Spacethread Episode 2: Attack of the UFO Guys

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Spacethread Episode 2: Attack of the UFO Guys

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Link to the original Space Thread

Hi! This is the thread to discuss general space and space exploration-related things, as well as adjacent topics. Such topics can include, but are not limited to: JWST news, rover news, future missions to the outer planets, theoretical cosmology, explanations about general or special relativity, exoplanets, speculative biology, the Fermi Paradox, SETI, space settlements, the ethics of space exploration, the Kardashev Scale, UAPs-as-possibly-aliens-but-skeptically, and so on.

While we're definitely more free to speculate about far-future concepts, we aim for at least a "Hard Sci Fi" level of skepticism. Think of it as orbiting around Isaac Arthur-level.

If you crave hard-nosed aerospace industry news and space rocket live streams, let me refer you to the Spaceflight Thread in SAL. If shooting the poo poo about alien visitations, reincarnation, and the Age of Aquarius is more your vibe, the UFO thread in CSPAM is probably your place.

We welcome everyone! I know that the Space Thread has at times been oddly contentious, given the subject, but I am sure that if we go forward with the idea that we shouldn't take things too seriously, take extraordinary claims with a grain of salt, and approach everything with a skeptical but open mind, things will be all right!

_{_{nervous laughter}}

Recommendable Video Channels:

Cool Worlds with Prof. David Kipping

Anton Petrov

Science Fiction and Futurism with Isaac Arthur

Event Horizon with John Michael Godier

JWST appreciation station

If you haven't heard, we deployed the James Webb Space Telescope recently and it's been A M A Z I N G

yeah!!

gently caress yeah!!!

Some random recent interesting space news I found:

This seems bad for near-future space travel...
Brain cavities that swell in space may need at least 3 years to recover

quote:

Spacing out spaceflights may benefit astronauts� brains.

While outside Earth�s atmosphere, fluid-filled chambers in the brains of astronauts tend to adapt to microgravity by expanding. But after a space mission, these structures might take three years to shrink back to normal, researchers report June 8 in Scientific Reports. The finding suggests that astronauts might need at least that much time between flights before their brains are ready to be in space again.

JWST captured Enceladus� plume spraying water nearly 10,000 kilometers into space

Didn't we try and fly a probe through something like this to try and find evidence of organic life recently? What happened with that, I wonder?

quote:

Enceladus� famous plume dwarfs the moon itself.

Geysers on Saturn�s icy moon spew water vapor nearly 10,000 kilometers into space, a distance about 19 times the diameter of Enceladus, researchers report in a paper accepted in Nature Astronomy. If the geysers were on Earth, the plume would touch the edge of our planet�s atmosphere.

NASA�s now-defunct Cassini spacecraft discovered almost two decades ago that Enceladus ejects salty water from a subsurface reservoir (SN: 5/2/06). But the spacecraft�s orbit around Saturn meant it was too close to the moon to see the plume�s true extent.

There has been a lot of UFOs and aliens trending in the news lately because of some whistleblower stuff...

quote:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft
The US has been urged to disclose evidence of UFOs after a whistleblower former intelligence official said the government has possession of �intact and partially intact� alien vehicles.

The former intelligence official David Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency, has alleged that the US has craft of non-human origin.

Information on these vehicles is being illegally withheld from Congress, Grusch told the Debrief. Grusch said when he turned over classified information about the vehicles to Congress he suffered retaliation from government officials. He left the government in April after a 14-year career in US intelligence.

Jonathan Grey, a current US intelligence official at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (Nasic), confirmed the existence of �exotic materials� to the Debrief, adding: �We are not alone.�

DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Jun 11, 2023

# ¿ Jun 10, 2023 23:39

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 16:36

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Reserved space for various stuff possibly in the future.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2023 23:39

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

mediaphage posted:

thanks for the op op

idk if i�d say isaac is hard sci-fi skeptical; while fun, 90% of his videos are sci-fantasy that are just what ifs with no real basis in reality

Depends on which one you watch imo. When he just casually throws a comment out about Boltzmann brains or something I'm kind of a bit like, ok, c'mon, but asteroid mining and space colonies and stuff strikes me as far less farfetched.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2023 00:09

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

A GIANT PARSNIP posted:

Sounds like something a Boltzmann brain would think.

I'll Boltzmann your brain if you don't shut up!!!!

