What cosmological event could snuff out the sun without destroying Earth?

CCWilson

Thanks, H2Bro. I've just placed my order for Asimov's book through Amazon. I think the timing for a star, hypervelocity or otherwise, wouldn't work for my story, though.

twofish-quant

If you want to get speculative, lets suppose in 2300 some even genius creates at field that changes the fine structure constant by affecting the Higgs field. He holds the world for ransom, turns off the core of the sun, and then he gets paid, turns off the field and the sun still stays off.

Ooopppsssss.....

If the nuclear core of the sun goes off then the sun will still shine for several thousand years.

CCWilson

All right. At this point we have Earth leaving the solar system and underground cities keeping our species alive. What happens to our planet's atmosphere? Do we lose some of it as the black hole passes nearby? Once we are no longer being warmed by the Sun, with all plant and animal life above ground exterminated, do we maintain our atmosphere, or is it slowly lost into space? Could someone in an insulated space suit walk around and get his oxygen, warmed before breathing it, from the air? How chilly would it be?

Incidentally, I'm sure it depends on how close the black hole passes Earth, but should we expect earthquakes and tidal waves before we are slung away from mother Sun?

DrStupid

Very far away from the Sun it will condense. There is a good description in "A Deepness in the Sky" from Vernor Vinge.

twofish-quant

Free oxygen is extremely reactive and unless you have something that is generating it (i.e. plants) pretty soon it's going to disappear from atmosphere.

H2Bro

I've read its more like a million years for photons to finish their random walk through the photosphere and exit the sun.

How's this for far-fetched...

Astronomers observe a red giant being stripped of matter by a binary black hole companion. They predict within 10 years the red giant will completely break apart and fall into the black hole. Coincidentally, the axis of rotation of the black hole is somehow determined to be precisely aligned with our Sun. As a result, when the star falls in the black hole will release a colossal gamma ray burst (GRB)

What does the GRB do to the Sun? anyone's guess. maybe it blasts off the corona and several neptune-equivalent masses of plasma are thrown off into space. I'm sure this is an event you could run with in terms of outcomes, and not too many people would say "thats not what would happen" (except on this forum, hehe).

Oxygen would freeze out of the atmosphere into snow and over time bind itself to iron in the soil. You might be left with a snowy covering of CO2 and Nitrogen, however.

EDIT: not actually 'snow', but a crystallized solid form of oxygen.

mfb

A GRB which can harm the sun would probably blast away the upper parts of earth, too. This is not limited to the atmosphere.


@CCWilson: A black hole can kick earth away without significant tidal effects.
In liquid form, our atmosphere would be a layer of ~10-15m height, distributed over the oceans.

Ryan_m_b

Interesting idea for a story. Something you're going to want to think about is the settlements themselves. We have no idea at this time how to make closed ecological systems, this is going to be a must if anyone is going to survive underground once the Earth's biosphere has failed. Consequently a long time to prepare (50-100+ years) might be needed for the R&D. Also you might want to give some thought as to the societal factors both physical and social e.g.

- What economic systems will be in place? Current models rely on growth but in such an underground vault set up steady-state systems with an emphasise on recycling may be better. Also how much private vs public ownership will be in place? It's all very well being free market until a monopoly on oxygen recycling forms.
- How good is the political set up? In the long run bad political systems tend to result in emigration and/or revolution. In a closed ecosystem the first is impractical and the latter catastrophic.
- How many people? It only takes a few thousand for sufficient genetic diversity but millions to adequately fulfil the specialist labour requirements of a technological civilisation.
- What nationalities/cultures and how will they clash? If the R&D and construction of these vaults is by economically developed countries how will less economically developed countries react? What will the social implications be for a minority group who are the few remaining survivors of an ethnicity/nationality/religion etc? What are the implications of a sudden, confined mixture of cultures (possibly violently incompatible)?

Hope this helps!

H2Bro

I've always found the social, economic, and political tensions/repurcussions of drastic shifts in technology to be the joi d'vivre of reading science fiction.

Kim Stanley Robinson has a great Mars series, (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). As I recall there was some fairly good insight into closed-loop ecosystems and habitation, which they set up in the first novel (red mars).

One thought I have is that in such a scenario, it would be quite easy to justify imposing a totalitarian regime. First off, its a basic survival competition, everything is scarce, so the argument that there's no room to indulge personal fantasies or dreams, or that everyone needs to suffer hardship for the greater good, are hard to defeat. Second, the very nature of the infrastructurally-dependent society lends itself to totalizing power structures, e.g. the Recycling engineers guild, or whoever captures the power generators. Also, in a society that survives by adapting to scarcity, a natural ethic or ideology of minimizing consumption would emerge. Today we might evaluate a persons success by their nice home, or new car, etc. In that world, it might be more on how efficient you are in water usage, or calorie metabolization, or thrify in re-purposing broken tools, machines, etc.

For that, you might find literature on life in the Eastern bloc most informative. They necessarily adapted to living in a totalizing society that controlled all major industries, and quite often prided themselves on their thriftiness in getting on without consumer goods, or re-using re-building old discarded machines.

CCWilson

Ryan, I have been thinking along some of those lines. I believe that multiple underground cities would be built, each served by a nearby power plant, one or several by every nation or group of nations with the economic wherewithal. And the psychology of being on an eventually doomed planet, the physical, political, economic, and cultural adjustments to life in a bunker, the process of selecting who's to populate those cities - there's a lot of potential there. At some point I'll need to get together with people who will help keep the story on the straight and narrow with respect to scientific and technological plausibility.

