|
Out of the 250 billion or so stars in the Milky Way, our home galaxy, we have closely looked at somewhere in the thousands with our instruments. That’s far far less than 1% of 1%. Maybe don’t give up yet radmonger.
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2020 16:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 11:36 |
|
|
Captain Monkey posted:Out of the 250 billion or so stars in the Milky Way, our home galaxy, we have closely looked at somewhere in the thousands with our instruments. Not to mention the amount of galaxies out there numbers in the trillions somewhere. So that's a lot of stuff to look at. To say the least. e: Also calling it now the reason andromeda is on collision course with milky way is the aliens want to give us a hug. 
Nurge fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Feb 25, 2020 |
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2020 16:41
|
|
|
Are there any reports or articles out there on whether they've used big data/machine learning for SETI-type purposes? I think it'd be a pretty good use for the technology. EDIT: Also, the potential upside of reasonable theorizing about what a potential future civilization could do is that you could make some falsifiable hypotheses. Bounding our speculation by known physical constraints allows us to make testable predictions, which we could then look for using telescopes. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do because it's something that we can actually execute right now, with our present-day technology. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Feb 25, 2020 |
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2020 21:20
|
|
|
What astronomy really needs is more blockchain Astronomers are pretty avid users of all sorts of data analysis techniques, for way longer than app developers.
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2020 10:50
|
|
|
Kesper North posted:What astronomy really needs is more blockchain 
|
|
#
?
Feb 27, 2020 23:01
|
|
|
Kesper North posted:What astronomy really needs is more blockchain Blockchain is orthogonal to data analysis. In the broadest sense blockchain is good for tracking things without the need for a central authority. Expand on your ideas maybe?
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2020 06:18
|
|
|
WOWEE ZOWEE posted:Blockchain is orthogonal to data analysis. In the broadest sense blockchain is good for tracking things without the need for a central authority. Expand on your ideas maybe?  I was making fun of buzzwords. Dropping the trailing period of a sentence is a common indicator among the Extremely Online that you're being sarcastic.
Kesper North fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Feb 28, 2020 |
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2020 09:12
|
|
|
i drop them all the time because i'm lazy and they're unnecessary, it doesn't mean i'm being sarcastic
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2020 11:23
|
|
|
Heard a depressing argument that the WOW! signal has the profile of the very end of a fast radio burst. Is that true or should I ignore it to continue my sense of wonder?
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2020 14:58
|
|
|
 if true!
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2020 15:07
|
|
|
Antifa Turkeesian posted:Heard a depressing argument that the WOW! signal has the profile of the very end of a fast radio burst. Is that true or should I ignore it to continue my sense of wonder? Fast Radio Bursts themselves are a relatively mysterious phenomenon. So it's kinda just only losing the wonder by giving one mystery a broader classification under another mystery.
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2020 15:12
|
|
|
I mean, fast radio bursts are themselves possibly the products of some late-stage Kardashev-III civilization (but probably not!), so I don't think you need to dim your sense of wonder quite yet.
|
|
#
?
Feb 28, 2020 16:11
|
|
|
yeah frbs are quite interesting in their own right, and still mysterious.
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2020 00:58
|
|
|
Wanna  about IRL Lovecraftian phenomena? Read about The Great Attractor.
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2020 05:55
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:yeah frbs are quite interesting in their own right, and still mysterious. The most interesting ones are the ones that repeat regularly. I think by now we traced back a couple of RFRBs to their source galaxies, but the regions they come from are apparently so different the scientific community has no clue what could be causing them. (It's aliens.)
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2020 13:00
|
|
|
Libluini posted:The most interesting ones are the ones that repeat regularly. I think by now we traced back a couple of RFRBs to their source galaxies, but the regions they come from are apparently so different the scientific community has no clue what could be causing them. (It's aliens.) some of them are probably some kind of weirdly wobbly pulsar or something but it is quite interesting because their characteristics are so varied; definitely a place for SETI to aim at at this point. (while I think interstellar alien civilizations do not exist due to the prohibitive energy requirements and questionable usefulness, I'm way more willing to bank that there are civlizations that dominated their solar system enough for us to be able to notice) dex_sda fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Feb 29, 2020 |
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2020 13:23
|
|
|
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/key-quantum-teleportation/607201/quote:As experimental proposals go, this one certainly doesn’t lack ambition. First, take a black hole. Now make a second black hole that is quantum-entangled with it, which means that anything that happens to one of the black holes will seem to have an effect on the other, regardless of how far apart they are.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 02:17
|
|
|
quote:There’s nothing in the theoretical analysis of these quantum circuits that isn’t fully consistent with standard quantum theory. It's a bunch of string theory nonsense.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 04:41
|
|
|
First, create an artificial black hole...
