{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "In Star Trek Generations, the bad guys had a substance which could stop the fusion inside a star, making it collapse and produce...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/712908749666385920/", "html": "<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"https://eightyonekilograms.tumblr.com/post/712879342925086720/in-star-trek-generations-the-bad-guys-had-a\" target=\"_blank\">eightyonekilograms</a>:</p><blockquote><p>In Star Trek Generations, the bad guys had a substance which could stop the fusion inside a star, making it collapse and produce a solar-system-obliterating shockwave. This is actually somewhat feasible compared to your average Star Trek science: for various reasons I don&rsquo;t think it could actually exist in the way it does in the movie, but you could conceive of a substance that acted as &ldquo;fusion poison&rdquo;, producing more of itself when it collided with energetic hydrogen but was not itself able to be fused further. Even the bit about the shockwave was really plausible: it&rsquo;s pretty much exactly what happens in an actual core collapse supernova.</p><p>The one really unfeasible part was that it couldn&rsquo;t happen instantaneously like it did in the movie. Even in the core of starts, most hydrogen atom collisions don&rsquo;t result in fusion - they can&rsquo;t overcome the Coulomb barrier. If you introduced a self-replicating fusion poison into the core of the Sun, it would grow only very slowly, at least at first. You could imagine a fusion poison produced almost no notable effects for centuries or millennia, then maybe a one-lifetime period of noticeable effects, then the Sun went out and everyone died.</p><p>Which I actually think would be a better story. Suppose you knew that there was a fusion poison, but not exactly when the Sun would collapse, since astrophysical time scales are immense and imprecise. It&rsquo;s going to be in the next 10,000 years, but beyond that you&rsquo;re not certain. Would people try to escape the Solar System? What would life be look in an era of certain doom but highly-uncertain timing?</p></blockquote>"}