Re: topmind spreads his seed


Mark VandeWettering wrote:
On 2006-07-02, topmind <topmind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mark VandeWettering wrote:
On 2006-07-02, topmind <topmind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

z wrote:
On 29 Jun 2006 21:00:17 -0700, "topmind" <topmind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


A simpler way to picture this is to take your spores and put them on the
lattices of a 10000 x 10000 x 10000 cube. If the cube has an edge of two
light-years, then that's a distance of a couple of billion km between
spores.

I am not sure what this is meant to imply. They don't travel in a
strait line, but rather will tend to be attracted to stars due to
gravity.

And would tend to end up impacting said stars due to gravity. Last
time I checked, the Sun was by far the biggest gravity well in our
solar system.

Yes, but unless something heads nearly strait at it, it will not pull
it directly into it.


Their motion will be perturbed by any star they encounter.

Agreed, but that is not the point. My point was that smashing directly
into a star is not that likely.

If it is unlikely to hit the star directly, then how likely is it to
hit a habitable planet?

The "target zone" for stellar orbits is far far wider than that for
smacking directly into a star.

This is, of course, dependent on the relative velocity of the two bodies.

I am just saying that the range of delta's that produce a strait-on
star face crash is much smaller than the ones for entering star orbit.


There will likely be some difference in motion between the pod and the
star itself, which usually turns into an orbit of some kind.

This depends again upon the relative velocities of the two bodies.

The particle was at the escape velocity of the Earth's system,

Are you suggesting here that since the pod still carry's the escape
volecity of our Sun's system that it will also "escape" other systems?
This gets back to the blind soccer analogy. Stars are moving somewhat
random relative to each other. An escape vector for one star may not be
for another.

if it
passed no closer than 1AU to a similarly sized star, it would escape the
gravitational attraction of *that* star just as it did for our star.

If it is unlikely for a spore to orbit the star, how much less likely for
it to be captured by a planet and orbit it?

Huh? I am not sure what you are referencing here. When I said "hit a
star directly", I mean impact into the *face* of the star, not merely
enter it's system.

Fine. If it is unlikely for a spore to hit a star, how much less likely
is it for it to hit the face of a planet?

It is more likely to hit the face of a planet. If you go into an "odd"
orbit, which is usually the case for a visitor, smacking a planet is a
fairly high probability fate. Stable orbits tend to be round and on the
same plane as the rest of the planets. If you don't have an orbit like
this, you generally either smack into something, get pulled into a
planetary orbit around a planet, get ejected out of the system, or get
pushed into a stable orbit somehow over time. As we can see from all
the craters on planets and moons, smacking into planets and their moons
is a fairly common fate. (Bigger planets tend not to preserve craters.)

Some of those craters just might be ET spore pods.

-T-

.

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