Scholz's star, a binary system consisting of a red dwarf and a brown dwarf, changed the trajectory of comets and other distant solar system objects when it passed just 0.82 light years from the Sun around 70,000 years ago:
At a time when modern humans were beginning to leave Africa and the Neanderthals were living on our planet, Scholz's star - named after the German astronomer who discovered it - approached less than a light-year from the Sun. Nowadays it is almost 20 light-years away, but 70,000 years ago it entered the Oort cloud, a reservoir of trans-Neptunian objects located at the confines of the solar system.
This discovery was made public in 2015 by a team of astronomers led by Professor Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester (USA). The details of that stellar flyby, the closest documented so far, were presented in The Astrophysical Journal Letters [open, DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/800/1/L17] [DX].
Now two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), the brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, together with the researcher Sverre J. Aarseth of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), have analyzed for the first time the nearly 340 objects of the solar system with hyperbolic orbits (very open V-shaped, not the typical elliptical), and in doing so they have detected that the trajectory of some of them is influenced by the passage of Scholz´s star.
"Using numerical simulations we have calculated the radiants or positions in the sky from which all these hyperbolic objects seem to come," explains Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, who together with the other coauthors publishes the results in the MNRAS Letters [open, DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/sly019] [DX] journal.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 24 2018, @12:31PM (1 child)
Mind bleaching happens nowadays, no doubt.
Personality replacement? That more fantastic than FTL.
Besides, if you get to replace the personality, why bother with biological beings, why not send AI just from the start?
(underlying matter: what makes you you? I tend to think that the biological body is included, but Ok, fine, let's say a human being is defined by the mind only. Now, if you get to replace even that... who has the right to life, your born-in personality/firmware or the replacement v1.1 or v1.2?... if you kill them based on the needs of "the mission objective" why send a human in the first place?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 24 2018, @01:24PM
Most of this is now addressed in other comments.
However no matter how mind numbingly difficult it is to wipe, scramble, recreate, regrow, remix, etc. brain matter, FTL remains more fantastical because it could end up completely impossible due to physics, or have unrealistically huge energy requirements. It would be a lucky break to get any kind of warp drive working.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]