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Deuce posted:Why are black holes good for something other than death having one close* by would be an amazingly useful thing to study. * at least 200AU away please
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Sep 30, 2019 00:31
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Deuce posted:Why are black holes good for something other than death Well they convert mattet to energy in a consistent manner They are grest to build next to because of that The blackhole epoch is about 10^1200 years away and the star epoch is much closer Also smaller blackholes are more energy efficient than larger ones and can last an insanely long time unfed. 100 gigatons of energy output for 35kg of matter fed. Its the most renewable energy in the UNIVERSE!
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Sep 30, 2019 01:07
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I suddenly have an idea for a sci-fi story about a post-apocalyptic society that fled from the red giant sun, huddled in a ringworld around a tiny black hole in the oort cloud, and it's depressing as hell and I love it.
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Sep 30, 2019 01:43
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I need a goon approved Space exploration/ investigation style video or program. Nothing like the garbage on the History channel or Netflix, that just seems like whitewashed propaganda
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Oct 10, 2019 00:20
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Looks like cattle mutilation is back on the menu!A professional cow toucher posted:Coming upon one of the dead bulls is an eerie scene. The forest is hot and still, apart from a raven's repeating caw. The bull looks like a giant, deflated plush toy. It smells. Weirdly, there are no signs of buzzards, coyotes or other scavengers. His red coat is as shiny as if he were going to the fair, but he's bloodless and his tongue and genitals have been surgically cut out. Jenkins posted:"A lot of people lean toward the aliens," Jenkins says. "One caller had told us to look for basically a depression under the carcass. 'Cause he said that the alien ships will kinda beam the cow up and do whatever they are going to do with it. Then they just drop them from a great height." Traumatized son of professional cow toucher posted:Back in the 1980s, one of Terry Anderson's mother cows was mysteriously killed overnight. Standing at his ranch near Pendleton, Ore., Anderson points to the exact spot where he found her on top of a mountain. What actually kills these animals, and perhaps the lack of blood, are pretty much the only actual anomalies in cattle mutilation cases usually. The theories on where the blood goes include it pooling and decomposing at the lowest point of the body out of sight, or being decomposed rapidly in strong sunlight, or insects prioritizing consuming the blood over the animal's flesh. In spite of what the first cow toucher says, a dead cow missing its tongue and dick with no footprints around it is actually pretty good evidence for a buzzard. Scavengers aren't going to bother chewing on rawhide; they're going for the softest parts of the body which strangely are always the ones missing in these cases. The Wikipedia article on cattle mutilation is a pretty fun read if you want to know more about the weird things surrounding dead cows. Such as; Wikipedia posted:The absence of tracks or footprints around the site of the mutilated carcass is often considered a hallmark of cattle mutilation.[citation needed] However, in some cases, strange marks or imprints near the site have been found. In the famous "Snippy" case, there was an absolute absence of tracks in a 100 ft (30 m) radius of the carcass (even the horse's own tracks disappeared within 100 ft (30 m) of the body.) But within this radius, several small holes were found seemingly "punched" in the ground and two bushes were absolutely flattened.[14] In Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, June 1976, a "trail of suction cup-like impressions" was found leading from a mutilated three-year-old cow. The indentations were in a tripod form, 4 inches (10 cm) in diameter, 28 inches (70 cm) apart, and disappeared 500 feet (150 m) from the dead cow. Similar incidents were reported in the area in 1978.[15][16] Well that's a lot loving weirder and more specific than the cow's butthole being gone. LtStorm fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 02:21
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Yeah but a buzzard rips and tears and they specifically said it looked like a clean surgical cut.
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Oct 10, 2019 04:21
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D-Pad posted:Yeah but a buzzard rips and tears and they specifically said it looked like a clean surgical cut. Rips and tears within their strength, which means they presumably tear all the soft tissue away from the tougher hide. I'd take a wild guess the "clean" and "surgical" cuts are laymen looking at a cut that isn't ragged and declaring it was done by some kind of sharp object like a knife or, say, a beak. Though even more likely the cuts in the carcass were created by the corpse bloating and the hypothetical buzzard just stuck its head through to eat the organs it can reach. The research on that part from Wikipedia; Wikipedia posted:Surgical incisions in the skin are explained as: It's interesting someone tested actual surgical cuts vs. non-surgical cuts and how they change decomposition, but there's no elaboration on Wikipedia. loving great. I'll try to pull the citation from Sci-Hub and see if it explains that in more detail.
