Quote:
Originally Posted by Rain Man
A variant on the Great Filter could be that there are non-zero odds of getting wiped out by some flyby object, so maybe if a civilization is around long enough the odds are high that it'll get wiped out before it can settle other planets.
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Rogue planets are cool to think about.
After a lot of study and simulations, we are now pretty sure that our solar system probably had about 20 or so planets, but during the early chaotic phase where things were colliding and sharing orbits, most of them got flung off into the cold depths of space. The 8 that are left were the survivors who cleared their orbits, behaved nicely with one another, and achieved stability with the sun.
There could be just as many rogue, cold, rocky planets out there with no sun as there are planets orbiting suns. Who knows, we may have taken our revenge on whichever planet crashed into us and formed our moon by flinging it away into darkness.