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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsIf any intelligent life developed around an isolated rogue star
I wonder what effect it might have had on their civilization. Supposedly there are such things as isolated stars that develop in areas of space that are remote from any galaxies, either in small clusters or singly. Gases can condense into stars and planets even in widely disbursed areas of supposedly empty space. Also, there are other theories to account for these inter-galactic isolated rogue stars in deep space whereby they were either gently expelled from a galaxy through tidal effects with neighboring or colliding galaxies or violently kicked out, probably due to a close call with a super-massive black hole. Supposedly, the Hubble telescope has identified nearly 1,000 such isolated stars that have few or no neighbors and astronomers expect to find many more. Meanwhile, on Earth there are supposedly only three celestial objects that can be seen by the naked eye besides the stars of the Milky Way and they are all relatively close neighbors: the large and small Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda Galaxy.
If intelligent life arose on a planet orbiting a star that is in complete isolation, would individuals have looked up into the night sky (assuming there's day and night on the planet) and seen only a nearby moon or planet from their own solar system? If theirs was the only planet in the system (a star violently ejected from a galaxy might lose most of its planets) and they had no moon, their night time sky might seem completely black, almost like blindness (that is, unless they developed a much keener night time eyesight than humans on Earth and can perceive distant galaxies). With only one celestial body in their universe, their sun, I wonder how that might have affected their mythology and culture. Without being able to see stars in the sky, how would they have explained reality? Would they have bothered to develop night time telescopes? Would they have been interested in going into outer space, thinking there was almost nothing up there? If they eventually managed to better understand the universe only to realize how alone and isolated they were to the point where to get to the nearest star would require technology even beyond overwhelmingly difficult inter-galactic travel, would they have stopped trying? With nowhere to go beyond their planet, no outer worlds to colonize or exploit for natural resources and no new places to explore or develop on their own crowded planet, would it have turned them inward, possibly inventing computer-generated virtual reality worlds in which to lose themselves?
By the way, I'm not very knowledgeable in science or astronomy and if any experts want to correct me or add anything I'd welcome your thoughts.
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)The Andromada Galaxy was a blob with my eyes, but that's about it.
And no zodiacal light either.
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365070322/
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/resources/darksky/3304011.html?c=y&page=1
Our Milky Way sure looks like light pollution, and without it I wonder what else could be seen.
CIT13
(99 posts)Such stars do exist, thrown out of orbit or whatever, but they are out there. Generally they are singular such as our own, but most solar systems are binary and not conducive to planetary life. The night sky might be a lot dimmer, but we can see stars that died a billion years or more ago because the light is only just reaching us.
What they would miss out on is the view of a galaxy. Seeing the Milky Way on a clear winter night is one of the most spectacular things you can ever witness.
aint_no_life_nowhere
(21,925 posts)I'm not an expert but I have read a number of discussions on this topic on astronomy blogs and it seems that we can barely see anything outside of the milky way with the naked eye and those are relatively close clusters of stars. And even Andromeda is just a faint diffuse light to the naked eye and its individual stars could not be distinguished. At least that's what I've read. Even with the most powerful telescope, individual stars in other galaxies beyond the Milky Way are very hard to make out. I'm talking about isolated stars that are relatively quite distant from any galaxy. But I suppose that creatures evolving on a planet around a rogue star might have much better vision than humans or any other Earth creatures for that matter.
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)It's hard for me to envision a life-bearing planet being so isolated from everything else that even a galaxy like Andromeda would be too far away to be visible in the night sky.
Response to aint_no_life_nowhere (Reply #3)
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hunter
(38,334 posts)Would the people living on the surface think they were an island in an infinite sea of cloud?
petronius
(26,605 posts)that nothing else is visible, IIRC. Although exploring that wasn't really the topic of the novel...
ConcernedCanuk
(13,509 posts).
.
.
Or aquarium?
or Zoo?
and we are "here" just for some greater beings' entertainment?
A celestial "sitcom" if you will . . .
or "crime drama" - etc., . .
we are, - "versatile"
hmmm
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