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 05:32
|
|
|
Since we're talking about spacey poo poo, I thought I should share the news: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/scientific-rebel-freeman-dyson-dies/
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 07:16
|
|
|
ashpanash posted:It's a bunch of string theory nonsense.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 09:47
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:Books on this subject will be quite opaque without a good understanding of the math. Wald's books are good on the subject of 'synthesis' of SR with quantum, and as far as gravity goes, I always recommend Hartle's "Gravity." That one in particular can be read and understood with high school math and physics knowledge, and it will give you a practical mathematical understanding of the subject. Research I've done as a relativist is 90% based on stuff in Hartle so it's a pretty powerful book. Thanks for this recommendation, the book is interesting so far. But I would have to disagree with the bolded statement. Hartle is making some assumptions about the reader's mathematical knowledge that go beyond basic algebra. For example, in section 2.3 he causally claims limit x->0 sin(x)/x = 1 which someone could not possibly understand without L'Hôpital's Rule and therefore knowledge of derivatives. E: Yeah you definitely need a college-level understanding of calculus - line integrals, gradients, partial differential equations, calculus of variations this is gonna be fun America Inc. fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Mar 1, 2020 |
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 11:06
|
|
|
I had basics of calculus in hs because the public education system in my country is good  You're right, it requires some calculus, you cannot avoid it in GR. That said, it's a book suitable for first year students on a subject that's famously so opaque it usually is done in postgrad. Some hurdles are to be expected. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 11:26
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:I had basics of calculus in hs because the public education system in my country is good I did as well. Just word of warning for anyone else.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 11:29
|
|
|
You will probably also need the basics of matrix algebra - we're talking knowing what a matrix is and what operations are, but still. Be happy that book doesn't do the usual approach to learning GR - deriving the loving Lie derivative, then assuming the existence of covariant derivative, and then solving partial differential equations in hilbert spaces with rotations - cause that's like ten times harder lol. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Mar 1, 2020 |
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 11:32
|
|
|
I can live with that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2020 11:40
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:First, create an artificial black hole... quote:This experiment, as you might have guessed, doesn’t require black holes in the usual sense, meaning massive stars that have collapsed by their own gravity to an infinitesimally small volume. The researchers say that it could be done on a lab benchtop using just a few atoms or ions.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2020 06:03
|
|
|
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bw38/a-key-ingredient-for-life-has-been-found-on-an-extraterrestrial-source-scientists-reportquote:Tiny traces of a novel protein called “hemolithin” were detected inside the meteorite Acfer 086, according to a study recently published on the preprint archive arXiv and spotted by Futurism. The find could have big implications for understanding the origins of life on Earth or elsewhere in the universe, though it must be corroborated by other researchers first. I'm just trying to keep you all talking so I have something to read!
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2020 06:07
|
|
|
Great Filter talk in 3...2...
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2020 06:11
|
|
|
Maybe the Great Filter is a spam blocklist. Maybe we're on it because the first deliberate message we sent to the stars was dick pics and a mixtape. Food for thought.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2020 10:42
|
|
|
Kesper North posted:Maybe the Great Filter is a spam blocklist. If aliens are self-important hipsters to begin with, I say we go with the "don't pick up the phone" answer to Fermi
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2020 11:03
|
|
|
Illuminti posted:Also, the US government and military definitely thinks UFOs are real and here to probe us indiscriminately. I mean UFOs are real, there's little doubt about that, at least in my frame of reference. Doesn't mean they're aliens, though as I'm sure someone somewhere knows what each of these things have been. That popular mechanics article takes itself so seriously, but then you read how this program was started by someone who saw something floating in a room out of the corner of his eye that nobody else could see at the ranch of an eccentric billionaire that started researching cryptids before getting into space stuff. Okay, right. mediaphage fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Mar 3, 2020 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2020 01:52
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:I'm way more willing to bank that there are civlizations that dominated their solar system enough for us to be able to notice) This gave me an interesting thought. If Mars was habitable, like walk off the ship and breath the air and temp is fine, even if it had no life how much further do you think our space program would be today? If we had an entire extra planet we could live on with the only obstacle being getting there I think the space program would have only continued to ramp up after the moon landing. It would truly be the equivalent of colonization of the new world in a way that current mars colonization proposals are not. It's not inconceivable for a solar system to have two habitable planets and that means a doubling of the chance for life to come about. I imagine any intelligent life that found itself with an extra habitable planet would have a much greater incentive to fully develop their solar system because once you've got to the point where you can travel and colonize the other one doing all the other stuff like astroid mining etc becomes a lot easier.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2020 17:45
|
|
|
I think the space race would have kept going just so they could have bases there, places to maybe setup a reserve government in case the cold war destroyed everything. Back to FTL chat for a minute; is the issue ultimately the end result of any kind of FTL, doesn't matter what, could be slipspace, hyperdrive, could be Outside-Inside teleportation like from the Ender novels, wormholes, warp drive etc. At the end of the day if you go from Point A, and then end up say, at Point B 5 LY away; you could hypothetically turn a telescope towards point A and see yourself before you've left?
