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from the weebles-wobble-but-they-don't-fall-down dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The massive hypothetical object, which supposedly looms at the edge of our solar system, has been invoked to explain the strange clustering of objects in the Kuiper belt and the unusual way they orbit the Sun.
Now Planet Nine predictors Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech, along with graduate student Elizabeth Bailey, offer another piece of evidence for the elusive sphere's existence: It adds "wobble" to the solar system, they say, tilting it in relation to the sun.
"Because Planet Nine is so massive and has an orbit tilted compared to the other planets, the solar system has no choice but to slowly twist out of alignment," lead author Bailey said in a statement.
Before we go any further, a caveat about Planet Nine: It's purely theoretical at this point. Batygin and Brown predict its existence based on unusual perturbations of the solar system that aren't otherwise easily explained. (This is the same technique scientists used to find Neptune.) But the history of astronomy is rife with speculation that is never borne out: The same guy who correctly predicted the existence of Neptune also believed that a planet he called Vulcan was responsible for the wobble of Mercury. That "discovery" caused the astronomy world to waste years looking for something that wasn't there. (Mercury's wobble was eventually explained by the theory of general relativity.)
But the evidence offered by Batygin and Brown is compelling. When the pair announced their find in January, planetary scientist Alessandro Morbidelli of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice, France, told The Washington Post: "I don't see any alternative explanation to that offered by Batygin and Brown."
"We will find it one day," he added. "The question is when."
Planet Nine's angular momentum is having an outsized impact on the solar system based on its location and size. A planet's angular momentum equals the mass of an object multiplied by its distance from the sun, and corresponds with the force that the planet exerts on the overall system's spin. Because the other planets in the solar system all exist along a flat plane, their angular momentum works to keep the whole disk spinning smoothly.
Planet Nine's unusual orbit, however, adds a multi-billion-year wobble to that system. Mathematically, given the hypothesized size and distance of Planet Nine, a six-degree tilt fits perfectly, Brown says.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday October 23 2016, @06:43PM
You're missing my point. As long as humanity is clustered around one Star we have "all our eggs in one basket". It's not a matter of room, though I'd assert that the growth function could use any amount of terrain that could even possibly be present. That's irrelevant, because we're going to *need* to limit growth whatever we do.
But you also shouldn't judge future habitats by current space-labs. They shouldn't be at all comparable. They'd be more equivalent to a giant arcology. Admittedly archologies are currently an unsolved problem, but we're going to need to solve them anyway unless we impose REALLY strict population controls. Currently cities are inhumane places to live, but they also provide vital services that aren't available elsewhere...and rapid transportation uses lots of energy.
So think of a space habitat as a city in space. It would need to rotate for gravity. Now your argument is "Nobody would want to spend their life in a city!", but many people do. And your argument is that current city design can't be improved. I disagree.
OTOH, a habitat in space won't be very libertarian. Sorry, but it's a highly artificial environment in a very dangerous environment, so you can't let people mess with it in unsafe ways. This makes virtual reality very important, probably full immersion virtual reality. This is clearly already being worked on, however, for other reasons. In fact almost all the required technologies are already being worked on for other reasons.
If we do things right eventually humanity, if not Earth, will be able to survive a nearby supernova. And one WILL eventually happen. There's probably no rush on that score, however, the current problem is insane governments that are juggling thermonuclear bombs. Surviving that is a lot easier, but it still requires a self-sufficient off-planet civilization...preferably one which could survive a large Coronal Mass Ejection.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @02:13PM
If we do things right eventually humanity, if not Earth, will be able to survive a nearby supernova. And one WILL eventually happen. There's probably no rush on that score, however, the current problem is insane governments that are juggling thermonuclear bombs. Surviving that is a lot easier, but it still requires a self-sufficient off-planet civilization...preferably one which could survive a large Coronal Mass Ejection.
Note that Supernova events likely already happened in the past. All those problems are a single problem, and solution is one and same: do on Earth what you expect to be needed to do to survive on other planets, i.e. build self-sufficient underground habitats, shielded from surface-level radiation. It is much easier and cheaper to do that here and now then billions of miles away or in the hurry.