Charlie Stross <charlie@antipope.org> writes:
> Maybe the best bet is to either (a) try and pre-detonate the risky
Hmm, how to do that? Dump some kind of moderator material into the
core? Amplify some of the acoustic modes so that a pressure wave
destabilizes the core?
> cases before your own star gets closer than, say, 30 parsecs,
Maybe dropping one or more small black holes into an orbit through the core region might do the trick. It should cause some mixing beside the local heating, parhaps delaying the collapse a while as there was other stuff to burn.
> or (b) take
> a leaf out of a Larry Niven book (A World out of Time) and when your star
> gets a bit too close to the galactic core, crank up that old self-propelled
> gas giant and go find yourself a new G-type dwarf to orbit.
Could work, but the problem might be handling the relative differences in speed between an incoming and an outgoing star in an eccentric orbit - a deltavee on the order of a few tens of km/s for a gas giant is rather heavy. And doing wild things like stellar atmospheric braking while carrying around a terrestrial planet is not adviced, it might break.
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