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2020 18:07
|
|
|
D-Pad posted:This gave me an interesting thought. If Mars was habitable, like walk off the ship and breath the air and temp is fine, even if it had no life how much further do you think our space program would be today? If we had an entire extra planet we could live on with the only obstacle being getting there I think the space program would have only continued to ramp up after the moon landing. way way way farther for sure, and for interplanetary travel once you're in orbit you're halfway anywhere because of how physics work. that said I doubt the second planet wouldn't have life, I think a big asteroid collision would carry enough life on it to seed the other world if conditions were close enough. who could say
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2020 18:51
|
|
|
The Saturn V had enough throw weight to probably get to Mars with enough equipment if you were willing to go the slow way. A lot of the issues with Mars planning stem from people wanting to gun for the 90 day trip which necessitates burning propellant to slow down for reentry which is a significant chunk of your energy budget. The 180 day trip, which can be done in fairly decent comfort for a small crew, especially today. Is slow enough that Mars's atmosphere can do the work for you. If Mars could support life than it would also have a thicker atmosphere which makes reentry easier which probably changes a lot of the math.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2020 19:04
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:The Saturn V had enough throw weight to probably get to Mars with enough equipment if you were willing to go the slow way. A lot of the issues with Mars planning stem from people wanting to gun for the 90 day trip which necessitates burning propellant to slow down for reentry which is a significant chunk of your energy budget. Not as much as you think but it does help. (the atmosphere already there is enough for a good aerobrake in some stages)  Now, because of the fact you need more mass to carry more fuel 'just' 2 extra km/s on top of the 12km/s is a bunch, but it's doable. There's just no point to do something so dangerous and difficult when there's nothing there. If it were habitable, though... dex_sda fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Mar 6, 2020 |
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2020 19:13
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:that said I doubt the second planet wouldn't have life, I think a big asteroid collision would carry enough life on it to seed the other world if conditions were close enough. who could say Also isn’t O2 highly reactive and only in our atmosphere in useful quantities because of life?
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2020 20:15
|
|
|
A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Also isn’t O2 highly reactive and only in our atmosphere in useful quantities because of life? it is but anaerobic multicellular organisms exist even here, they just aren't common. you presumably could end up with a much more complicated alien lifeform that doesn't need O2 but yea we'd need life on mars for the atmo to be breathable for us
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2020 20:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 11:36 |
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Back to FTL chat for a minute; is the issue ultimately the end result of any kind of FTL, doesn't matter what, could be slipspace, hyperdrive, could be Outside-Inside teleportation like from the Ender novels, wormholes, warp drive etc. At the end of the day if you go from Point A, and then end up say, at Point B 5 LY away; you could hypothetically turn a telescope towards point A and see yourself before you've left? There's definitely a consistency issue with regards to FTL and it being time travel, and this can create paradoxes. There is no understanding of how the universe would cope with these sorts of paradoxes, especially since, by all known observations, causality in the universe remains consistent and the bedrock of our understanding of physics. But that's not the only issue with FTL. The less sexy, but I think more important and relevant issue is that FTL simply can't happen, mechanically, in our universe. We live in a M4 metric, and there's only certain ways that translations can be made in such a metric, and an FTL translation is not allowed. You can look at it this way - every single way you can conceive of that might allow some sort of FTL traversal through spacetime is countered by some sort of all-seeing, all-powerful conspiracy that, in one way or another, prevents you from actually achieving FTL. What kind of conspiracy is this? Well, it's a complete one. And, as Henri Poincare pointed out, a complete conspiracy is in fact a law of nature. Even if I were being super open to even the craziest of possibilities, there still would be a steadfast rule that cannot be broken: travel through spacetime at speeds faster than c is impossible. This raises the question, what about doing something that doesn't involve travelling through spacetime? Well, that's a weird concept, isn't it? At what point does the concept of travel stop making sense?
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2020 20:40
|
|