I think I can defeat my own speculation even better...

What I was first thinking when all this began, was this: Imagine launching a space ship made of "unobtainium" from Earth towards our sun, such that it is intended to come so close it almost grazes the sun's corona. Then it will build up tremendous velocity during its journey and shoot off at an astonishing speed as it rounds the sun.

However, imagining that same space ship as it approaches a rogue star travelling at relativistic velocity does not mean my space ship will accelerate to relativistic velocity as it approaches the star, because I was missing a key ingredient - Time. Acceleration due to gravity involves a constant times T squared, ie: totally depends on how long a body is subjected to the influence of gravity. As my ship approaches that rogue start, the star has passed by in the blink of an eye, and my ship will have, in the end, experienced acceleration due to the star's gravity for only a brief moment - not long enough result in any appreciable acceleration.

As to my second conjecture, there is no doubt that the collision of two stars traveling at tremendous speeds would easily result at least in the formation of a Black Hole, but beyond that, and depending on their mass, who knows what else?

There is no "vendor lock-in" with Google products.

As far as capture goes, I think it depends how close to the star you come. Remember, a start has a massive gravity, independent of its speed. Its mass is also increased in some proportion to its velocity. Not sure how much that would contribute to its gravity.

"Two stars moving 0.3c in opposite directions relative to us are going to collide at about 0.6C. Again, we're not getting major relativistic effects" The products of the collision do not depend on "relativistic effects", rather, they depend on temperate/energy produced by the collision. I am sure that temperature would be high enough to produce many exotic particles.

In short, it wouldn't dismiss either of my conjectures, except to say my stated results of a collision are fanciful, but it think it would be far more dramatic than a normal collision. Think of all the energy that would be released!.

I think it would be cool to try that. Sounds like an ideal application of the GPU.

Never tried that.

My own research... A Neural Network Exhibits Social Behaviour

Seems Intel was involved with it...

http://venturebeat.com/2014/12...

Seriously, what if one of these stars smashed into another similar one headed right for it at relativistic speed? It would be like the Large Hadron Collider at astronomical scale. Maybe it would create a star made of Higg's Bosons or who knows what. Maybe the resulting collision would create a Black Hole so dense it would suck in the entire Universe.

Then I had another, totally different thought. Suppose one of these happened to be passing by... You could send a space ship at normal velocity up to meet it in such a way it gets captured by the gravity of the star and gets pulled along with it. Of course, you might experience some pretty wicked acceleration that could leave you a puddle of red goo on the deck, but that's the chance you might take.. Alternatively, get it to fling you in whatever direction you want to go via the slingshot effect. You should be able to pick up a relativistic velocity from it for free. Maybe that was what the author meant when he suggest it could seed life in other galaxies.

I didn't like it either. It left me flat, like I had wasted my time watching it. It somehow reminded me of Contact, and after reading the comments, I now understand there was some cross-fertilization from people involved in that. I didn't like the way Contact turned out either. Been a SciFi fan all my life. We had two great topics with these films - first contact, and time travel. I have read many great stories that employed these themes, but the movies had to turn them into some kind of supernatural, quasi-religious experience - something like Ghost, I suppose. I was very disappointed in these movies.

I kept thinking about all those corn stalks they were trampling - such a waste.

"Gravity waves travel faster than light." Interesting - hadn't heard of that. If they do, it must be by cheating - warping SpaceTime, to do it. As far as entangled particles communicating with each other faster than the speed of light goes, we cannot take advantage of that phenomenon, so we are safe from violating Causality.

I visited your fair state back early in the year. Drove from the Grand Canyon to Flagstaff then down the mountains to Phoenix - speed limit: 80 mph, just a-flying down those mountains! Had to keep up or would have gotten run over by trucks and vehicles behind. What a wild ride! Visited Phoenix, where it seems nobody works. Instead they all come down from the mountains to party there, best I could understand. Visited South Mountain and saw the stately Saguaro Cactus standing guard over that sacred mountain. They are so cool! Though you see them in every cowboy movie filmed anywhere, they only grow there in AZ, mainly there on South Mountain on the southern outskirts of Phoenix. After a night partying in the city, next morning took Highway 8 towards Yuma, then down for a brief visit across the border at Mexicali before heading back to California. Will never forget that trip, and hope to return some day. I think I like your state.

btw: You forgot to mention - there is no fucking daylight savings in Arizona.

The story at Ars has a video of an candid interview Kim Dotcom did with the press a couple of days ago... http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

I listened to the whole thing, and found it very interesting. Kim Dotcom gave fairly straight forward responses, and came off for me as an intelligent, not so bad guy. For sure it would be easy for us to envy his wealth, but IMHO he came about it by exploiting loopholes in the law, not by breaking the law.

Instead of pursuing Kim Dotcom to the ends of the earth (Sorry, NZers), why doesn't the US DOJ expend their effort prosecuting the crooks on Wall Street whole defrauded the whole world of a trillion dollars selling those bogus Credit Default Swaps that led up to the crash of 2008? Not one has been prosecuted, nor will they ever be.

I'm sure I'll get flamed for writing this as a driver

I won't flame you, but I would suggest being a taxi driver might motivate you to write a little FUD. Obviously, the existence of Uber is a serious threat to the status quo with taxi drivers. In fact this whole article is about how much owners of these medallions have to lose. Please bare with me a moment while I question something here...

You say...

Uber has succeeded in remaking the cab market and externalizing all equipment costs and liability to the drivers, all while actually even paying them (unbelievably) less than the chicken-scratch cab drivers already make, and all the while pretending they do something different than charge money for a ride somewhere. Many drivers are making 3-4 dollars an hour after vehicle maintenance, depreciation, taxes, water and snacks for passengers, and Uber's 20% and assorted fees.

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If it was as bad as you say, nobody would drive for Uber. Yes, their fare is going to be lower than a typical taxi, and Uber gets their cut, but on the other hand, they don't have to pay a hefty "Medallion Rent". See this paragraph I lifted from a comment by LGW below...

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You do realize many/most taxi drivers are part time, right? The normal system in most places means only the most successful drivers actually own a taxi. The rest rent by car by the calendar day, and pay a hefty sum for that. The result is it's normal to try to stay awake for as much of that 48 hours as possible, as it takes many hours of driving just to cover the fixed daily cost of the taxi, then sleep for a day or two, then repeat. This is not a system geared towards safety!

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Does an Uber driver have to suffer like that? I doubt it.