Sanrith Descartes
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The Astronomy Thread
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Burns
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Weapons need to be economically feasible. No one is going to build something 1000% larger than it need to be for power generation, just to use it as an inferior weapon; especially when you can use that money to make many other weapons. Also, a ginormous geosynchronous orbiting laser is going to be much easier to hit, verses a bunch of sats with kinetic weapons or nukes zipping around the earth, which indecently, are much cheaper.
Oh, you spent 10 trillion+ on that space laser? It would be a shame if our 500 million dollar nuke sats, that we already have pointed at your ginormous space laser, were to destroy it before you could use it, or shortly after you fired it's first shot.
My guess is that even something like a 25 sq. mile space solar array would work more like slowly boiling a tank of water, not a scifi death laser cutting through buildings in less than a second, like it coming from superman's eyes.
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Sanrith Descartes
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Palum
what Suineg set it to
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51/49, the indication of a healthy democratic discourse.
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Sanrith Descartes
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meStevo
I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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'An international team of astronomers ... used Webb to observe NGC 602 and they detected candidates for the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way.'
Webb finds candidates for first young brown dwarfs outside the Milky Way
An international team of astronomers has used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to detect the first rich population of brown dwarf candidates outside the Milky Way in the star cluster NGC 602.
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'An international team of astronomers ... used Webb to observe NGC 602 and they detected candidates for the first young brown dwarfs outside our Milky Way.'
Webb finds candidates for first young brown dwarfs outside the Milky Way
An international team of astronomers has used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to detect the first rich population of brown dwarf candidates outside the Milky Way in the star cluster NGC 602.esawebb.org
Not gonna lie, as soon as she gave the NGC # I looked to see if I had shot it but ......nope my $500 wonder hasn't had the pleasure.
One more very cool bonus of owning a Seestar.
Aaron
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This never ceases to amaze me. Time after time we point a telescope at some random, "empty" part of the sky. Take a long exposure and discover it's filled to the brim with hundreds or thousands of galaxies, each one containing billions of stars. And yet we continue to think that life must only have evolved here.
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Furry
🌭🍔🇺🇦✌️SLAVA UKRAINI!✌️🇺🇦🍔🌭
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I don't know a single reasonable person that believes that life is only on earth. It's all but certain that life isn't only on earth in this solar system, yet alone only earth in the entire universe.
Now, I do think earth has a particular set of situations that make it spectacularly suited for life in a way that is probably quite damn rare in the universe, but when you start tacking a couple dozen 0s onto something and multiply it by quite rare, its still a big ass number.
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Sanrith Descartes
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I always end up at the same place when I ponder other life.
Is there intelligent life out there? Yes.
Are they more advanced than us? Most likely
Space faring? Most likely
Aware we exist? Probably.
Have known about us for at least half a century? Yeah.
And this is where I always end up...
If they are more advanced and have watched us since the 50's, why in the fuck would they allow us to keep advancing to space travel. Aint no way in hell an advanced race allows violent warmongering fucks like us to share space with them. It's a death wish for them eventually. End us now while they can.
Is there intelligent life out there? Yes.
Are they more advanced than us? Most likely
Space faring? Most likely
Aware we exist? Probably.
Have known about us for at least half a century? Yeah.
And this is where I always end up...
If they are more advanced and have watched us since the 50's, why in the fuck would they allow us to keep advancing to space travel. Aint no way in hell an advanced race allows violent warmongering fucks like us to share space with them. It's a death wish for them eventually. End us now while they can.
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Sanrith Descartes
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Not sure why we'd assume this. It's only been since the 1970's that we've been producing signals meaningfully detectable outside our solar system. That's only ~1800 star systems that could conceivably know about us, most of which are hostile to life as we know it, and unless they know some very important physics we don't it's almost impossible for them to have even replied by radio, never mind arrived here physically. Space is very big, long way to the chemist, etc.
I mean, maybe they've been parked in our solar system invisibly all along, but if we're entertaining theories for which there are no evidence almost anything could be true.
Palum
what Suineg set it to
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They probably already did, it just takes a few hundred years for the meteorite swarm to reach the planet.
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Sanrith Descartes
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Burns
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Saying there is other life out there, just due to the sheer number of stars we know exist does not mean that it's intelligent life. Saying there is other intelligent life out there, does not mean it's more advanced than us. Saying there is more advanced life than us, does not mean, and this is the most important bit, that it is close enough to interact with us.
No life outside of the Milky Way has a feasible way, that we know of, to reach us and that's where we start getting into "close to mathematical certainty" of life. When talking about just the Milky Way and eventually Andromeda (if humanity somehow survives) then the chance of life is still rather high (probably), but moving up the complexity line until you get to space fairing gets less and less likely (where the Fermi paradox comes in).
Furthermore we live in the fucking boonies of the Milky Way and our earliest radio transmissions haven't reached out very far (in galactic scale). So an alien race would need to find us first, if they weren't replicator types that decided to occupy every star system in the galaxy.
There is also the theory that galaxies have a habitable zone, just like solar system, where as you get closer to the super massive black hole the star density is too high and mass extinctions come too often to allow advanced life.
People happily fill an information vacuum with whatever bullshit they can come up with. Lack of explanation != aliens.
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Sanrith Descartes
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Furry
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I wouldn’t be surprised at all if humans are the most advanced form of life in this galaxy and earth stands alone as the most habitable planet in the galaxy too, most people don’t understand just how naturally blessed the earth is with unlikely things that support life. The moon to agitate oceans and the rotating core of the earth to protect us from radiation are both extremely unlikely things according to all out knowledge of the universe.
That said, I think quasi habital planets that support life of varying levels of complexity will be extremely common. One barrier to complex society that most people don’t think about is that complex life is probably most likely to evolve on ocean worlds. If you think the barriers of getting to space are bad for humans, think about trying it with the physical and environmental limitations of a dolphin.
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Kiroy
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Little surprised there’s not much more talk about this. It’s a big deal. Satellites randomly exploding in stable orbit is uhh, not really suppose to happen. Implications ect.., spy stuff, targeted by foreign micro sat, self destruct, horrible engineering, debris
very odd