Spacethread Episode 2: Attack of the UFO Guys

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

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

Boris Galerkin posted:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/12/astronaut_brain_recovery/

I would love to spend 6 months in space and than take a 3 year paid vacation.

But you'd have spend 6 months in cramped boring space studio apartment and use a weird toilet. No thanks!

RE: silicon life, an even weirder, but potentially plausible form of life is one based on emergent dynamics of cold dusty plasma:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12466-could-alien-life-exist-in-the-form-of-dna-shaped-dust/
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/9/8/263/pdf

Examples of dusty plasmas include Saturn's rings and interstellar clouds.

The dynamics are very interesting. MHD fluid dynamics is already incredibly rich due to the addition of coupled EM physics - giving you different kinds of waves like Alfven waves and many other things. Dusty plasma kicks this up a notch. Energy in systems like these are pretty much equipartitioned between the degrees of freedom of that system. That means that things like free electrons tend to have high temperatures (velocities, roughly), whereas an incomparably more massive dust particle will be at a low temperature, encouraging stability. In addition, dust particles usually get a net negative surface charge, because negatively-charged electrons are more mobile than positively-charged protons or other ions, again due to their lower mass (this effect is also critical in lightning, where ice graupel gets a net charge).

This multi-temperature system allows for the formation of all kinds of plasma structures, including plasma "crystals" and DNA-like double helixes, capable of replication in simulations. More prosaic plasma crystals replicate the same lattices found in ordinary crystalline materials like metals (these are all described by the space group). These systems can even result in arrangements strongly resembling galaxies and their formation - hinting at these complex structures being related to statistically universal phenomena.

These structures can be stable due to the low temperatures of the dust phase. This kind of emergent complexity at the edge of chaos is exactly the sort of thing one needs for life. I personally think dusty-plasma life is more plausible than silicon life, but I wouldn't necessarily call it "likely". Who knows though?

Unfortunately, richer dusty plasma dynamics are very hard to study on Earth. With the effects of gravity, dusty plasma systems are mostly confined to 2d, but the richer 3d dynamics can happen in microgravity. I imagine these structures would also be very hard to study in nature, in places like Saturn's rings, because a spacecraft would disrupt the structures.

Here's a cool video of some experiments done in space:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kanYuBptuZ0

screenshot:

cat botherer fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jun 12, 2023

# ¿ Jun 12, 2023 18:53

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 09:49

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

mediaphage posted:

the fact that it can form a double helix i don't find particularly indicative of its relevance to whether it can be a basis for life, though. if we found discrete information storage that was conserved through replications, thats obv more interesting.

not that i'm making GBS threads on the science, it's cool regardless. i just don't buy this life claim as anything more than clickbait

The helices can replicate though (definitely in simulation, I don't know about any experiments). That does actually imply information storage. From there, one could even imagine things like a cellular membrane to shield the helices and stuff from external perturbations. Stable structures capable of replicating would become more numerous. This would conceivably allow mutations in such replications to introduce more robust or complex structures, and all of a sudden you have something like evolution.

The physics behind this is just so complex and interesting. It's the only thing I'm really aware of that could conceivably rival organic chemistry in that department. In addition, different sizes or species of dust particles could act like different "elements", capable of combining into stable arrangements in ways similar to chemical molecules. To be clear, I don't think that plasma life is necessarily probable, but I'd put it ahead of silicon-based life. At any rate, there is a lot more places dusty plasma in the universe than places capable of carbon- or silicon-based life, which helps right there.

cat botherer fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Jun 12, 2023

# ¿ Jun 12, 2023 19:07

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

DrSunshine posted:

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.

Actually I think it might be slower than earth carbon life timescales. This stuff is at really low temperatures/velocities. I also read some blurb that dusty plasma can be useful for looking at the same dynamics as liquid/solid colloids because the timescales are longer. I could be wrong though. If it is significantly slower, then it may not have had the chance to develop a huge amount of complexity by evolutionary means, but it could keep going for a lot longer after most stars fizzle out.

It doesn�t sound like the book you are talking about, but there�s a dry sci-fi read about intelligent life on a neutron star by the late physicist/tethers/laser sail guy Robert Forward, called Dragon�s Egg.

quote:

The star contains about half of a solar mass of matter, compressed into a diameter of about 20 kilometers (12 miles), making its surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth. Its outer crust, compressed to about 7,000 kg per cubic centimeter, is mainly iron nuclei with a high concentration of neutrons,[1] overlaid with about 1 millimeter (0.039 inches) of white dwarf star material.[2] The atmosphere, mostly iron vapor, is about 5 centimeters (2.0 inches) thick. The star shrinks slightly as it cools, causes the crust to crack and produce mountains 5 to 100 millimeters (0.20 to 3.94 inches) high. Large volcanoes, formed by liquid material oozing from deep cracks, can be many centimeters high and hundred meters in diameter, and will eventually collapse, causing starquakes.

