Outer Space Thread

[Arthur Dent]

Fun fact: the energy that would be needed to accelerate the Apollo spacecraft to 0.2 c is equal to ~65% of global electricity production in a year.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Man, I'm just trying to digest all this information which is truly awesome.

I guess 2 questions that come to mind.

1. Milner alluded to not being able to put a laser of this magnitude in space because no government would allow it (which I totally understand), but how heavily guarded will this laser be? I mean, this thing could be a superweapon so easily, I'd have to believe. So, yeah...that's...that's something.

2. Do we have the ability to manufacture an instrument precise enough to fire a laser precisely and accurately enough to hit a sail the size of a kitchen table 20 trillion miles away? I mean, there's the earth's rotation and path to account for, the atmospheric conditions, the position/speed/motion of the sail, and then there's the 4th dimension of time to account for as well. I'm sure we have equations for all these things, but do we have the ability to calculate precisely enough all these things to input the data into a unit that can accurately aim the laser? I mean....this is going to take an incredibly, incredibly precise calculation and then measurement. We're not just rounding off to a decimal point here....

[pioneer98]

Man, I'm just trying to digest all this information which is truly awesome.

I guess 2 questions that come to mind.

1. Milner alluded to not being able to put a laser of this magnitude in space because no government would allow it (which I totally understand), but how heavily guarded will this laser be? I mean, this thing could be a superweapon so easily, I'd have to believe. So, yeah...that's...that's something.

2. Do we have the ability to manufacture an instrument precise enough to fire a laser precisely and accurately enough to hit a sail the size of a kitchen table 20 trillion miles away? I mean, there's the earth's rotation and path to account for, the atmospheric conditions, the position/speed/motion of the sail, and then there's the 4th dimension of time to account for as well. I'm sure we have equations for all these things, but do we have the ability to calculate precisely enough all these things to input the data into a unit that can accurately aim the laser? I mean....this is going to take an incredibly, incredibly precise calculation and then measurement. We're not just rounding off to a decimal point here....

My understanding is that the laser would only give it one blast of a certain amount of time while it is in orbit around the Earth, and that would be enough to get it going. If it already is to Mars in less than an hour, it's already going plenty fast.

The concept they were talking about was having a few hundred of these probes on some larger "mothership" orbiting the Earth. The motherhsip would release them one at a time, and they'd be blasted one at a time, maybe one per day or something if the laser could be recharged that quick. The idea being that sending a few hundred of these increases the chances that one actually makes it.

I'd think you are right about the need for extreme precision I would think. If they get the angle off by a tiny amount, it would result in being off by a huge distance by the time it got there. That's probably another reason to send a few hundred of these - it's more likely that one of these actually gets close. Since the Earth will be in a different position each day, and so will the planets with their gravitational pulls, they'd need a unique and precise calculation for the angle of each one.

[pioneer98]

A 15 year old discovered that the 117 Mayan known cities aligned with star constellations. If you had laid a picture of the constellations on a map, the cities aligned. Then he discovered that one of the constellations has 3 stars, but only 2 cities had been found. They used satellite images and found square structures in the spot there should have been a 3rd city. It looks like it will be one of the 5 largest Mayan cities found. It was previously not found because it is in a very inaccessible jungle.

http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/a-15-ye ... 1463023531

[redbirdjazzz]

A 15 year old discovered that the 117 Mayan known cities aligned with star constellations. If you had laid a picture of the constellations on a map, the cities aligned. Then he discovered that one of the constellations has 3 stars, but only 2 cities had been found. They used satellite images and found square structures in the spot there should have been a 3rd city. It looks like it will be one of the 5 largest Mayan cities found. It was previously not found because it is in a very inaccessible jungle.

http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/a-15-ye ... 1463023531

Did a teen discover a lost Maya city? Not exactly.

[pioneer98]

Turns out that weird star that has the big eclipses at weird intervals did not dim over the past 100 years as the one astronomer claimed from looking at old pictures. Now they are going to observe it more and get an idea of what wavelengths are being eclipsed to see if it tells them anything about the properties of the objects causing the eclipses.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch ... urce=atltw

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

I've spent the weekend trying to debunk his logic and it's impossible.

