Here’s my idea: an advanced civilization that has discovered how to move and control a small sun (star). They are explorers who travel the galaxy by moving their entire earth-like planet at great speed (maybe close to light speed through voids but slowing significantly as they approach a system) with said star in tow for energy and light. One day humans wake up to see a blue planet, looming a little larger than the moon, resident in the sky. In reality it is significantly farther away than the moon but similar to earth in actual size. Also a second smaller sun is visible but resident in the outer throws of the solar system as the traveling planet is taking advantage of our sun while it is here following the plane of earths orbit around Sol. A flotilla of ships is heading our way filled with excited explorers. Talk about mixed human emotions.
I’m gonna be so mad if this has been done the way I've described it.
Tracy
[This message has been edited by tnwilz (edited July 18, 2008).]
Ahhh... there was an Invader Zim episode similar but not really... I don't think that is what I am thinking of. Arg, this is going to bug me now.
I was thinking... perhaps I could do some biblical tie-ins. Like the prophecy of a New heavens and a New earth... or New Jerusalem...like their capital city could be called Jerusalem??? Hmmm... a lot I could do with this. No story just yet lol... But it will come to me.
[This message has been edited by tnwilz (edited July 18, 2008).]
Tracy
E. E. "Doc" Smith used to fling planets around all the time---they made pretty terrible weapons. (How'd you like to be standing on a planet with another planet comin' at ya?) Those stories date from the thirties.
Stan Schmidt (he still edits Analog, doesn't he?) had a series of stories in the seventies where he moved Earth, in detail...
So planet moving is nothing new...I'd wonder about the gravitational effect on Earth and the solar system.
(Appropos to this topic...there's some terrific compiled footage of Earth, taken from a deep space probe, I forget the name, with the Moon moving in between Earth and the camera. Really helps you grasp how much larger the Earth is than the Moon...)
I'm liking this - I may actually have come up with a fairly original idea here. Keep up with the suggestions though, this has been very helpful.
Tracy
quote:
One day humans wake up to see a blue planet, looming a little larger than the moon, resident in the sky.
I don't think they are going to be able to sneak a planet in that easily, especially if it is bringing its own sun. Astronomers are not going to miss spotting something like that from a huge distance away, unless you are also positing some kind of "cloaking device," I guess.
As Robert Nowall has pointed out, though, the gravitational effects are going to be noticed, even if they can't see the planet and sun coming.
Its good that you throw challenges at me because these are the thoughts readers will have and it needs to be within the realms of believability.
They'd have to park their sun at least as far away from ours as Pluto is from Sol, so as not to disturb the orbits of our planets; less if their sun has less mass than ours.
Then they'd have to get their planet out of orbit around their sun, into orbit around ours, all the time keeping it warm.
If their planet is the same mass as the moon, it certainly should not come anywhere near as close to us as the moon, because it would influence our tides. The heavier it is, the further away it should be, and further again to avoid capturing our moon into its own orbit.
Even if it does that, it will still slightly perturb our orbit and those of nearby planets. (Whether that would matter to us, I don't know.) It's through observing the motions of Uranus that the existence of Neptune was predicted, before it was actually observed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation
I can't do the math, but if it's a planet of similar size to ours, I can't imagine but that it would affect us dramatically if we could see it "looming a little larger than our moon."
Furthermore, there are the relativistic effects of pushing their planet and sun up to speeds close to that of light. Initially I thought that since mass increases with speed, their planet would have to orbit ever closer to their sun to avoid flying off at a tangent, which would mean its temperature would rise until its inhabitants fried. But then I thought, their sun's mass too will increase with speed so they'll want to orbit further away to avoid diving into their sun, with the disadvantage of lowering temperatures.
But then I wondered if, since they're both accelerating, their relative masses would remain unchanged. I Googled it and realised that there's something called "relativistic mass" and started trying to understand it:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/tdil.html#c3
http://www.opencourse.info/astronomy/introduction/09.light_relativity/
Now I have a headache.
