Oh, nevermind!

https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/rogue-star-hurtling-through-the-milky-way-wont-smash-into-our-solar-system-after-all
--
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

On 11/13/2023 10:26 AM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
> Oh, nevermind!
>
> https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/rogue-star-hurtling-through-the-milky-way-wont-smash-into-our-solar-system-after-all

Aliens attacking humans notoriously have horribly bad aim.

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 18:26:13 UTC, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
> Oh, nevermind!
>
> https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/rogue-star-hurtling-through-the-milky-way-wont-smash-into-our-solar-system-after-all
> --
> columbiaclosings.com
> What's not in Columbia anymore..

Spoiler?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Wells_short_story)>
(1897)
"the fraction of humanity who was able to survive"

Perhaps technically /not/ a star. Ask the astronomers?

In article <4133d730-5be9-4197-b13e-b4108856e928n@googlegroups.com>,
Robert Carnegie <rja.carnegie@excite.com> wrote:
>On Monday, 13 November 2023 at 18:26:13 UTC, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>> Oh, nevermind!
>>
>>
>https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/rogue-star-hurtling-through-the-milky-way-wont-smash-into-our-solar-system-after-all
>> --
>> columbiaclosings.com
>> What's not in Columbia anymore..
>
>Spoiler?
><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Wells_short_story)>
>(1897)
>"the fraction of humanity who was able to survive"
>
>Perhaps technically /not/ a star. Ask the astronomers?

I was thinking more along these lines:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20707/pg20707-images.html

Taj Lamor gazed steadily down at the vast dim bulk of the
ancient city spread out beneath him. In the feeble light
of the stars its mighty masses of up-flung metal buildings
loomed strangely, like the shells of some vast race of
crustacea, long extinct. Slowly he turned, gazing now out
across the great plaza, where rested long rows of slender,
yet mighty ships. Thoughtfully he stared at their dim,
half-seen shapes.

Taj Lamor was not human. Though he was humanoid, Earth had
never seen creatures just like him. His seven foot high
figure seemed a bit ungainly by Terrestrial standards, and
his strangely white, hairless flesh, suggesting unbaked
dough, somehow gave the impression of near-transparency.
His eyes were disproportionately large, and the black disc
of pupil in the white corneas was intensified by contrast.
Yet perhaps his race better deserved the designation homo
sapiens than Terrestrians do, for it was wise with the
accumulated wisdom of uncounted eons.

He turned to the other man in the high, cylindrical, dimly
lit tower room overlooking the dark metropolis, a man far
older than Taj Lamor, his narrow shoulders bent, and his
features grayed with his years. His single short, tight-fitting
garment of black plastic marked him as one of the Elders.
The voice of Taj Lamor was vibrant with feeling:

"Tordos Gar, at last we are ready to seek a new sun. Life
for our race!"

A quiet, patient, imperturbable smile appeared on the Elder's
face and the heavy lids closed over his great eyes.

"Yes," he said sadly, "but at what cost in tranquility! The
discord, the unrest, the awakening of unnatural ambitions--a
dreadful price to pay for a questionable gain. Too great a
price, I think." His eyes opened, and he raised a thin hand
to check the younger man's protest. "I know--I know--in
this we do not see as one. Yet perhaps some day you will
learn even as I have that to rest is better than to engage
in an endless struggle. Suns and planets die. Why should
races seek to escape the inevitable?" Tordos Gar turned
slowly away and gazed fixedly into the night sky.

Taj Lamor checked an impatient retort and sighed resignedly.
It was this attitude that had made his task so difficult.
Decadence. A race on an ages-long decline from vast heights
of philosophical and scientific learning. Their last external
enemy had been defeated millennia in the past; and through
easy forgetfulness and lack of strife, ambition had died.
Adventure had become a meaningless word.

Strangely, during the last century a few men had felt the
stirrings of long-buried emotion, of ambition, of a craving
for adventure. These were throwbacks to those ancestors of
the race whose science had built their world. These men, a
comparative handful, had been drawn to each other by the
unnatural ferment within them; and Taj Lamor had become
their leader. They had begun a mighty struggle against the
inertia of ages of slow decay, had begun a search for the
lost secrets of a hundred-million-year-old science.

Taj Lamor raised his eyes to the horizon. Through the leaping
curve of the crystal clear roof of their world glowed a
blazing spot of yellow fire. A star--the brightest object
in a sky whose sun had lost its light. A point of radiance
that held the last hopes of an incredibly ancient race.