It answers most every question I've ever come up with:
Why no other life forms
How did this happen (honestly the odds of you being here have to be 10^10^10000 and probably more)
If humans survive, why no time travelers
If no God, how did the universe happen. People believe that God created everything and detractors kind of ask why can't it just be that the universe and mass and all that always was....yeah, that's great and all, but you're just believing that something was around forever and always will be. Is that more likely than something putting you here?

I could go on and on, but his answer makes more sense than I think we'd like to admit.

Actually, I take that back. It's possible by agreeing that humans kill themselves off before discovering the technology to create a simulation this complex (though, that still doesn't answer any of the above questions)

[Arthur Dent]

It answers most every question I've ever come up with:

So, you think video game characters are actually alive or will spontaneously become so at some point?

Why no other life forms

Who says there aren't?

How did this happen (honestly the odds of you being here have to be 10^10^10000 and probably more)

According to what? Are we talking about the odds that you specifically exist exactly as you are or of intelligent life of some kind somewhere?

If humans survive, why no time travelers

Because time travel isn't possible?

If no God, how did the universe happen. People believe that God created everything and detractors kind of ask why can't it just be that the universe and mass and all that always was....yeah, that's great and all, but you're just believing that something was around forever and always will be. Is that more likely than something putting you here?

"I don't know," is a lot better answer than either of those.

[pioneer98]

I don't know if I buy "singularity" stuff and this simulation idea kind of falls into that realm. We have been able to keep increasing computing power to this point but that doesn't mean it will go on forever. I keep thinking we will hit some limit, or get close to some limit and start to slow down. I know they are looking at other technologies to try to get around the limitations of our current computer architecture, but I guess we'll see. At some point there could be diminishing returns. Then there is the idea that our simulations will somehow gain consciousness. We don't even really understand what consciousness is, yet somehow an AI is going to get it. I think it could be possible for an AI to become nearly indistinguishable from a real person to us, but that is not the same thing as an AI simulation with billions of conscious entities running inside of it.

The thing that I have really been fascinated by was that idea that the second law of thermodynamics could explain the origin of life. I think I posted it in here a while back but this was the gist of it:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122 ... y-of-life/

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”

Think of the implications that we might just be some kind of manifestation of a basic law of physics playing itself out. The idea is that life originated in a way to keep dissipating more and more energy. Maybe then, the "winner" in evolution is the one that was the best at dissipating energy. Or maybe evolution is just another manifestation of it - maybe always having this eternal competition going on between species is the thing that increases energy dissipation the most rapidly. It also makes me kind of wonder if human culture isn't rooted in this. Maybe discovering tools and technology gave us a big advantage over other animals, because it made us better at dissipating energy. Maybe the human culture most likely to spread is the one that is best at increasing the dissipation of energy. Maybe ideas, such as Liberty, eventually win out because they have have physics on their side? Or maybe always having ongoing competition between cultures is the thing that keeps the entropy engine churning. If that's the case, then are competition and war also unavoidable due to physics? It's kind of crazy to think that a basic law of physics could possibly be behind for such things.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

How did this happen (honestly the odds of you being here have to be 10^10^10000 and probably more)

According to what? Are we talking about the odds that you specifically exist exactly as you are or of intelligent life of some kind somewhere?

I'm talking about the odds of you, in particular, being born.

Or think of it like this. The average splooge is 3.7 ml. There are somewhere between 15 million and 400 million spermatazoa per ml. So, let's just say 600 million spermatazoa per ejaculation. Each sperm results in, presumably, a unique individual. Individuals procreate multiple times generally to get pregnant.

The odds of your mom birthing you, in particular, are extremely small, no? Even assuming your mom and your dad were trying to create you when you were conceived, the odds of you, the AD that was conceived are incredibly small. If one of the other couple hundred million, at a minimum, tadpoles entered the egg instead of the one that created you, you wouldn't be here.

If your mom had been with another guy, you wouldn't be here. If your dad had been with another woman, you wouldn't be here. If your mom hadn't been born (same odds of you being born), you wouldn't be here. If your dad hadn't been born, you wouldn't be here. If they had never met, you wouldn't be here. Go back thousands of generations, and the odds of you being born are infinitesimally small.

Now throw in the whole thing of the earth being a habitable planet and your species appearing and evolving....and yeah, the odds of you being born are basically non-existent.