# ¿ Jun 11, 2023 01:06

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Dameius posted:

Good OP. To bypass the Isaac is/is not, I'd redescribe it as speculative science science-fiction or harder on the soft/hard sci-fi scale level would work.

Also just because it'd be a shame to get lost to the last thread, early in the last thread we had a discussion on what silicon based life could maybe look like based on known chemistry that was super cool and fits perfect with the speculative science idea. It can be found starting here.

Good one!

I've read some articles and followed some shorts on youtube that suggest that it might not really be possible to form Silicon-based life, unfortunately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODprZlHeGrQ

Gonna requote this post because it was cool, for :science:

LtStorm posted:

I take issue with your issue. There's no guarantees silicon-based life would be rock anemones or stuck at the bottom of oceans. Well, no more guarantee than it'd be anything because we haven't met it yet. Now I get to talk about what I think about silicon chemistry!

Carbon is super-flexible, you are correct, but silicon is the second most flexible atom next to it (and is literally next to it on the Periodic Table meaning their properties are similar). Silicon is flexible enough to make macromolecules just like carbon, which is possibly the most important thing for it plausibly being a cornerstone of life and why we talk about silicon-based life. Macromolecules are, as the name suggested, large molecules; at their low end a macromolecule contains hundreds of atoms while at the high end it contains thousands of atoms. Small molecules, like the nucleic acids in our bodies (dozens of atoms each), come together due to their chemistry to form macromolecules such as DNA (thousands of atoms). The proteins in our bodies and any polymer we use in our lives are composed of macromolecules.

Making macromolecules requires a flexible atom able to form lots of bonds (lots in this context being four) as a base. Both carbon and silicon can form four bonds with four different atoms; they're both about equally good at that. One important feature of these flexible atoms is how they form long chains. Carbon has no problem forming long chains of itself; if you have a long chain of carbon with only hydrogens in every other available bonding position, you have a hydrocarbon; modifying them can make things important to our biochemistry like fatty acids. The silicon equivalent is a silane, which is hilariously flammable like hydrocarbons, but not nearly as stable. So while silanes, which are highly reactive in general, may be important to the biochemical reactions of a silicon-based life form, it's probably not going to around as a stable molecule. What silicon can do that carbon can't is form silicones. A silicone, as in the polymer we see in our every day lives, is a chain of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms. Silicones are highly stable and flexible with the theoretical ability to modify each silicon in the chain with up to two other atoms. Carbon doesn't form an exact equivalent of silicone--alternating carbon with oxygen in a chain makes an ether functional group which has its own complex chemistry. You can put ether functional groups in a chain but they tend to form a loop instead of a straight chain, which oddly enough is important to how Febreze and other odor eliminating products work.

Another thing you would need for life is a set of functional groups that have a variety of chemical properties they can imbue macromolecules with. For our carbon-based life, most atoms used in our functional groups are near carbon in the Periodic Table: nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur. Other atoms used in our biochemistry are on the left side of the Periodic Table (hydrogen, sodium, magnesium, etc.) or near the center (iron, zinc, manganese, etc). While we don't know exactly what other atoms silicon-based life would use in its functional groups, it's easy enough to speculate it would share a lot of the atoms with us based on what we know about basic chemistry, the chemistry of silicon, and our own biochemistry. We know, for instance, that in our own biochemistry the elements carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur have a complex interlocked chemistry. Silicon does not interact with nitrogen directly, but has chemistry with carbon and sulfur. So functional groups for silicon-based life would have access to nitrogen as a key micronutrient much like we need iodine--or they may not use nitrogen at all. With carbon, we know silicon can form some functional groups and that they have a complex chemistry with each other because of the study of organosilicons. With sulfur, we know silicon can polymerize with it in a way that carbon can not, which would be an important difference in how silicon-based life works. Silicon does not interact with phosphorus much at all under Earth-like conditions, so if we found silicon-based life using phosphorous we'd probably learn something new about that chemistry. Lastly, one thing silicon is hands-down worse at than carbon is the ability to form double and triple bonds. Carbon is very good at both of those things which means they're a big part of the functional groups in our own biochemistry.