The quiet voice of Tordos Gar came through the semidarkness
of the room, a pensive, dreamlike quality in its tones.

"You, Taj Lamor, and those young men who have joined you
in this futile expedition do not think deeply enough. Your
vision is too narrow. You lack perspective. In your youth
you cannot think on a cosmic scale." He paused as though
in thought, and when he continued, it seemed almost as
though he were speaking to himself.

"In the far, dim past fifteen planets circled about a small,
red sun. They were dead worlds--or rather, worlds that had
not yet lived. Perhaps a million years passed before there
moved about on three of them the beginnings of life. Then
a hundred million years passed, and those first, crawling
protoplasmic masses had become animals, and plants, and
intermediate growths. And they fought endlessly for survival.
Then more millions of years passed, and there appeared a
creature which slowly gained ascendancy over the other
struggling life forms that fought for the warmth of rays
of the hot, red sun.

"That sun had been old, even as the age of a star is counted,
before its planets had been born, and many, many millions
of years had passed before those planets cooled, and then
more eons sped by before life appeared. Now, as life slowly
forced its way upward, that sun was nearly burned out. The
animals fought, and bathed in the luxury of its rays, for
many millennia were required to produce any noticeable
change in its life-giving radiations.

"At last one animal gained the ascendancy. Our race. But
though one species now ruled, there was no peace. Age
followed age while semi-barbaric peoples fought among
themselves. But even as they fought, they learned.

"They moved from caves into structures of wood and stone--and
engineering had its beginning. With the buildings came
little chemical engines to destroy them; warfare was
developing. Then came the first crude flying-machines, using
clumsy, inefficient engines. Chemical engines! Engines so
crude that one could watch the flow of their fuel! One part
in one hundred thousand million of the energy of their
propellents they released to run the engines, and they
carried fuel in such vast quantities that they staggered
under its load as they left the ground! And warfare became
world-wide. After flight came other machines and other ages.
Other scientists began to have visions of the realms beyond,
and they sought to tap the vast reservoirs of Nature's
energies, the energies of matter.

"Other ages saw it done--a few thousand years later there
passed out into space a machine that forced its way across
the void to another planet! And the races of the three
living worlds became as one--but there was no peace.

"Swiftly now, science grew upon itself, building with ever
faster steps, like a crystal which, once started, forms
with incalculable speed.

"And while that science grew swiftly greater, other changes
took place, changes in our universe itself. Ten million
years passed before the first of those changes became
important. But slowly, steadily our atmosphere was drifting
into space. Through ages this gradually became apparent.
Our worlds were losing their air and their water. One planet,
less favored than another, fought for its life, and space
itself was ablaze with the struggles of wars for survival.

"Again science helped us. Thousands of years before, men
had learned how to change the mass of matter into energy,
but now at last the process was reversed, and those ancestors
of ours could change energy into matter, any kind of matter
they wished. Rock they took, and changed it to energy, then
that energy they transmuted to air, to water, to the necessary
metals. Their planets took a new lease of life!

"But even this could not continue forever. They must stop
that loss of air. The process they had developed for
reformation of matter admitted of a new use. Creation! They
were now able to make new elements, elements that had never
existed in nature! They designed atoms as, long before,
their fathers had designed molecules. At last their problem
was solved. They made a new form of matter that was clearer
than any crystal, and yet stronger and tougher than any
metal known. Since it held out none of the sun's radiations,
they could roof their worlds with it and keep their air
within!

"This was a task that could not be done in a year, nor a
decade, but all time stretched out unending before them.
One by one the three planets became tremendous, roofed-in
cities. Only their vast powers, their mighty machines made
the task possible, but it was done."

The droning voice of Tordos Gar ceased. Taj Lamor, who had
listened with a mixture of amusement and impatience to the
recital of a history he knew as well as the aged, garrulous
narrator, waited out of the inborn respect which every man
held for the Elders. At length he exclaimed: "I see no
point--"

"The Black Star Passes". Slowly. :-)

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20707>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Star_Passes>

Noting remarks in Wikipedia, then searching
the text, extremely few references to female
humanoids appear. The three young scientists
have no mothers and no fiancées, and aspire to
head out in a "flying bachelor apartment"
launched by the workshop foreman, to be free
of feminine contamination.