Ryan_m_b

Agreed!
The Mars Triology was quite good for that, it stands out for me as one of the few real explorers of new economic models.
It would also be physically easy to implement. Keeping a closed ecosystem going would require ubiquitous surveillance (tracking animal/plant/fungi/microorganism population numbers, interactions and diversity, monitoring the status of critical machinary, surrounding rock etc). Not only that but the ability to finely control the environment to alter any of these parameters. In such a system dissent could be easily detected and dealt with, there's no real way to form a resistance and a violent revolution in a confined closed system could be catastrophic.

However it's not the only way things may go and given the possibility (however slim) of violent revolution it might not go that way. A better system could be one of widespread consumer co-operative enterprises or direct public ownership.Indeed there's lots of interesting scope for story. Just thinking about what the culture and psychology (not to mention technology) of the people entering the cities would be after generations of effort to build these things because the end of the world is comming (and only a few will survive) is an effort!

twofish-quant

I'd imagine that a millennialist religious theocracy would work well in this situation. The end of the Sun is a sign from God. The other thing is that if it's obvious that everyone is going to die in the end, I think "rational" people would likely give up. It's the people that think that God will perform a miracle if we are all good, that are likely to keep going forward.

As far as the social setup, I think something military would work. Militaries deal with small closed social systems, and the number of people is small enough so that any sort of dissent would be quickly wiped out.

But we are in survival mode. One thing about a sudden population crash is that the economy is likely to be based on scavanging. One thing about a "cold earth" is that it's likely to leave a lot of technology in good shape. If you have a car that leave it out in normal temperatures, it will disintegrate in about a century. If you have a car and freeze it in liquid nitrogen temperatures for a thousand years, I'd imagine that it would be *possible* to have it working.

So I can imagine that "technology" would consist of being able to mining old machines and make them work, and I can imagine a religion growing up around this. You have "wizards" that know the secret methods of getting an engine from the surface and have it work rather than explode.

Ryan_m_b

I'm not so convinced, I think the majority of people whether they are religious or not would want the human race to survive. I don't see why it would be rational to give up that sounds like one of those weird criticisms of atheists that they must have no hope without god.
Hmmm, the problem IMO with a military set up is that whilst it is good for undemocratic organisations that people voluntarily (or temporarily) join I think it's a bad way to run a society at large. Militarism generates a large amount of social tension and this would go further, almost Khakistocracy! It seems that the social set up has to be rigid enough to act quickly and decisively but flexible enough to adapt and satisfy the social need for freedom.
I don't really see that as working very well at all. I doubt the majority of modern equipment would survive in such conditions and if you don't have the expertise to fix and maintain them you're in trouble. Not only that but the knowledge to use them would have to be kept known by someone, you can't just rely on having it written down and try to get people to self-learn when you need it. I could go on but others have put it better.

CCWilson

I suspect that such an event would shatter the religious beliefs of a lot of people. This kind of catastrophe would be so unlike what most believers thought God had in mind for us, so different from what their holy books predicted, so unimaginable as the act of a loving God, that there might well be a turning away from religion. Still, there's no limit to our capacity for self-delusion, so maybe not.

I also think that the survival of our species and of life in general would be embraced as a personal responsibility by most of those selected to populate the underground cities and even by many who didn't make the cut and would be, therefore, doomed. We do have the capacity for altruism and self-sacrifice and a drive to do the right thing under some circumstances, after all, and what cause more compelling than the survival of humanity could there be? After the first generation, though, selfishness would make a comeback, idealism would decline, and the course of life underground would be unpredictable.

Sanescience

If science jargon is not your forte, don't try to explain it. Just have the brightness of the Sun diminish for "no reason". If heat takes a million years to escape from the core, then the core quenched a million years ago and now we're seeing the effect.

In Stephen Baxter stories "Xeelee Sequence" all the stars of the universe are fading because of aliens called Photino Birds modifying the stars to suit their purposes. The books are pretty cool.

twofish-quant

Sure, but we are talking about the sun going out.

One thing that will make it a lot easier for a military/theocratic dictatorship to function is that I think we are talking about small numbers of people. Instead of a total populations of billions, we are maybe talking about a 100,000 at most, and if you deviate slightly, that's an excuse to send you out the airlock......

One thing about this world is that I'm getting the feeling that aside from the sun going out, any society that survives is going to be rather unpleasant.

I suspect that in this situation anyone that wants freedom is going to end up out the airlock.

But the knowledge to fix and maintain is much less than the knowledge needed to build something. I can make basic repairs to a car or a computer. I couldn't build one from scratch.

Ryan_m_b

100,000 seems far to small to maintain a high tech society. Remember it can't be anything but a high tech society, more so than ours IRL because it has to be able to build and maintain closed ecosystems. The thing about high tech societies is that the labour force has to contain many skilled, specialised labourers. There might be some ways of cutting down and making systems more efficient but I can't see anything less than millions. Any modern device has a huge background of support industries to make, gone are the days when a few hundred craftsmen could knock up most of what society produced.

Given this, the need for genetic diversity and the strong culture of trying to ensure the human race survives I highly doubt execution would ever be put into effect. You don't spend generations trying to save a splinter of the species and then start killing people off without extremely good reason. More likely crimes or anything like that would be dealt with by some sort of compulsory labour.
See above, the complexity of the modern technosphere (let alone one in a closed ecosystem for millions of people) is such that it takes a huge specialised and skilled labour force.