I believe you'd have to get the science of this right, or at least consistent with what lay people know of relativity and gravitational mechanics, in order to maintain our willing suspension of disbelief.
By the way, we can feel Earth's gravitational effect rather further out than our atmosphere. Earth's gravity is what keeps the moon orbiting us, and there's the concept of gravitational slingshots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
At the back of my mind I'm thinking that if they could solve all these problems they wouldn't need to tow a sun around; they'd have found an easier way. But I'm not an intergalactic alien with an intellect the size of a planet, so what do I know.
Good luck with this,
Pat
[This message has been edited by TaleSpinner (edited July 20, 2008).]
[This message has been edited by TaleSpinner (edited July 20, 2008).]
So the idea of a world orbiting a SMALL star and moving through our galaxy like a comet is hardly far fetched.
I understand the gravitational pull of Sol on the planets in our solar system. Sol has tremendous mass, which is why all the planets are held in their respective orbits. There are other planets in our system that are many times larger than earth that have no tangible effect on us because they are too far away. The only two things which affect us are the Sun because of it’s colossal size and the moon which is so close you can almost touch it. The moon is so very close that it is actually orbiting us, yet only tugs slightly on our planet. A second earth size world (which is quite small in context) following at a safe distance in the same plane of orbit would have little or no effect. The biggest possibility would be that if the world followed too close it would slow our orbit by its gravitational attraction, but like I say, I would not have it follow too close. If it were six months behind it would be at the opposite end of our orbit plane or three months behind, a quarter orbit behind, but even then I would doubt it would have any effect considering how tiny it is and the great distances involved (145.000.000 miles) Yet I would think it would be far more visible to the naked eye than any of the other planets in our system. Even if it appeared as half the size of our moon you would still see it in the day-time sky near the horizon. You can see Saturn’s rings with a good pair of binoculars and it is almost a billion miles away a lot of the time.
I would have to come up with a reasonable level of explanation as to how these aliens control the movements of the star and home-world but hey, that’s what sci-fi is all about right?
That would also explain why they were able to "sneak up" on Earth (although moving close to the speed of light would probably cause quite a few X-rays to be emitted from running into atoms in interstellar space).
You could even work in that if the gravitational system/ algorythmn's falled, all hell would break loose and stuff would start crashing into eachother like a galactic pinball machine.
sahweeeeeet!
I haven’t heard of any such works like that, but are the y paece ful ?
Rfw2ND
There are a few thoughts once expressed that the moon was really a star ship, arriving to deliver humans to the planet.....
An tnwilz says, the stars and their programs are moving all the time. The problem comes when you try to alter how they're moving.
When you accelerate their system, they not only need to accelerate the planets as well, but they have to do so in such a way as to keep their angular momentum relative to their old orbits, while adding an identical amount of acceleration in some other direction. If you could move a planet at all, though, this is just really cool and complex math.
Additionally, the sun is gaseous, so you couldn't just hook a rocket on it and say giddyup. You can potentially do that with a solid planet, but not a star. The core of the star, being denser than the outer layers, would kinda just slip out, and this would be a bad thing.
Additionally, as any computer programmer would tell you, you need to field test this thing first. That would make for some interesting precursors (stars winking out, blowing up, beginning to move around).
Then there's power. Where are you going to get the energy to do all of this? Maneuvering would be a royal pain as well.
All this said, though, the technology to do all of this would be sufficiently advanced... MAGIC!
Sounds like a fun project.
Tom
In 1934 Edmund Hamilton wrote "Thundering Worlds." It's a short story about a future era when the sun goes dim. To save itself, mankind straps gigantic atomic engines to all nine planets and drives them around the universe looking for a new sun.
[spolier alert]
Along the way they come across a race of aliens who also have a dying sun. The aliens copy the human idea and the story becomes a chase through the universe to be the first to find a good sun. Eventually the narrator, governor of Mercury, sacrifices his planet by crashing it into the aliens.
Pretty cool stuff from 1934!
[This message has been edited by Doc Brown (edited July 23, 2008).]