So silicon is flexible enough to plausibly build large macromolecules with, and we know from basic research into the chemistry of silicon that it can form functional groups with carbon, oxygen, and sulfur at the least. Once you have functional groups you need a set of molecular building blocks using those functional groups that fit together in a flexible way to build a macromolecule. As that macromolecule gets bigger it will start demonstrating unique properties due how its functional groups interact with each other and with functional groups in other small and macromolecules. In carbon-based life this would be where you building blocks like nucleic acids that are assembled to make a self-replicating macromolecule like DNA and RNA which is able to facilitate the synthesis of other macromolecules like proteins and other structures that make up the cells organisms are composed of.

So from this perspective there's nothing clearly standing in the way of silicon-based life being just as complex as carbon-based life. Silicon has its own bag of tricks to offer but we only poorly understand them because we haven't studied silicon and its ability to form macromolecules (this is something basic research would do, FYI) nearly as much as we've studied carbon and most importantly our own biochemistry. Most of our research into organosilicons is due to polymer research--so how to make different and better plastics (this is something applied research does, FYI).

The bigger hurdles to us imagining silicon-based life, from our perspective as carbon-based life, is what their basic building blocks and fundamental chemical reactions for them would be--which we have to completely guess at. For example, their biochemistry would definitely have several reduction-oxidation reactions somewhere in it (which doesn't have to involve oxygen in spite of the name of the reaction); for us one of those is carbon (solid) and oxygen (gas) forming carbon dioxide (gas). The equivalent for a silicon-based life form would be silicon (solid) and oxygen (gas) forming silicon dioxide (solid). So how they use that reaction would have to be completely different than how our form of life uses the equivalent. And of course because silicon reacts well with carbon it may just be that they use the same carbon and oxygen redox reaction as us.

When we think about silicon-based life we need to remember it doesn't have to exist at the same conditions as we do. What if they were on a planet halfway between Earth and Venus in conditions? I say this because one idea is that silicon-based life could exist at much hotter temperatures than carbon-based life. Going to a much higher temperature and pressure would mean changes to chemistry that would both make some reactions we benefit from unfavorable and unusual and vice verse. One other big question that also relates to the reactions that make this life possible is what solvent that silicon-based life would use as at a higher temperature water isn't going to work. Sulfuric acid is one suggestion because it boils at 300 C; so if silicon life using that would exist somewhere just below that temperature. Using sulfuric acid as a solvent would also make the chemistry happening completely different than how our life works and might have the benefit of making silicone-based macromolecules much more stable. An example in the difference of conditions is silicon nitride, an inert industrial chemical under Earth-like conditions. On a hot planet covered in sulfuric acid, silicon nitride would not exist as a compound--it would be dissolved so nitrogen would not risk being locked up in an inert compound and would go elsewhere in their environment and be available for biochemical reactions.

Living at a higher temperature than us hardly would stop a silicon-based life from space-faring anymore than we do from the perspective of life support--it's trivial to make a hotter box than what we do for traveling the delightfully insulating depths of space where you have more trouble getting rid of heat than generating it.

Of course, what kind of technology is possible on the planet they might live on is another question. The important thing is that if silicon-based life could form from abiogensis, there's nothing fundamental that we know of standing in its way of being as complex as us.

Citations: A lot of chemistry textbooks I've read because I'm a chemist. I like this one which is about supramolecular chemistry, the study of molecules--especially macromolecules--interacting with one another.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2023 02:48

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

cat botherer posted:

Plasma life

What is the timescale on these types of emergent plasma phenomena? Could a hypothetical dusty plasma based life take place on extremely fast timescales that would be hard for us to recognize or observe?

I feel like I recall a novel by Stephen Baxter or someone about plasma life in the corona of a star or something.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2023 23:11

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Also, for

content - did anyone catch that interview with Grusch? I missed it.

https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the-ufo-whistleblower-speaks/

Reading the summary of it, it... seems like a whole load of nothing. Pretty much like a rehash of every other whistleblower interview on this subject. :geno:

quote:

�Well, naturally, when you recover something that�s either landed or crashed � sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds. It�s true,� Grusch said.

He told NewsNation that he has seen �some interesting photos,� and �read some very interesting reports. However, he says that the specific documents and photos that would prove his claims are still classified and he cannot disclose them here.

....

