I’m disappointed that the news is not full of pundits screaming that we do something about this impending disaster:
There is a star bearing down on us at 32,000mph relative to our frame of reference, that is going to enter our solar system in 1.5 million years, and fuck everything up. That’s the technical term for it. [bi]
Followed by a great deal of fireworks. [source]
“Gliese 710 will trigger an observable cometary shower with a mean density of approximately ten comets per year, lasting for three to 4 million years,” wrote the authors.
I’m relieved, really, because until I learned of this expected event, I thought that humanity might escape its little corner of the galaxy and go on a littering rampage. Not that there will be any humans we’d recognize as such, 1.5 million years from now.
However, imagine my horror when I discover that astronomers are covering up the fact that there are plenty of prospective obliterators. Clearly the astronomers have been conspiring with the planetologists to conceal the real danger behind a smoke-screen of fake global warming. In 2015, an astronomer from Max Planck Institute published: [doom]
The closest encounter appears to be Hip 85605, a K or M star, which has a 90% probability of coming between 0.04 and 0.20 pc between 240 and 470 kyr from now (90% Bayesian confidence interval).
In other words, we apparently live in pachinko-land and our little backwater occasionally gets scoured by stuff so big that even Bruce Willis can’t blow it up with nukes. A great big rock, that’s something, but a K or M-class star, dawdling through the Oort Cloud and sucking a great big swarm of rocks in its wake: that’s something else. 240,000 years is “next week” on planetary scale.
Mankind must all lay down our arms and start the party now. There is no time for hate and nationalism!
I’m down.
Yeah that proves it, Sithrak hates us, no matter what we do.
We can call it the Velikovskypalooza. Any suggestions for musical headliners?
mordred@#2:
Sithrak hates us, no matter what we do.
To be fair, Sithrak’s, uh, fair. He doesn’t play favorites.
Pfft. Never mind boring old rocks from the Oort Cloud. The real reason to party is that we could wink out of existence any second.
Ignore the disclaimer. That’s just party-pooping.
Rob Grigjanis@#5:
Winking out suddenly sounds a lot less upsetting. But I’m going to take your excellent advice and start partying immediately. After all, waiting 250,000 years – might miss the party.
I don’t understand most of it, but my impression was that it’s expected to be stable for an extremely long time, if it ever does decay. I’ve seen crazy numbers like 10^40 to 10^50 years get tossed around as a lower bound, much much longer than our planet will exist. The point is, we’ll have many have bigger issues before that. Of course, it could be at any time, if they’re just wrong (but still right enough about the decay). That would be … uh … “exciting” is not the right word for the total annihilation of everything. We should probably reserve such terms for our party and things of that sort. But it would something.
It’s upsetting while you watch a comet/asteroid headed your way…. But once it hits, you’d definitely be gone in an instant. And now that you know about vacuum instability, isn’t that pretty much the same as seeing it coming (even though you can’t figure out when)?
cr @7: Few people take the instability (or, more accurately, metastability) very seriously, because it depends on a calculation (involving this guy) which assumes no new particles between currently accessible energies (about 10^4 GeV for proton-proton collisions) and somewhere above 10^10 GeV.
And, yeah, even if the calculation is valid, the probability we’ll get hammered is ridiculously small.
But what about the party?
In heaven there is no beer.
That’s why we drink it here.
And when we are gone from here,
all our friends will be drinking all our beer.
As for the comets, it’s worth noting that about 10 comets on hyperbolic orbits are discovered every year, so this would about double that number.
“There are comets coming from the Oort Cloud!!” is of the same order as “The reactor is going critical!”
Johnny Vector@#10:
“There are comets coming from the Oort Cloud!!” is of the same order as “The reactor is going critical!”
Whew! I won’t spend the next 1.5 million years cringeing in terror!
But now I’m going to drink because tomorrow existence might wink out.