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Most_Engineering_992 t1_iuc9yvu wrote

Reply to comment by EDFLsnape in The scariest picture of space... by EDFLsnape

I'm going to be mean, so look away ...

There are vast regions of space where you could be floating (in a space suit) with no gravity and no light that you could see. Just endless, boundless darkness, with no direction. There are planets around solitary stars where the night sky is just black, and if you lived on one there would be no astronomy and nobody would have any notion of a larger universe.

"Vast" doesn't capture the scale

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mj6174 t1_iucgj0g wrote

Rogue stars fascinate me. The ones wandering between galaxies.

Edit: I think they are interesting because life can evolve on planets orbiting these stars. Other than parent star, there will hardly be any radiation risk, or supernova, neutron, x-ray or gamma ray bursts. If star have multiple planet, they may be observable in night sky but nothing much else it would be creepy. It will be much easier to conclude sky like a dome with bright shiny dots on it at night in such system. If at all these civilizations develop telescopes, they may still get views of far away galaxies.

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dingo1018 t1_iucr7gq wrote

What about the rogue planets? They can be wondering between solar systems or even galaxies, sometimes at incredible speeds if say they had a narrow escape from a black hole. And should one pass through or even just close enough to our solar system it would make a very handy space ship! If course we would have to be ready to go hop on as it passed, and you don't get to choose where you go.

Right now there could be a civilisation who managed to survive on a planet with no star! Just wondering through space, the planet core slowly cooling providing the bear minimum, but if they are clever enough they could split the atom and live in total comfort, until their version of Putin ruined it (how did this get political?) 🙉

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MVRK_3 t1_iudqvo7 wrote

Chances that there could be life on a rogue planet would be nearly none. A planet that is probably frozen solid because it doesn’t have a heat source at all. It would have no atmosphere either so it would be constantly bombarded by radiation and other harmful things that would kill anything living on it.

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dingo1018 t1_iuduz2f wrote

A sufficiently high amount of radioactive material in a world with a molten core is not impossible, the by-product of radioactive decay is heat. After all a good amount of the Earths heat is still residual from the planets accretion. Or there could be a gravitational influence such as large satellites gravitationally bound, the tidal forces producing heat from friction. And that's leaving aside a technologically advanced civilisation who can split atoms for power. Also an atmosphere could certainly survive even if just trapped below surface.

Regarding radiation, a strong magnetic field from a molten metal core should do the trick!

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MVRK_3 t1_iudw53f wrote

I don’t think a planet like that wound be rotating enough to keep a constant magnetic field like earth does though. Too many inconsistencies with a rogue planet like that would effect all of that. Also I don’t think intelligent life would be able to live with all those inconsistencies as well. Life on earth formed and evolved because earth was relatively constant with weather and conditions. A planet not in an orbit could go from being frozen, to super hot passing by another star, so life wouldn’t be able to adapt and evolve.

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BryKKan t1_iudx7cs wrote

Better answer is that they could live inside it, and use a combination of fission and fusion for energy

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MVRK_3 t1_iudxrc6 wrote

It’s not impossible, just very very unlikely.

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dingo1018 t1_iudxmwd wrote

I think after the event that sent it apart from it's star it would settle into a very stable state, space is vast, the odds of it coming close enough to another star close enough to benefit from it's heat output would likely be it's death due to gravitational shear.

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MVRK_3 t1_iudyt6h wrote

Possibly. But would life have time to evolve into some kind of intelligent form in that span though? In earths 4 billion or so years, we have barely evolved into intelligent life to barely touch the moon. Obviously there could have been life forms that evolve faster and discover technology faster than we have, but I still think it’s very unlikely.

Also I find it very sad that we will never find out the answers to everything we’re discussing.

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SeraphSurfer t1_iudxpbm wrote

>They can be wondering between solar systems or even galaxies, sometimes at incredible speeds if say they had a narrow escape from a black hole. And should one pass through or even just close enough to our solar system it would make a very handy space ship! If course we would have to be ready to go hop on as it passed, and you don't get to choose where you go.

Alert Hollywood. I HAVE A SCRIPT!

It's kind of like the little watched "Space 1999", but with modern special effects and a whole world to work with vs just a moon base, I think we've potential.

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dingo1018 t1_iudxz1h wrote

It has been in a book or two, but that is no reason to stop now!

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Opus_Majus t1_iug751l wrote

Do you happen to recall any of those book titles?

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dingo1018 t1_iuhj4nj wrote

Dark Eden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Eden_(novel) was a fun read, one of the random ones I've borrowed from the library, it's not that heavy on the sci fi unfortunately it's more a human book about the highly inbred descendants of a crew that crashed on a rogue planet, but the author does a fair job of describing his idea of a frozen planet with pockets of geothermal heat that is channeled through the trunks of giant trees and various life forms most of which are bioluminescent in some way, pretty cool read actually I did enjoy it.

That's the only one I can personally remember reading specifically about rogue planets but Wikipedia has a page im gonna bookmark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rogue_planets_in_fiction

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carbonqubit t1_iugh83z wrote

What I think are even stranger and more daunting are rogue supermassive black holes that are created from incomplete galaxy mergers.

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snarkuzoid t1_iudb33d wrote

How about "really, really vast"?

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Most_Engineering_992 t1_iudz0ei wrote

How about ...

“Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.”

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