�It is a well-established fact, at least mathematically and based on empirical observation and analysis, that there most likely are physical, additional spatial dimensions,� he said. �And you can imagine, four and five-dimensional space where what we experience is linear time, ends up being a physical dimension in higher dimensional space where you were living there. You could translate across what we perceive as a linear flow. So there is a possibility that this is a theory here. I�m not saying this is 100% the case but it could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial, and it�s actually coming from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.�

�Based on the very specific properties that I was briefed on � isotopic ratios that have to be engineered for it to be at those levels. But also just extremely strange, heavy atomic metal, high up in the Periodic Table. Arrangements that we don�t understand. You know what the emergent properties are, but there�s just a very strange mix of elements,� he said.

Uhhhhhh-huh.

I dunno, smells like a disinfo op to me.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2023 23:34

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl2ap0m6fGk

Okay, this is just cringeworthy at this point. Instead of ooh and ahh-ing over being so incredibly lucky as to catch a big meteor like that on camera (even with sonic booms and break-apart sounds!!), everyone is crawling over themselves to scream about th' alieeums!

I went to watch the Geminids in the mountains this past winter and they looked absolutely the same. Same composition probably, because the fireballs I saw were greenish. It was fantastic, actually, one of the best and most cosmic things I'd ever seen in my life.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2023 15:12

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Little bit tangent to this but the trailer for the Three Body Problem Netflix adaptation dropped a few days ago. I just finished reading the series earlier this year, and I'm excited to see it come to a platform where I can actually stream it!

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 17:57

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Ok, in the grand scale of things, 100M isn't even that much, even when talking about space projects. Next, let's be totally generous and say that yes, SETI is almost invariably committing anthropomorphism by searching for signals that would be intelligible to us: is that truly an unreasonable thing to do, though? In the vast set of all possible civilizations, perhaps SETI would only discover signals, were they to be discovered, that would come from beings resembling us -- you have to ask if it would even be worthwhile to try to communicate with beings that don't. Think of it like internet dating: say you trawl through ten thousand people - would you prefer to connect to the first bozo that swipes right that has nothing in common with you, or spend time connecting to someone who has a ton of common ground?

mediaphage posted:

ah yes famous technological spacefaring civilization earth whales

Star Trek IV was a documentary.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 20:33

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

It turns out all UFO visitations/sightings/close encounters were true, all of them, and were attempts at first contact but we just can't understand alien behavior nor can they understand us, because ~aliens. Blipping around very quickly and disappearing, implanting weird little pieces of metal, being shot down all the time by primitive apes with boomsticks, and making patterns in grass is just how their culture expresses greetings and conveys important information.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 20:48

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

mediaphage posted:

i'll be honest i hated the books. but i'll watch the show because they'll probably grind off the worst bits

I'm curious - what didn't you like about them? I admit it's not everyone's cup of tea - the characterization is pretty nonexistent and terrible, but I don't have high expectations for that in "big idea" type sci fi novels. I enjoyed Foundation too, and that one's characters are just kind of talking exposition puppets. I really liked the presentation of the Dark Forest concept, though.

mediaphage posted:

never mind this thread iteration sucks too

I'm sorry. :saddowns:

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 21:06

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

To return to the issue of possibly missing intelligent signals in SETI because of too much anthropocentrism in our approach, I think that while it's fair to raise the issue that other intelligent species might express themselves and produce an "intelligence signal" in ways we might not expect, I feel like you need to draw the line somewhere. We have no other reference point for what the behavior of an intelligent civilization would be other than our own, so the most conservative action would be to look like signals that could be produced by a civilization like our own. Otherwise, if you're too liberal in your definitions for intelligent behavior, without any other a priori boundaries, I feel like there'd be too much of a chance for false positives. Would patterns of jets of water from Enceladus be an intelligent signal? If you include too many unexplained phenomena it risks labeling every suspicious phenomenon as SETI signal.

EDIT: Oh I think we're talking cross-purposes here lol.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 22:45

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

LanceHunter posted:

Also, goddamn. The UFO guys are coming from inside the thread.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2023 14:52

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Jesus III posted:

Why do you think UFOs are from space? Is there anything that points to space rather than unexplained natural phenomena or anything else?

Who are you addressing with this?

# ¿ Jun 30, 2023 14:54

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

eXXon posted:

Avi Loeb is so exhausting.

My respect and credibility for him all but cratered as soon as I read up on him and watched Angela Collier's criticism. The fact that he publishes such huge torrents of lovely short articles is really damning. Even his way of speaking is really tiresome!