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Oct 10, 2019 05:39
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D-Pad posted:Yeah but a buzzard rips and tears and they specifically said it looked like a clean surgical cut. this isn’t a knock on the witnesses or you, but how closely were they able to look? Buzzards are far from the only corpse scavenger around, and smaller scavengers take smaller bites e: the post above this makes a similar argument but substantially better
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Oct 10, 2019 05:44
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Bear in mind those "investigations" are done by fuckwits.
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Oct 10, 2019 09:16
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it's not birds, it's blowfly maggots.
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Oct 10, 2019 12:30
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These "investigations" are always so absurd. Dead cows and dirt marks do not add up to alien abductions. Besides which, people have been performing this sort of urban storytelling for 60 years, find a new plot.
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Oct 10, 2019 12:36
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It's kind of interesting, in retrospect, how many fringe paranormal phenomena end up just being totally normal, day to day phenomena that only look weird to modern humans because we've distanced ourselves from the natural world. Spontaneous Human Combustion just turns out to just be regular human combustion; that's what it looks like when someone accidentally sets themselves on fire. You can map the origin and eventual obsolescense of claims of spontaneous human combustion to the exact brief period of time a few decades after the safety lamp became standard in modern British homes (and thus coroners lost institutional knowledge of accidental human burnings) and the proliferation of the electric light bulb. There was a time when everyone knew what it looked like when someone burned alive, and then that time passed. Cattle mutilations are just slightly unusual looking regular animal carcasses. Chupacabra are just wild dogs with mange.
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Oct 11, 2019 02:54
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On the topic of strange, I found some star jelly one time, and it was really weird. I don't think we've even got a universally accepted theory for it's formation even (I think that it's probably multiple phenomenon that get grouped together). Some people just have a knee jerk unknown=alien (or ghosts or monster, etc) reaction when there's no conclusive explaination, that I think might be due to a human need to always have an explanation, even if it's probably wrong.
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Oct 11, 2019 07:50
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Yeah so I do believe cattle mutilations are probably a natural phenomena we don't understand, but I don't buy the theory it's lost knowledge because we aren't close to nature any more. These cattle aren't being found by city folk they are being found by the ranchers themselves and I can tell you those guys have just as much experience with cattle deaths and corpses as people did hundreds of years ago. More in fact. I grew up on a farm and animal corpses of all kinds were an extremely common thing. The difference in knowledge of nature between myself and my friends from the city is immense sure, but the people whose day to day job is ranching have a vast amount of knowledge. Whenever one of our major animals died and we couldn't immediately tell why we called the vet out to do an autopsy on the spot. So yeah it is probably a natural thing, but it is definitely way outside the norm with a lot of characteristics that are not easily explained.
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Oct 12, 2019 19:28
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It's probably just carnivores and scavengers. Can you imagine it? Your fantastic Von Neumann probe has just spent the past million years traveling and finding a life-bearing world, and the first thing it does, after spending unbelievable amounts of time and energy traveling through the void of interstellar space, is waste a huge amount of reaction mass on landing, killing, and leaving behind some corpses of a large grazing life form? I mean, yes yes, we cannot ascribe human values onto alien minds, but just think about what a vast expense is made for such a trivial sampling.
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Oct 12, 2019 23:06
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It’s a bit morbid but I see no reason why the explanation should be different from crop circles: people doing just to gently caress with other people. At any rate “we don’t know” is not a reasonable argument for aliens. It’s as a valid to say mole people or the Illuminati did it.