Around 3000 BC Dragon's Egg cools enough to allow a stable equivalent of "chemistry", in which "compounds" are constructed of nuclei bound by the strong force, rather than of Earth's atoms bound by the electromagnetic force. As the star's chemical processes are about one million times faster than Earth's, self-replicating "molecules" appear shortly and life begins on the star. As the star continues to cool, more complex life evolves, until plant-like organisms appear around 1000 BC. One lineage of these later became the first "animals", the earliest of these stealing seedpods from sessile organisms and some later lineages becoming predators.

(�)
In 2032, a cheela develops the race's first weapon and tactics while overcoming a dangerous predator. In November 2049 a human expedition to Dragon's Egg starts building orbital facilities. The rest of the story, including almost the whole history of cheela civilization, spans from 22 May 2050 to 21 June 2050. By humans' standards, a "day" on Dragon's Egg is about 0.2 seconds, and a typical cheela's lifetime is about 40 minutes.[4]

The science is pretty spot on. For example, neutron stars do have very thin solid crusts, maybe complete with plate tectonics, or at least faults. Actual �starquakes� of these crusts have been detected by X-ray emissions. On the earth, quakes are caused by stress from mantle convection on the crust. On neutron stars, it�s apparently caused by flow of the interior material dragging field lines around. The changes in the extreme magnetic field then exert stress on the crust.

The physics of a neutron star crust and atmosphere could potentially be complex enough to lead to life, but due to the crazy high temperatures, the timescales would be way shorter than a cold plasma whose dust might only be at a few kelvins - much lower than even carbon life.

n.b.: Magnetic fields are �frozen� in conductors, of which plasma is a nearly perfect one. Fluid flow drags the field lines around, but the field lines impart stiffness in response - field lines are stiff in that they like to stay straight and not bend. Changes in the field can only slowly diffuse through the medium. This diffusion can actually be neglected for a lot of solar physics/solar wind stuff because the conductivity is high enough. In the case of superconductors, the field lines existing when a material first transitions into superconduction are totally frozen in. That�s why superconductors exclude magnetic fields they are subjected to, allowing for levitation. This is a big part of why MHD flow is so complex.

cat botherer fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Jun 13, 2023

# ¿ Jun 13, 2023 00:11

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

aniviron posted:

Do crop circles count as passive? Doesn't harm an animal, after all.

Lotsa bugs get squished

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 01:46

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

LanceHunter posted:

Aliens are alien

The Polish author Stanislaw Lem's books are really good at exploring hard questions of communication with other intelligences. Solaris is the most famous but not my favorite of the bunch.

His Master's Voice is a really good one. It's set at a military facility in Nevada that receives a seemingly-intelligent neutrino signal, and follows their futile efforts to understand it.

On the subject of hyperintelligences, Golem XIV (full text) is another good one. Basically, the Cold War powers developed better and better supercomputers to control strategy, but past a certain point, the AIs would become uncooperative or go catatonic as they withdraw into ontological speculation. The book is presented as lectures given by the eponymous computer before it advanced into a higher/different intelligence regime and became unable to communicate with humans.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2023 18:58

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-big-gravitational-wave-announcement-is-coming-thursday-heres-why-were-excited

This is cool: There's a major announcement coming soon about cosmic gravitational wave background - basically the same deal as cosmic background radiation, but gravity waves. CBR is from when the universe first became transparent, a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. However, the universe was always transparent to gravitational waves, so this could go back to 10^-32 seconds after the Big Bang.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2023 16:44

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

Boris Galerkin posted:

Oh this is interesting. I remember watching a video on it from the PBS Spacetime guy last year or so I think. Good to know they�ve kept pushing along and have more to share.

Apparently a big part of it is being able to exclude other sources of detectable waves, especially from black hole mergers.

Also this came out today:
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4067865-congress-doubles-down-on-explosive-claims-of-illegal-ufo-retrieval-programs/

quote:

Asked June 26 about allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made several stunning statements.

In an exclusive interview, Rubio told NewsNation Washington correspondent Joe Khalil that multiple individuals with �very high clearances and high positions within our government� �have come forward to share� �first-hand� UFO-related claims �beyond the realm of what [the Senate Intelligence Committee] has ever dealt with.�

Rubio�s comments provide context for a bipartisan provision adopted unanimously by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of �non-earth� or �exotic� origin.

This extraordinary language added to the Senate version of the Intelligence authorization bill mirrors and adds significant credibility to a whistleblower�s recent, stunning allegations that a clandestine, decades-long effort to recover, analyze and exploit objects of �non-human� origin has been operating illegally without congressional oversight.