# ¿ Jul 8, 2023 15:21

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Jesus that's just atrocious. Ugh. Avi Loeb is officially worse than NDGT.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2023 04:04

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Well, see, the thing is that unlike other "public intellectuals", the thing which distinguishes Avi Loeb as uniquely bad is the fact that he just stole artifacts from another country, and one of the poorest countries on earth at that! "Violating the laws of a foreign country" puts you on a different axis!

On a scale of annoyingness, I'd put Avi Loeb above NDGT, who is quite far above Michio Kaku. In terms of smugness, Avi Loeb is just slightly below NDGT. In terms of Woo, Avi Loeb is in the middle between NDGT at one pole while Michio Kaku is at the other.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2023 04:54

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

cat botherer posted:

JWST has detected objects consistent with interpretation as

dark stars,

the size of supermassive black holes, dating from a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

https://www.livescience.com/physics...ive-dark-matter
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.01173.pdf

I had never heard of these hypothetical objects until recently. Here's the general idea: Supersymmetry (which has no real empirical evidence as of yet) predicts particles called "neutralinos," the lightest of which is an good candidate a good candidate for a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) explanation of dark matter. These hypothetical neutralinos are Marjona fermions, which are fermionic superpartners of gauge and/or Higgs bosons. Unlike standard (anti-) matter, they are their own antiparticles, and so self-annihilate (this is because they have real-valued wave functions, whereas regular fermionic particles and anti-particles have complex ones related by conjugation). These particles could conceivably form the majority of the mass of the universe as dark matter, but only diffusely - such that the timescales of annihilation of the diffusely scattered particles are greater than the current age of the universe. In this scenario, most of the original dark matter may have already annihilated (most soon after the Big Bang), explaining that most of the energy-mass of the universe is dark energy (I might be wrong about this).

Dark stars are objects that could have existed in the early universe under this scenario. They would have mostly been made up of normal matter by this point in the Universe's history, but would have had some neutralino dark matter. Also, they wouldn't have been dark - instead of fusion, they would create energy from neutralino annihilation. Nowadays, such supermassive clumps of matter would immediately collapse into black holes. The radiation pressure from fusion, or degeneracy pressure is not sufficient to prevent collapse. However, the annihilation of these neutralinos would provide enough pressure to prevent this. There could have also been normal stellar-sized dark stars, which would have densified and started to undergo fusion after the neutralinos were exhausted.

Dark stars also aren't dark. They would emit a fuckton of radiation but be cooler and less dense overall. This result is not confirmed as of yet. The smoking gun would be a helium absorption line, rather than an emission line, at a particular wavelength. If true, this would have some pretty big implications in fundamental physics as well as being loving nuts.

That's loving wild!!

We'll see how it goes as the scientific community digests it through peer review and other observations, but this could be huge if true.

I mean, even proving supersymmetry and understanding the nature of dark matter would be massive!

# ¿ Jul 20, 2023 17:00

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

There's a live stream of the congressional hearing on UAPs right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgEisi_ozJ0

# ¿ Jul 26, 2023 15:41

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

I AM GRANDO posted:

It�s nothing until there�s incontrovertible proof that it�s something. If aliens were visiting the Earth, wouldn�t literally anything be different? If alien technology has been in the hands of the US and its contractors for ~100 years and they�ve never been able to learn anything from it, what difference would it make? I wish I knew what this guy was actually being prevented from learning about.

So, if the claims put forth are taken at face value -- what Grusch had said about these UAP capabilities defying known laws of physics and so on -- then what that would imply is that all our known laws of physics and science are wrong, on a fundamental level. All of the Standard Model and General Relativity, which have been tested at accuracies up to one part in one hundred trillion and one part in ten trillion respectively, are essentially bullshit. We would need to rewrite everything from Newton on up. In fact, probably the basis of what we understand to be rationality itself would be undermined.

I feel like if that was true, I'd feel incredibly sad and mournful.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2023 16:33

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

I AM GRANDO posted:

Science doesn�t really work that way. The dude�s lying and there aren�t any ufos, but if there were then whatever physics they�re doing would have to be compatible with what we know is true. GPS doesn�t invalidate anything in newtonian mechanics just because it requires relativity to operate, just like Mercury�s orbit doesn�t prove that gravity is false. Anything you can do with Newtonian physics is still possible.

