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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 acid andy on Friday April 06 2018, @12:40AM (5 children)
Would the VR simulations have some kind of HUD or tooltips to remind the person where they really were and that it was just a temporary simulation? Or would that be a reward or easter egg buried somewhere within it? If there are no clues like that included, it sounds awfully like our current lives on Earth. Of course this simulation argument is nothing new.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 06 2018, @12:56AM (4 children)
It depends. You set the parameters before you go under, and then regret it (or not) later.
I like the easter egg idea. As for the HUD, if you were mind wiped and "reborn" as a tabula rasa in a virtual world, you wouldn't necessarily question the appearance of HUD elements, status windows, RPG experience, skill system, etc. Especially if the NPCs are in on the game.
If in real life, everyone experienced elements of first person RPG games, possibly using floating abstract symbols or universally translated voices ("the announcer" or God(s) speaking to you), you would just accept it. Some might form interesting religions or philosophies around it, but I doubt most people would think they were living in a simulation. That's the way it always was. God granted us the useful hit point bars.
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(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday April 06 2018, @01:19AM (3 children)
That's a very good point. I was thinking of the HUD or tooltip carrying a more explicit message though, something that more directly expresses the message that the person is experiencing a temporary simulation (or a life within a life). How you encode a very explicit message without a language is tricky though (attempted in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message) [wikipedia.org] and I think it would still polarize people between forming religious beliefs about it and viewing it more skeptically.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 06 2018, @11:28AM (2 children)
I include the "mind wipe" in my entirely speculative scenario so that it would go something like this:
1. You choose the desired parameters, setting, and scenario for the virtual world before being mind wiped. You get to adjust your fate/luck/how everything works, etc.
2. You undergo the mind wipe and are either reborn, flashed with some false memories, or given amnesia but with your working knowledge intact (so you don't need to relearn languages, concepts, etc). This is simply to increase immersion. This step could be optional or you could not entirely "wipe" your memories.
3. After you die virtually or conclude the simulation, you're back in your spacecraft and you get to have a gee-whiz moment as you remember your IRL memories, if applicable. This is also a good time to have an existential crisis as you'll have both your real memories and your memories of the virtual environment (where any loved ones were FAKE and GONE FOREVER, unless they are strong AI entities which can be saved in the spacecraft's memory permanently).
3a. It's fun, I swear. Someone will want to do this.
The HUD/message or subtle hints, while certainly doable (the VR would be experienced using either an extremely advanced headset display or a "Matrix"-like connection), may be undesirable if the point is to forget everything. But this is all based on user choice and our future capabilities to affect how the brain works.
The technologies needed to affect the brain to this precise level may not be available for centuries, but I think they are more likely to be developed than faster-than-light travel, which is considered physically impossible. Time dilation could also help make interstellar journeys feel shorter, but you are still constrained by the need to decelerate for half of the voyage in order to orbit or land on an exoplanet.
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(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday April 06 2018, @12:37PM (1 child)
Yeah. When I thought about this time dilation keeping a space traveler young, when I myself was younger, I had a crazy idea for how to deal with the problem of all your colleagues back home aging hundreds of years while you were away. It's wildly inconvenient but I imagined they could all either enter a device, or the whole surface of the planet (or their country) be modified to be a device, that somehow accelerated them in place to an equivalent speed.
The trouble is they would have to be either vibrated back and forth or constantly rotating so that they didn't move too far from their home. Which of course means that they would constantly have to be undergoing acceleration or deceleration and it couldn't be too violent. This would require enormous amounts of energy and of course would severely limit the average speed and amount of time dilation attained, so the craft would have to move slower to match, or they would have to settle for a compromise where the colleagues at home age faster but are still alive when the traveler returns.
The whole idea sounds so inconvenient, difficult and uncomfortable that it would probably be more sensible for the entire society to just travel together as one in an enormous biosphere almost like a traveling planet (but obviously far less massive).
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 06 2018, @01:08PM
We just have to accept some people breaking away from the rest of humanity, unless the black swans of faster-than-light travel or communications are realized.
If mind uploading becomes possible, you may have a way to send a lot more people on an interstellar voyage, or even "clone" personalities of loved ones to stave off loneliness.
The near term concern (within the next few centuries) is colonizing or mining every rock in the solar system. Bezos (world's richest man) thinks that the solar system could support 1 trillion people [soylentnews.org]. If you are staying indoors the whole time, then distant rocks like Pluto and Sedna could be almost as easy to colonize as Mars or Titan.
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