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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: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Saturday March 24 2018, @12:24PM (3 children)
What's the point of mind wipe? You might as well reproduce and die at some point in the future.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday March 24 2018, @01:00PM
The point is that c0lo, and many others to be fair, don't see how they could stand living hundreds or millions of years while exploring the galaxy. 200+ years from now, there will be a mix of advanced technologies available alongside the interstellar spacecraft that could make this journey more palatable. You could go into some kind of cryosleep (the easy option). You could read a new book every day and not run out for hundreds of thousands of years. You could play around in VR, enhanced with aforementioned neuromorphic strong AI, and networking with other minds on the ship. You might not have a body at all but might exist as an uploaded mind. If the ship does have room for life support and walking around, and mind uploading exists, you could have a body printed on demand, and destroyed and recycled whenever your finished (crew of thousands can take turns sharing a small physical space).
I simply offer mind wiping as a way to create a novel virtual reality experience. Maybe it can be done in such a way that a vague impression of your "real" life is kept while you bumble through the scenario, and you have a sudden "aha" moment at the end when you realize that you were living in a Truman Show-esque simulation all along. Maybe this is torture, or maybe you would get addicted to it. You would have all the time you need to find out.
If you have perfect anti-aging available, will you still want to die at some point? That's a question you have to answer for yourself, and doesn't need to be imposed on everyone else ("who could possibly want to live that long oooohhhh nnoooooooooo").
If you were reproducing and dying, then you'd just have a generation ship, which wasn't what I was talking about because it doesn't make sense in light of anti-aging and doesn't allow you to see the places you're traveling to (since you'd be dead).
As for reproduction, by the point a ship like this launches, we'd have the ability to mix DNA digitally, synthesize an embryo, and incubate it to term in an artificial womb. Any sex would be for recreation or to make a point.
I don't have to come up with perfect solutions to these issues, since there will be centuries to think about it. But it is amusing to see the skepticism and disdain for immortality. Maybe we should pass out razor blades and California-approved suicide pills [soylentnews.org] to centenarians as a public service. Not only are they fucking old, but they don't even have the bodies of young adults! They must be suffering.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 25 2018, @04:46AM (1 child)
Going to sleep is a bit like dying. The person who wakes up is someone else, who happens to have your memories.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday April 06 2018, @12:45AM
Or, as I often point out, the person that was sitting where you are a second ago was quite possibly someone else who happened to have most of your memories. Of course if you start taking such a hypothesis too seriously, and are selfish, all future plans suddenly seem unimportant. They only matter to the person that will inherit your continued existence.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.