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Oct 13, 2019 03:21
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Owling Howl posted:It’s a bit morbid but I see no reason why the explanation should be different from crop circles: people doing just to gently caress with other people. At any rate “we don’t know” is not a reasonable argument for aliens. It’s as a valid to say mole people or the Illuminati did it. I don't think anyone in this thread is saying it is aliens. I don't believe it is, but I lean more towards some kind of natural phenomenon and not a human as you are suggesting here. Doing what is described in these cases would be several orders of magnitude more difficult than strapping some 2x4s to your feet and making a crop circle. First, you have to approach a 1200lb animal in the dark at night and get close enough to inject it with something immediately lethal that also won't show up on a toxicology report (they actually have done extensive autopsies on some of these cases). If you've ever tried doing something like this to a cow not in a chute you'd know it's hard enough in daytime. Second, the lack of any blood whatsoever would require some pretty serious skills and even equipment. Some of these animals are almost completely drained of blood, not just a lack of blood around the wounds. Third, and this would probably be the easiest part, you've got to remove the genitals and other parts in a surgical manner. You'd also think with these cases having spanned decades at some point someone would have been caught in the act. None of this is to say it can't be done. Just about anybody could do it given an appropriate amount of planning and preparation, but goddamn it would be a ton of effort to pull off. Also, in some of these cases there are multiple cows it all happens to in one night which would be even harder. I think it has to be some kind of unexplained phenomenon. Maybe the cow dying of some natural cause then some weird predator behavior or something like that. Who the gently caress knows? I know it isn't aliens and I doubt it is humans but that is about it. Edit: Actually, maybe it is a secret society of veterinarians and this is the requirement for initiation. D-Pad fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Oct 13, 2019 |
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Oct 13, 2019 07:03
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What if the phenomenon everyone thought was aliens was actually some kind of cult ritual all this time?
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Oct 13, 2019 15:55
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D-Pad posted:I don't think anyone in this thread is saying it is aliens. I don't believe it is, but I lean more towards some kind of natural phenomenon and not a human as you are suggesting here. Doing what is described in these cases would be several orders of magnitude more difficult than strapping some 2x4s to your feet and making a crop circle. There's nothing particularly unusual going on. I studied animal decomposition, and the "scalpel-like cuts", are actually exactly what you expect when a large mammal bloats after the skin dries. The skin splits, and it looks exactly like it's been cut. Blood drains, rots, and is eaten. It's long gone very fast. What's left is exactly what's described as a "cattle mutilation". This path of decomposition is an uncommon phenomenon, since a cow is a valuable animal that you shouldn't be losing track of, but it's not exactly rare. All the other stuff, like the tripod suction cup tracks, that's just people making stuff up. Journalist are extremely happy to take quotes from people with tenuous grips on reality, and very happy to add a few details of their own under "journalist license". Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Oct 13, 2019 |
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Oct 13, 2019 17:26
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Bug Squash posted:There's nothing particularly unusual going on. I studied animal decomposition, and the "scalpel-like cuts", are actually exactly what you expect when a large mammal bloats after the skin dries. The skin splits, and it looks exactly like it's been cut. Blood drains, rots, and is eaten. It's long gone very fast. What's left is exactly what's described as a "cattle mutilation". This path of decomposition is an uncommon phenomenon, since a cow is a valuable animal that you shouldn't be losing track of, but it's not exactly rare. I don't disagree with any of this, but a lot of these cases they are actually discovered the next morning and that isn't enough time for those processes to happen. I am sure plenty of them are like you said, but in a lot of these cases it's discovered the next day and by an experienced rancher who knows the difference. Anyway, I feel like I am arguing with all of you and I am not, just pointing out that for some of these the more obvious explanations don't make sense. It's gotta be something weird and rare (but not aliens).
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Oct 13, 2019 22:18
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Axetrain posted:Hi I'm the lifeform that evolved up on a loving neutron star. I'm 2 millimeters tall, made entirely out of neutrons somehow and my body temperature is roughly a million degrees kelvin AMA. I just want to say that weeks later whenever I see this thread in my control panel I think of this post and smirk.
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Oct 13, 2019 22:29
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D-Pad posted:I don't disagree with any of this, but a lot of these cases they are actually discovered the next morning and that isn't enough time for those processes to happen. I am sure plenty of them are like you said, but in a lot of these cases it's discovered the next day and by an experienced rancher who knows the difference. Anyway, I feel like I am arguing with all of you and I am not, just pointing out that for some of these the more obvious explanations don't make sense. It's gotta be something weird and rare (but not aliens). I appreciate that you're not looking for an argument, but I've got an important point to make wrt all this: people make stuff up. Maybe not deliberately, but they do. Eye witness testimony doesn't mean poo poo. Maybe the rancher conflated two different cows, maybe they've got an insurance fraud going on, maybe they're prone to misremembering, and maybe they're just a drunk idiot. You don't need to spend time explaining weird stuff from newspapers about this, UFOs angels and ghosts, because chances are it never happened.
