Palum
what Suineg set it to
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The Astronomy Thread
- Thread starter Araxen
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Burnem Wizfyre
Log Wizard
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We might already be living in our virtual reality world lol, also the center of the universe shit Aladain, look up what cosmic inflation is and it will put an end to the idea of a center of the universe.
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khorum
Murder Apologist
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They'll prolly devolve into virtual stone-age mutant barbarians long before then.
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Eomer
Trakanon Raider
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Faster than light travel, if it's actually possible, is probably centuries away. Who knows? But traveling at significant fractions of the speed of light with small probes is something that we could achieve today, if someone had a spare ten or hundred billion laying around. By the end of this century we might well be able to build actual colony ships that could get there in decade-long timeframes. So yeah, distance really does matter.
Oh, another unique thing about red dwarves and their planets is that they can burn pretty much indefinitely. Our Sun and others like it have life cycles of around 10 billion years. We're roughly halfway through ours. Red dwarves can continue to burn for pretty much ever. Trillions of years, apparently. That's significant in terms of the implications for the formation of life, as well, given that it took the better part of 4 billion years for complex life to appear on Earth.
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Eomer
Trakanon Raider
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Galaxies and solar systems are mostly empty space. Just because they're merging doesn't mean that stars are slamming in to each other like billiards. It's becoming apparent that galactic evolution involves almost continuous collisions and mergers. The Milky Way has collided and/or merged with probably dozens of smaller, dwarf galaxies. We're still here.
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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A galatic merge usually entails three things:
1) Orbital instabilities that will chuck a tiny percentage ( < 0,x%) of the stars out of their original galaxies into the intergalactic void. The rest of the stars may get shuffled around, but they're still in.
2) Gas clouds get slammed by incoming gas clouds, collapse in greater numbers, and you get a massive burst of star formation (usually very active ones that don't last long)
3) A merge of the central black holes, which tends to occur when collision and merge is complete, and which will probably send massive burst(s) of cosmic rays that sterilize the inner regions of the galaxy but is survivable beyond a certain range (due to good ole' inverse square law).
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Tripamang
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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When people bring up the topic of us living in a simulation it always makes me think about quantum mechanics. Using probabilities and never having to determine a position until it was necessary are great ways from a computer science perspective to save on computing resources.
I doubt that we are, and we're probably just some universal fluke that managed to survive through the hostile conditions of the early galaxy.
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Quantization is fixed-decimal calculations and Eisenberg Incertainty is allocating the N bits the spec allowed you to use per particle!
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khorum
Murder Apologist
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The formal argument behind that Simulation Hypothesis has been out for over a decade and lots of prominent scientists give Nick Bostrom's original paper a lot of credence. Folks like Neill DeGrasse Tyson and Steven Hawking.
A few years ago a team at the University of Washington came up with a methodology to test if we lived in a computer simulation by looking for observable artifacts in subatomic quantum chromodynamics. Basically there are constraints related to simulating the physical universe using any system with finite resources. Seems legit:
arxiv summary said:
I don't get all that but it made me hard.
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Cad
scientia potentia est
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I wasn't really thinking about FTL travel, just relativistic travel with time dilation. For colony ships the getting up to speed and slowing down parts will take some time, but the travel time will be shortened. I guess it always matters how far away they are, but it matters less when you can speed up time on the way there.
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Tripamang
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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Hah I feel like I should get this, I haven't really done any rendering work
Or this is a straight up math reference that's over my head hahI love the concept of it on the surface, but there is just so much stuff we can't explain that going down the simulation route almost seems like the search for god. Hell Beryllium decaying oddly might point to the existence of a dark photon that's a carrier for an unknown force, which could lead to an entire tree of dark particles and forces we were completely unaware of. Though I must admit that a dark form of matter that doesn't interact easily with the observable universe would be an excellent way to observe it without us noticing or interfering!
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Dandain
Trakanon Raider
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So, I'm fortunate to have had access to the dark sky since I was a child. While your natural eyes do not see near the density of stars that the timelapse provides, there is an indescribable amount that appear in a dark sky area when the Moon is new. Additionally, the brightness of the full Moon is astounding in a dark sky location as well. Highly recommend making plans to experience the sky like it really is, vs how it merely appears while exiting in the daily grind. Plan around the moon phases.
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Dandain
Trakanon Raider
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The first full instrument flyby happened and was successful, no images so far except this one leading into the approach.
NASA's Juno Successfully Completes Jupiter Flyby
NASA's Juno Successfully Completes Jupiter Flyby
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Dandain
Trakanon Raider
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This article is from the palereddot.org, which is the planet hunting operation that discovered the existence of proxima b. It breaks down what possibilities for proxima b we can currently imagine given current knowledge. Its clearly a bit on the optimistic side, but that doesn't detract from the content. I think a lot of folks wouldn't mind this read.
Opportunities and Obstacles for Life on Proxima b
Opportunities and Obstacles for Life on Proxima b
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spronk
FPS noob
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Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Surprised there aren't more posts about it. Seen a shit load of articles about it on my Facebook.
Not that it matters too much, as 95 light years is fucking far. So unless this is a super advanced alien civilization that is capable of traveling that fast, they're probably all extinct. That's also assuming it's actually a signal and not some other anomaly. Cool shit either way though!
Not that it matters too much, as 95 light years is fucking far. So unless this is a super advanced alien civilization that is capable of traveling that fast, they're probably all extinct. That's also assuming it's actually a signal and not some other anomaly. Cool shit either way though!
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ShakyJake
<Donor>
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What? That's not far at all. That means it took 95 years for that signal to reach Earth. If "they" are there, then they're still there.
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