If you were lost - could you really go home ?

[Launch window]

We've seen all the sci fi TV shows and horror films like Aliens, somebody is put into a deep cryogenic freeze and ends up lost. Or Tv like Farscape, Star Trek Voyager, Buck Rodgers, LostinSpace show a story of people who end up in a strange place... The Battlestar Galactica thread also got me thinking.
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php?p=554689#post554689
So let us imagine 100 years in the future we lose a spacecraft in deep freeze or giant space station gets sucked through a wormhole and ends up in another part of the universe.

Now lets say these lost spacecraft or spacestations have some of the geatest scientists, plenty of food & fuel, best radio equipment and telescopes better than Hubble.


Would they really know where home is ?
I say it would be impossible to know where home is
because the perspective of the sky would be totally different and we still know very little about our own Galaxy

So they could never find their way home

[hhEb09'1]

If they were lost in our own galaxy, they should be able to find their way home. That's not what you meant, right?

[Donnie B.]

Reminds me of an old Asimov short story.

A criminal escapes with a great booty by performing a blind hyperspace jump that takes him to a random destination. The cops, of course, cannot follow.

His grand plan is to find his way back to civilization by letting his ship's computer identify the local stars visible after the jump. A confederate has programmed the computer with spectral signatures for all the major stellar landmarks that might be expected to be visible. (The ruthless criminal has, of course, murdered the confederate to protect the secret strategy; he knows nothing of computer programming himself.)

With the Universe's well-known sense of irony, he ends up appearing near a reassuringly bright, identifiable object. But the computer crunches and crunches, without results.

Turns out he's popped out near a recent supernova. The computer will be calculating forever and never figure out where it is...

[frenat]

I remember reading a story where the computer figured out where it was by looking for pulsars. The frequency of each pulsar is different so only two would have to be located to determine a location.

[crosscountry]

on another thread, someone mentioned Pulsars. The problem was that from different perspectives the puslars may not look the same.





if we were in our own galaxy, the best bet is to look for extra-galactic objects i.e. other galaxies. We know pretty well the locations in the sky of those. Also Globular clusters would be helpful.


If we were in another galaxy, far enough away to not see the local group, I suspect we'd be lost. But the same rules apply, triangulate on what you do know.


Galaxies have planes, that's 2-d. all we need is the 3rd dimensional point to find home.