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Oct 13, 2019 22:42
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https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30256/scientist-behind-the-navys-ufo-patents-has-now-filed-one-for-a-compact-fusion-reactorquote:Scientist Behind The Navy's "UFO Patents" Has Now Filed One For A Compact Fusion Reactor quote:The War Zone has been reporting on a set of bizarre patents assigned to the U.S. Navy that describe radical new technologies that could absolutely revolutionize the aerospace field, and frankly, the very way we live our lives. These include high-energy electromagnetic fields used to create force fields and outlandish new methods of aerospace propulsion and vehicle design that basically read as UFO-like technology. You can learn all about these patents, their viability, and the issues surrounding them in these exclusive features of ours. Now, the same mysterious Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division engineer behind those patents has produced another patent—one for a compact fusion reactor that could pump out absolutely incredible amounts of power in a small space—maybe even in a craft. further reading https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29232/navys-advanced-aerospace-tech-boss-claims-key-ufo-patent-is-operable quote:Navy's Advanced Aerospace Tech Boss Claims Key 'UFO' Patent Is Operable quote:We have several active Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Navy to pursue more information related to the research that led to these patents. Really seems like there's been a marked uptick in the Navy talking about UFOs recently. Wonder if it's just random noise or something else. edit: On further reading, probably just a load of bollocks. Illuminti fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Oct 14, 2019 |
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Oct 14, 2019 03:47
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I'm guessing any patents sent in by that salvatore guy have to be assigned partly to the navy in some way because of his employment contract. But every stoner musing he has doesn't necessarily go up the chain of command before he mails it out.
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Oct 14, 2019 06:15
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Phyzzle posted:I'm guessing any patents sent in by that salvatore guy have to be assigned partly to the navy in some way because of his employment contract. But every stoner musing he has doesn't necessarily go up the chain of command before he mails it out. You would think, but if you go back and read the previous articles about it the first round of patents was initially rejected as magic bullshit and a higher up in the Navy stepped in and got it approved by claiming "no it's totally for real guys" It doesn't make it any less bullshit but it is interesting the brass are involved in pushing this through at least at some level.
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Oct 14, 2019 15:54
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I am in no way surprised that the armed forces is full of charlatans, grifters, and true believers.
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Oct 14, 2019 16:30
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What was the name of that "stardrive" for want of a better word that everyone got very excited about a few years ago. It was like a metal rhomboid that produced tiny amounts of thrust. Was going to get us to mars but turned out to be the usual coldfusionesque pseudoscience..... edit: The EmDrive! I eventually found it on google by searching for star drive pseudoscience! Apparently some seemingly actual scientists are still working with it https://www.wired.com/story/a-mythical-form-of-space-propulsion-finally-gets-a-real-test/ Illuminti fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Oct 15, 2019 |
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Oct 15, 2019 00:16
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Illuminti posted:What was the name of that "stardrive" for want of a better word that everyone got very excited about a few years ago. It was like a metal rhomboid that produced tiny amounts of thrust. Was going to get us to mars but turned out to be the usual coldfusionesque pseudoscience..... The EM drive. Supposedly some sort of microwave reflection chamber that was completely bunk.
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Oct 15, 2019 00:20
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There should be a scifi show about humans disguising as aliens, visting other humans and puppeting them by running around as giant octopuses demanding surrender.
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Oct 15, 2019 02:34
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Illuminti posted:edit: I was interested a while ago when they announced it, but as soon as they started babbling about quantum foam or some other psudo science poo poo, I backed away slowly.
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Oct 15, 2019 05:52
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GodDamnArtist posted:Those scientists are wackadoodles. They keep looking for some tiny TINY thrust measured in micro newtons when dozens of other possible, and realistic, factors could better explain the measured 'force'. It does seem like a colossal waste of time
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Oct 15, 2019 08:11
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:There should be a scifi show about humans disguising as aliens, visting other humans and puppeting them by running around as giant octopuses demanding surrender. That's a Rick and Morty episode.
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Oct 15, 2019 12:39
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This is really interesting. I think the guy makes a strong case: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/im-convinced-we-found-evidence-of-life-on-mars-in-the-1970s/
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Oct 15, 2019 17:30
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D-Pad posted:This is really interesting. I think the guy makes a strong case: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/im-convinced-we-found-evidence-of-life-on-mars-in-the-1970s/ what's this about Martian will o the wisps, is there footage of that available? bizarre. that meteorite they found in the 90s was never totally ruled out as containing fossilized microbial Martian life yeah?