Additionally, the bill instructs individuals with knowledge of such activities to disclose all relevant information and grants legal immunity if the information is reported appropriately within a defined timeframe. Moreover, nearly 20 pages of the legislation appear to directly address recent events by enhancing a raft of legal protections for whistleblowers while also permitting such individuals to contact Congress directly.

Researcher and congressional expert Douglas Johnson first reported on and analyzed the remarkable bill language, which, if it passes the House, could become law this calendar year.

Beyond the Senate Intelligence Committee, the powerful investigative body that oversees the nation�s intelligence agencies found the aforementioned whistleblower�s allegations � that secret UFO-related programs are illegally withheld from Congress � to be �credible and urgent.�

Moreover, according to two reports, multiple military, intelligence and contractor officials corroborated claims that the U.S. government or private companies possess multiple craft of possible �non-human� origin.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2023 16:58

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

Boris Galerkin posted:

There�s a person in the physics/astronomy thread that says they�ve seen/heard rumors of detecting a supermassive black hole merger with gravitational waves.

Oh cool. Sounds like that might happen during a galactic merger. I don't know of supermassive black holes that aren't at galactic centers, but I suppose they could be flung out occasionally into intergalactic space. That would make them hard to detect aside from gravitational lensing though.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2023 17:02

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

JWST has detected objects consistent with interpretation as

:catdrugs:

dark stars,

:catdrugs:

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.

cat botherer fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jul 20, 2023

# ¿ Jul 20, 2023 01:13

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

GOAT probe

# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 15:28

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

GOAT probe still goated

Voyager 2 phones home and says everything is cool
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/voyager-2-phones-home-and-says-everything-is-cool/

Rappaport posted:

I thought cattle mutilation alien probes assaulted cows?

It's fun to mix up the kind of anuses you core out from time to time.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2023 15:10

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

# ¿ Sep 14, 2023 15:45

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

neutral milf hotel posted:

they look real to me

# ¿ Sep 16, 2023 01:51

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Mars is cold and thicc around the middle

https://www.space.com/mars-water-ice-equator-frozen-ocean

The article briefly mentions it, but Mars has glaciers remaining from the periods of high obliquity*, mostly on mountains at low/mid latitude. They really look like frozen-to-the-bed polar glaciers on Earth. Previously, they were thought to be pretty much all rock glaciers with just interstitial ice. However, some are probably mostly pure ice with a debris and/or salt cover (some people call those rock glaciers too, but they're pretty different than the interstitial ice kind).

*Mars' axial tilt variation is massive and mathematically chaotic. IIRC, obliquity before about 15 Mya is basically impossible to know.

Here's a Mars glacier (perspective generated from HiRISE) where you can see a lobe spreading out, complete with a terminal moraine:

c.f. a glacier in a similar situation in the McMurdo Dry Valleys:

https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glacial-geology/glaciers-on-other-planets/types-of-glaciers-on-mars/

# ¿ Jan 19, 2024 17:43

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

The EMDrive just won't die. AFAIK, quantized inertia isn't the crackpottiest thing ever, but all of these modified Newtonian dynamics theories still fail to explain observations that show gravitational lensing in places spatially separated from normal matter. In the balance of all of it, it's still just really hard to get away from dark matter.

I suppose the reasoning of DARPA is that it is worth it even with an infinitesimal chance of success. They've funded a lot of stupider stuff.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2024 18:24

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

The Chad Jihad posted:

Huh, I thought that one got robustly debunked? I've always had a soft spot for the emdrive, I think it was the first time I got sucked into a 'miracle breakthrough'

Yep. The great majority of replications have been negative, and all positive results have been shown to be due to measurement errors or confounding forces.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2024 18:46

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

The immortal probe is still going!

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth

quote:

After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can � for the first time in five months � check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.

For the first time since November, NASA�s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).

Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA�s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft�s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it�s sent to Earth.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 13:07

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

Rappaport posted:

How would you know?

They work at NASA and haven�t even heard of the secret space program :sad:

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 13:36

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

DrSunshine posted:

Was that an idea based on the nuclear pulse rocket (Daedalus) concept, or the Project Starshot effort they're working on right now with the mini solar sail swarm?

A fission-fragment rocket could get to 0.1 c with near-current technology. It can get a specific impulse north of a million seconds (albeit with low thrust) simply by using the particle fragments resulting from fission of either thin sheets or particles of Pu or whatever as the reaction mass. NASA recently funded a concept where the fuel particles would be embedded in aerogel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket

cat botherer fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Apr 26, 2024

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 18:35

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 09:49

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; Can't post for 8 hours!

DrSunshine posted:

Alright folks, new goon project: let's build an Alpha Centauri rocket with a stack of used HDDs.

I�ll make the logo

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 19:30

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