent of the North Star, so navigation would be harder (but you'd need a fairly large relative speed for that to really be the case). As long as you had an iron core, magnetic navigation would still work, you just might explore the world a bit more slowly (without an iron core, being cooked by radiation would be an issue).
Newtonian mechanics came from things in the solar system, rather than beyond. Having a large gas giant that cleaned up the solar system (so there's just one other planet left) would be more of a problem than a rogue star.
General relativity was first demonstrated with gravitational lensing during an eclipse, but that wouldn't be affected (though we are very lucky in our moon for this and various other reasons). But it was later demonstrated by GPS satellites, so even if you missed the eclipses then you'd get a later chance (fun fact: original GPS satellites had a backup mode in case Einstein was wrong).
The question that bothers me is whether the opposite of this. In China, science effectively stalled for hundreds of years because they didn't invent glass, which was a prerequisite for most of chemistry. Perhaps there's something that's really obvious to people on a rogue star that's the equivalent of glass for us and is the thing that you need to unlock an entire field of science that we simply are not aware that we miss. For example, a simple way of synthesising bosons would enable trivial low-radiation nuclear power, but we have no idea how to do it. Maybe if you observe the galaxy from a different vantage point, it takes you down a path where you discover that it's easy.
@david_chisnall @futurebird You've read "The Road Not Taken", right?
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story) for anyone who hasn't.)
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@guitargabe @futurebird Would it be possible to get astral navigation, just using distant galaxies as the reference points instead of stars?
Even if your star is moving relatively quickly in cosmic terms I would think changes would be seem pretty slow in human-like time frames. Unless its moving at relativistic speeds compared to those distant galaxies.
@floatybirb @guitargabe @futurebird
on earth, vision evolved in the context of the starlight and moonlight available at night. If there were no nearby stars, there would still be many galaxies, and it's possible aliens evolving on such a world would have eyes adapted to see such galaxies as well as we see nearby stars.
Alternatively, they might have evolved other senses for navigation; many migrating birds sense the earth's magnetic field for long distance navigation.
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What would be some of the challenges for a civilization that developed on a planet orbiting a rogue star? A star, that was moving very fast and generally orthogonally away from nearby galaxies?
(Updated for errors: God, sometimes I can't type anything.)
I'm looking at this table of how various elements formed, and wondering if said rogue star and its planets would have formed in a context similar to that of Earth, and presumably been ejected from their orgin galaxy later, or formed in some other context that might leave them with much lower abundances of some elements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_nucleosynthesis#/media/File:Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg -
@david_chisnall @futurebird You've read "The Road Not Taken", right?
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story) for anyone who hasn't.)
I've never encountered this but may well check it out.
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What would be some of the challenges for a civilization that developed on a planet orbiting a rogue star? A star, that was moving very fast and generally orthogonally away from nearby galaxies?
(Updated for errors: God, sometimes I can't type anything.)
@futurebird there’s an Ian M. Banks novel that kinda explores this, one of his few SF novels
Not set in or around The CULTURE. -
What would be some of the challenges for a civilization that developed on a planet orbiting a rogue star? A star, that was moving very fast and generally orthogonally away from nearby galaxies?
(Updated for errors: God, sometimes I can't type anything.)
Are you thinking of VERY fast, like relativistic speeds? As in "Why are all the stars in that direction blue and all the ones in that direction red?"
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Are you thinking of VERY fast, like relativistic speeds? As in "Why are all the stars in that direction blue and all the ones in that direction red?"
How fast could a solar system be moving relative to large nearby galaxies? Are there upper limits in some way?
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What would be some of the challenges for a civilization that developed on a planet orbiting a rogue star? A star, that was moving very fast and generally orthogonally away from nearby galaxies?
(Updated for errors: God, sometimes I can't type anything.)
@futurebird how fast is fast? At 3000km/s the interstellar medium is going to hit like alpha and beta radiation, never mind the neutral hydrogen. That's going to do a number on the planet's upper atmosphere ... At least, untill it hits intergalactic space and the density drops 2-3 orders of magnitude. After which astronomy is going to be stunted—maybe not happening at all until photography is invented. Only planets really visible, no stellar motion.
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@futurebird there’s an Ian M. Banks novel that kinda explores this, one of his few SF novels
Not set in or around The CULTURE.@MishaVanMollusq @futurebird
It is a good novel, but I don't buy the bit about how the system's societies became decadent and corrupt because they had no hope of interstellar travel.