We already know that our current models are getting something wrong, since relativity and the standard model of particle physics are incompatible. Probably we�ll be able to do some cool new poo poo once we figure out what�s incomplete between them.

I'd think that if the UAPs were clearly and obviously violating basic principles like non-locality, relativity, thermodynamics, the speed of light, and so on, but yet the same rules still applied to our everyday experience and measurements, then the case would be highly strengthened towards there being some kind of interference in our measurements, our perception of cause and effect. The simulation hypothesis -- or interference with our perception to such a severe extent that it reduces to the simulation hypothesis -- would gain a much higher credibility. In that case, we could not be sure that anything we measure or experience was not the direct result of some alien intelligence pulling the wool over our eyes, meaning that "true" reality might follow rules that were completely unknown to us. For example, what we observe to be the cosmic microwave background might actually just be a kind of illusion created at the boundaries of our solar system, or a kind of hologram, or even just bit-level alterations in our instrumentation created at the moment of measurement.

My point is that if you accept the "UAPs are violating fundamental principles of physics" thesis, then we may as well toss out science entirely and return to mysticism.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2023 17:32

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

So this isn't really space-related, but could someone with a physics degree please tell me what the deal is with the first room-temperature superconductor? Do you think it's bullshit? What's the deal?

# ¿ Jul 31, 2023 20:03

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/01/search-for-voyager-2-after-nasa-accidentally-sends-wrong-command

quote:

Search for Voyager 2 after Nasa accidentally sends wrong command

Nasa engineers hope to re-establish contact with the Voyager 2 spacecraft after sending a faulty command that severed communications with the far-flung probe.

The spacecraft is one of a pair that launched in 1977 to capture images of Jupiter and Saturn, but continued on a journey into interstellar space to become the farthest human-made objects from Earth.

The space agency lost contact with Voyager 2, which is now more than 12bn miles away, when mission staff accidentally beamed the wrong command to the distant spacecraft more than a week ago.

The command caused the probe to tilt its antenna away from Earth, and although the direction it is pointing in changed by only 2%, the shift was enough for engineers operating receivers on Earth to lose touch with it.

Well this is bad!

Though it's still wild to me how long Voyager 2 has lasted. This probe was launched like more than ten years before I was even born and it's still chugging away out there. Incredible engineering!

# ¿ Aug 1, 2023 18:50

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

eXXon posted:

surprisingly bright ghosts (the donut-shape things, the brightest of which is in the bottom-left corner of the top-left image, and which are internal reflections and not UFOs).

But what if they are, they're just the afterimage of aliens / the shadow government tampering with our images to conceal their presence? :tinfoil:

# ¿ Aug 1, 2023 23:47

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Chad Voyager
Virgin Tesla Roadster

# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 15:32

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Rappaport posted:

Welp, one down, badly (BBC)

That's too bad.

I feel like I'm a little sad whenever any country loses a probe. On the small silver lining, we do tend to lose them more often than not. I think I recall a statistic somewhere that lander missions have the lowest success rates?

# ¿ Aug 20, 2023 17:59

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Rappaport posted:

India fared better, as they've announced that the lander made a successful touch-down on the Lunar surface.

Jai Hind! 🇮🇳

DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Aug 23, 2023

# ¿ Aug 23, 2023 15:55

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

India's moon rover is doing great.

quote:

India only landed on the Moon last week, but its Chandrayaan-3 mission has already made its first scientific observations of the lunar south pole.

By shooting lasers at the surface, the onboard rover has confirmed the presence of sulfur, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced.

It's the first rover to ever explore the region.

"The Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) instrument onboard Chandrayaan-3 Rover has made the first-ever in-situ measurements on the elemental composition of the lunar surface near the south pole," ISRO said in a statement.

"These in-situ measurements confirm the presence of Sulphur (S) in the region unambiguously, something that was not feasible by the instruments onboard the orbiters."

I am legitly super happy for them. India has historically been one of the world's great powers, and it's fantastic to see them in space now, doing awesome science, after centuries of imperialism.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2023 14:46

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Bug Squash posted:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66786611

Possible detection of dimethyl sulphide on exoplanet. It's tentative as of yet, but very exciting if true as it's currently a strong bioindicator.