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Oct 15, 2019 17:38
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my bony fealty posted:what's this about Martian will o the wisps, is there footage of that available? bizarre. Well, they were vastly smaller than anything that's alive today (and there are some species with massive size reduction evolutionary pressures on them), and there's not much reason to think they ever were alive. We can't rule it out, and while I think it's pretty likely there are microbial fossils on Mars, I would be extraordinarily surprised if these were examples of them.
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Oct 15, 2019 18:07
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I remember having a fermi paradox argument at work, but how true is it that we currently apparently still don't understand how dead matter/chemistry that gets assembled into self replicating patterns that are stable but able to change and evolve?
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Oct 17, 2019 03:16
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My understanding is that we have a decent conception of abiogenisis to self replicating RNA to DNA, so long as you don't look to closesly at the details. As in, we know it can happen because it did, and we think we can give a pretty good rundown of how it happened, but there is still a poo poo ton of original research to do to prove all the steps. Also, given the nature of what we are talking about here and the distance between then and mow, we'll never likely know for sure, just have ever more increasingly educated guesses. Dameius fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Oct 17, 2019 |
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Oct 17, 2019 05:04
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Raenir Salazar posted:I remember having a fermi paradox argument at work, but how true is it that we currently apparently still don't understand how dead matter/chemistry that gets assembled into self replicating patterns that are stable but able to change and evolve? Dameius posted:My understanding is that we have a decent conception of abiogenisis to self replicating RNA to DNA, so long as you don't look to closesly at the details. As in, we know it can happen because it did, and we think we can give a pretty good rundown of how it happened, but there is still a poo poo ton of original research to do to prove all the steps. Yeah, we basically "know" how non-living matter becomes living matter. We've found evidence of what early life was like, we've proven a bunch of theories about how individual components of life arose, and we've tested lots of working parts. Putting that all together to go from non-living matter to living matter in a laboratory is an unfathomably complex experiment still, though. Which, hypothetically, if we replicated what happened on Earth it would take as long as it actually did which was somewhere between an indeterminately small time and almost a billion years. So creating life in a laboratory as it naturally arose probably will take more time than modern humans have existed as a species. Until we get to that point we hijack cellular machinery to make "artificial" organisms and assemble simple artificial cells using chemistry. Even the simplest actual cell is a ridiculously complex set of mechanisms and interlocking parts. Incidentally viruses and how they function are important to study for abiogenesis since they're only quasi-living and very simple because of that. There's a bunch of new fields of chemistry that are exploring the gritty details of how life works, arose, and perpetuates itself. The ones I'm familiar with are: Supramolecular Chemistry (my background  ) which is heavily interested in self-assembly, molecular architecture, and host-guest chemistry which are all very important to biological systems. And, even more new, is Systems Chemistry which focuses on populations of molecules and what they do rather than the idealized chemical reactions aimed at efficiency and consistency. That dovetails it easily into abiogenesis. Catalysts aren't a new field of chemistry but are supremely important to understanding abiogenesis as enzymes were a crucial early development for life. And the exact details of how enzymes do what they do remains an unsolved problem in chemistry, which is frustrating.Oh, here's a navigable metabolic pathway map to give an idea of the complexity of life I'm talking about. This is just the ~550 reactions that cells use to turn energy sources into actual energy to be used. Not all the other things your cells do other than power themselves.
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Oct 17, 2019 05:54
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We recently gene spliced photo synthesis to be more efficient because the way plants evolved to do it was extra energy intensive. Have chemsists deconstructing the reactions down at the level you are working with come across anything else like that? Or just any other cool poo poo you've seen/done/learned in field?
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Oct 17, 2019 06:59
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This begs the question then, do we know enough to know some idea of the odds? My coworker insisted he read about how some scientist out there insisted that the odds were so small, that even if we factor in we already exist, that the odds are so small that even over billions of years and billions of worlds that the chance of it even happening once is basically nigh impossible. How valid is that and are you perhaps familiar with which scientist made that claim? I hear it was some dude who was originally a physicist who switched to biochemistry or something.
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Oct 17, 2019 16:13
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