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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 takyon on Saturday March 24 2018, @01:21PM
That's not the scenario I'm talking about in the original reply. Coke man [soylentnews.org] is not going to care about an interstellar flinging of embryos. The idea here is that with anti-aging, you could hang out on Earth for a few centuries, during which time interstellar travel designs and other technologies are refined as much as possible. Then you set out on a journey to explore the universe, endlessly. You are a walking dead caveman loser if you can't choose to travel throughout the Milky Way and to other galaxies as desired.
Otherwise, your artificial womb idea is fine. Except that the frozen embryos are unlikely to be needed because at the point we would attempt such a mission, we could add an attachment to the womb that synthesizes an embryo from the DNA sequence. I guess the embryo would have the advantage of storing the genetic data with less degradation than today's conventional data storage would experience over many centuries, but then you could just use DNA-based storage instead of a pre-made embryo, probably saving on mass requirements.
Extrasolar colonies don't have to send anything back to Earth. We have closer resources throughout the solar system that we can utilize. Terrestrial planets and moons such as Mars or Titan, asteroid mining, a Dyson swarm, and more efficient recycling and manufacturing would make any such deliveries totally unnecessary. However, there is something that a colony could export without needing FTL travel: intellectual property (such as film), sent at the speed of light. Motivation to colonize in the first place could range from "just because we can", to scientific discovery, or making humanity more resilient against cosmic disasters like a nearby supernova or directional gamma ray burst.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]