It could be a Hycean world, by the way, which is pretty neat. We'll never be able to get there in our lifetime, but I can only imagine what kind of bizarre creatures might live on such a world.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2023 14:50

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

https://abc7.com/mexico-aliens-corpses-ufos/13776957/

quote:

Scientists in Mexico are pulling back the curtain on what some believe are aliens, and the remains of "non-human" beings were put on display.

Two small mummified specimens were presented Tuesday at Mexico's first public congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), also known as UFOs.

Displaying two mummified bodies he claimed to be not from Earth, journalist and UFO researcher Jaime Maussan and other experts proposed that the Mexican Chamber of Deputies recognize UAPs, to guarantee airspace security and to allow it to be studied. The shriveled bodies with shrunken, warped heads left those in the chamber aghast and quickly kicked up a social media fervor.

"It's the queen of all evidence," Maussan claimed. "That is, if the DNA is showing us that they are non-human beings and that there is nothing that looks like this in the world, we should take it as such." But he warned that he didn't want to refer to them as "extraterrestrials" just yet.

The apparently desiccated bodies date back to 2017 and were found deep underground in the sandy Peruvian coastal desert of Nazca. The area is known for gigantic enigmatic figures scraped into the earth and seen only from a birds-eye-view. Most attribute the Nazca Lines to ancient indigenous communities, but the formations have captured the imaginations of many.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2023 14:48

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Boris Galerkin posted:

Me after sitting through a 2 hour useless meeting

Who could've known that the face of alien civilization would be withered Wojak?

# ¿ Sep 14, 2023 16:16

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Shaddak posted:

Footage from the parker solar probe flying through a CME:

https://youtu.be/FF_e5eYgJ3Y

What are the "sounds" that we're hearing in the video? Is it somehow translating the radio frequencies into noises?

# ¿ Sep 20, 2023 01:47

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Man, is it just me, or did a lot of the original moon landing astronauts end up living to incredible age?

... I wonder... If there's something up with that.🤔

# ¿ Nov 10, 2023 15:47

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

In order to divert more funding to manned space exploration, I'm going to start an ivermectin-style conspiracy theory that cosmic radiation adds +30 years to your life span.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2023 16:31

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/24/amaterasu-extremely-high-energy-particle-detected-falling-to-earth

quote:

Astronomers have detected a rare and extremely high-energy particle falling to Earth that is causing bafflement because it is coming from an apparently empty region of space.

The particle, named Amaterasu after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, is one of the highest-energy cosmic rays ever detected.

Only the most powerful cosmic events, on scales far exceeding the explosion of a star, are thought to be capable of producing such energetic particles. But Amaterasu appears to have emerged from the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy.

�You trace its trajectory to its source and there�s nothing high energy enough to have produced it,� said Prof John Matthews, of the University of Utah and a co-author of the paper in the journal Science that describes the discovery. �That�s the mystery of this � what the heck is going on?�

Ok which of you guys just beamed a signal to Trisolaris

# ¿ Nov 24, 2023 16:03

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

https://www.sciencealert.com/voyager-1-is-returning-a-mishmash-of-1s-and-0s-from-space-nasa-is-baffled

quote:

Voyager 1 Is Returning a Mishmash of 1s And 0s From Space. NASA Is Baffled.

Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object from Earth, is sending back a repetitive jumble of 1s and 0s that don't make any sense.

Scientists at NASA are desperately trying to fix the glitch from 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away .

Goddamnit, Trisolaris, leave us alone wouldja??

# ¿ Dec 14, 2023 15:41

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

I AM GRANDO posted:

Isn�t the Kuiper Belt like light years closer to the sun than the Oort Cloud?

There�s no way we�re still getting Voyager data in a thousand years or whenever that thing hits the Oort Cloud.

Nah, not like light years, more like within 1 lightyear.

(checking)

Ok, well maybe like 3 light years at most. It's kinda unclear.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2023 22:35

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

God imagine the tedious interstellar politics of the future - it�s all property line disputes over where whose Oort Cloud ends where like neighbors disagreeing over the placement of a fence or tree.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 00:20

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 16:36

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Dameius posted:

A rogue planet passes through the oort cloud right on the divider line between Sol and AC. The ensuing property claims dispute kicks off a 20 millennia long total war blood feud, laying waste to both systems. All orbital bodies have been reduced to a size no larger than an asteroid.

This except it's 40K years of legal claims and countersuits in Galactic Civil Court, with the same end effect.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 01:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Spacethread Episode 2: Attack of the UFO Guys

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