A former Oxford researcher known for futurist takes floated the idea of steering the Milky Way-Andromeda collision like a giant swarm-robotics project, aiming to hold onto most stars while cutting kinetic energy waste and sparing interstellar gas.
@krishnanrohit I am working on the merger. It is a heck of a swarm robotics problem, but I think we can ensure that few stars, no kinetic energy, and little interstellar gas is lost.
In around 5 billion years the milky way will collide with andromeda, whos doing something about this
The comment offers no models, simulations, or timelines, leaving the engineering steps needed to choreograph billions of stars entirely open.
Replies treated the notion as an efficient-resource framing for an event still billions of years away, though no wider academic follow-up has surfaced yet.
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@anderssandberg Waste not want not
@krishnanrohit I am working on the merger. It is a heck of a swarm robotics problem, but I think we can ensure that few stars, no kinetic energy, and little interstellar gas is lost.
@anderssandberg @krishnanrohit Already fixed it. Now gimmie a hard problem. https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/apocalypse-when-hubble-casts-doubt-on-certainty-of-galactic-collision/