--- On Sun, 9/6/09, Terry Blanton <[email protected]> wrote:
> One problem with their story is that the home system of the > aliens was > identified as Zeta Reticuli, a binary star system. It > is believed > that binary systems likely would not contain planets, much > less those > which could sustain life. > > But this is not yet proved. The main problem with the map is, it doesn't even fit Marjorie Fish's 'best fit' particularly well. Also, given a rather large number of stars even in nearby interstellar space, it isn't hard to find things that, given you stare at it long enough, start to make 'sense.' As far as the possibility of stable solar systems around Zeta Reticuli... Yes, it is a binary, but it is widely separated, given as something around 3,700 AU's apart, with an orbital period reaching ~100,000 years. Assuming that orbit is not too eccentric, the separation should be fairly constant, so planets could theoretically exist around either star. Given that both stars are G1-G2V, nearly the mass of the Sun, I'd expect the orbit to be around some imaginary point in space, with the stars themselves being relatively constant separation. Zeta 2 Reticuli was once thought to have a a close, unresolved companion at ~0.5 AU from it. That WOULD disrupt a planetary system quite nicely, but it has since been determined to be (probably) an artifact, and not a real celestial body. Zeta 1 Reticuli doesn't seem to have anything near it. The metallicity of both stars, where iron is used as a measurement, is around 2/3rd the Sun's. Apologies to Bob Lazar, but I don't think we're finding any atomic number 115 stuff anywhere near the place. More on Lazar in a moment... Zeta 2 was thought to have a planetary companion candidate, but this was retracted as the star was found to be undergoing pulsations (non radial, of the type that confused people about 51 Pegasi?) I haven't found much else about the particular star's variability, but if it is much, it would make (Earth like) life more difficult. Zeta 2's luminosity is 1.02L(sun), so for an Earth-like planet, you get roughly the same orbit we have now. Zeta 1 is 0.79L(sun), so you'd want to be about 0.89 AU from the star. Not much difference there, either. Back to Ramblin' Bob Lazar... Element 115 is supposed to be copper colored, but it's damn heavy, or so says Ramblin' Bob. Supercopper, then? Why don't we call it POLICIUM, then, in honor of traffic supercops, those grand supplemental tax-collectors. Why the guy chose to weave a story where the boring, unattractive and uninventive 'grays' actually MINED "Policium" is beyond me. Why not either leave it a mystery where they got it (mystery is good), or have one of the little gray men, one or more of whom seemed to be just chillin' on the base, explain that they had built mammoth particle accelerators to make the stuff en masse. I never built a jet-powered Honda, so maybe I'm not qualified to say anything but how about this? But consider a humble alien: You are the leader of the vanguard of an invading army from the stars. You need to make a fuel station to produce a heavy element your operations here need. But let's not use Policium or antimatter. Had enough Star Trek for a while, much thanks. Let's use (for no good reason), U238. Where to get it? Where to get the energy to make it if you need, oh, a few million metric tons of it? Well, the pesky humans aren't doing a damn thing on Mercury, and there's a lot of solar energy just waiting to be tapped. You've come almost 70 trillion miles, and you've peaked out at speeds pushing 0.94c. Are you afraid of a hot ball of rock? No. You're also of an adventurous and curious race. (You are NOT a gray, nor so dreadfully unattractive) Mercury recieves a ridiculous amount of free solar power, has an abundance of heavy materials, has an insanely tenuous atmosphere, and has water ice waiting at the poles. You can also find a place where the temperature is somewhere between +800F and -235F, and you might use the temperature differential for some nice thermoelectric gizmos. You've got a major heat source and heat sink right there on the same rock, and the gravity well isn't too bad either. Why do you want U238? You happen to know how to induce matter to 'burn up' into energy, the same as happens when equal bits of matter and antimatter are combined. You just don't need to make the antimatter, and your people would get nervous about having it around in any case. Plus, those Penning traps would take up a lot of space you have to devote to more important things. -Colonization equipment -Self-replicating machines to build your space stations -Scientific and astronomical equipment to aid your exploration and understanding of this solar system and corner of your interstellar neighborhood -War machines to persuade pesky humans to cooperate -That space rum you brought from home Does directly burning matter --> energy violate something? Not CoE, you only get as much bang as is in m*c^2. I suppose baryon conservation is a problem. We can't do that (yet). But you don't care, you're not a human. You like making protons do the whole p --> e+ + pi0.... pi0 --> 2y. You have the GUTs to do it, and faster than 10^36 years. (sorry, couldn't resist). You've got a bunch of electrons left over. What to do? Oh, well, that nice e+ solves that, and gives you more gamma rays. How about those neutrons? Do you want to wait 15 minutes more? No, why? If you can kill 10^36 years, what's 15 minutes? n --> p + e- + -ve. Then do the thing to the proton that you did some nanoseconds earlier. And AFAIK, you didn't even violate charge conservation. Now to go deal with those jerks on the third planet.... ... Lazar wasn't really imaginative. But maybe Zeta Reticuli is just a boring piece of real estate, where nothing of any consequence ever happens. After all, it is just shades of 'gray'. --Kyle
