General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: UFOs explained [View all]PoindexterOglethorpe
(25,857 posts)My Son The Astronomer is in a PhD program in astronomy at George Mason University, in Fairfax, VA. I frequently text him or call him up with astronomy questions. I joke that I could give you his cell phone number, and if you have an astronomy question, call him, and simply say you're a friend of his mother's. In reality, I don't give out his phone number, and even if I did he probably wouldn't answer a call from a number he doesn't recognize.
Here's an example of the kinds of things I discuss with him. I'd like to write a novel in which an intelligent, technological species of dinosaurs has evolved, and then their astronomers discover that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, and they can tell from its size that it will essentially destroy most life on the planet. Their solution is to invent time travel and plan on going about 6 million years into the future, a long enough time for the planet to have recovered, but short enough that another intelligent species would not yet have evolved. Only someone makes some kind of a decimal point error, and they go some 65 million years into the future. Oops.
So I've been discussing with him, once these dinosaurs arrive into our present, how would their astronomers figure out how far they've come? I'm hypothesizing that they send several different groups on several parts of the planet to maximize survival. One group has the misfortune to be on Antarctica, and they all freeze to death. Anyway, the stars move quickly enough that whatever constellations they had, would be unrecognizable after six million years. So the ones that arrive in survivable places -- assuming humans don't find them quickly, are now hard pressed to figure out how far into the future they've come. I suggested to My Son that perhaps they could look at the galaxies, like Andromeda, and work it out from that. He thought it was feasible.
This possible story does assume they have astronomy and astronomical instruments very much the same as we have now.