Due-Studio-65 t1_jd5l6x9 wrote on March 22, 2023 at 12:06 AM

If its moving fast enough to be useful, how would you set up a colony in the time you could access it?

Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5lch7 wrote on March 22, 2023 at 12:07 AM

You would likely need to send multiple spacecraft at the same time to the object. Couldn’t nuclear energy get us a long way once we’re actually on the object? This would be a notch in favour of making a colony that could become self sustaining if properly prepared

Brain_Hawk t1_jd63jzf wrote on March 22, 2023 at 2:22 AM

Asteroids are not typically that large, of course there's exceptions. But the gravity on this supposed intersolar object would be almost definitely miniscule. Finding a very large asteroid passing through the solar system seems to be rare, as far as I am aware, though I admit my knowledge here is very limited

So why would anybody want to live on such an asteroid? It's not going anywhere fast. The nearest star intersection is likely to see will be somewhere in millions of years in the future. So all these people are going to go live on this asteroid which is basically living in outer space with no gravity, which will have all kinds of problems for your body, and now they're cut off from the earth and have to live in a small self-sustained society which is by its very nature going to have extraordinarily strict rules and limit people's personal freedom to be huge degree, limit what you can do what you can see if you can talk to, definitely limit who you can sleep with and how much population you're allowed to grow.

Also that in a few million years maybe it will pass through some of the solar system that may or may not have some useful thing to visit?

Nah. That's not a mission that's going to happen even if it were feasible

Nerull t1_jd646f7 wrote on March 22, 2023 at 2:27 AM

Not really. For interstellar asteroids you're looking at transit times between star systems measured in millions of years. Nuclear power isn't going to last that long. Frankly, neither is human technology. If people did somehow survive on an asteroid for millions of years, they wouldn't have any cultural memory left of how they got there or why and they would have evolved to be substantially different than humans on Earth - which they might find at their destination anyway, if Earth humans develop faster propulsion methods.