Robo Reagan posted:

possible, but i don't think it's very likely. if you had a creature in the shape of a human that was the size of the solar system, it would take him hours just to scratch the top of his head because of the distance his arm would have to travel from his waist. there's a theoretical limit on how big a living creature could reasonably be

Sabel posted:

Omi-Polari posted:

science fact:

if you could instantaneously travel 66 million light years away, you could look back at earth and watch the asteroid impact which drove the dinosaurs to extinction

blowing your mind

Robo Reagan posted:

define telescope because we use entire galaxies to see very distant objects with the help of gravitational lensing

Orkin Mang posted:

and to think the whole thing revolves around the earth....

The Protagonist posted:

my favorite place/thing yet found:

the largest supermassive blackhole ever detected, ~6billion solar masses, has a smaller (~700million solar masses i wanna say) blackhole orbiting around it which dives through the accretion disc of the larger companion periodically, causing massive flares/explosions and it is likely aliens celebrate this awesome event by sitting at a safeish distance away and getting blasted

Fister Roboto posted:

Actually, everything is there.

The Protagonist posted:

nah, those protons gonna' pop eventually

The Protagonist posted:

The more I learn the more I likely I feel that there are no cosmological singularities, but rather a pocket of inverted spacetime within each blackhole, with we ourselves inhabiting one. It just seems to match the repeated symmetry/evolutionary nature of everything else we've just begun to understand.

This in no way explains the origins of anything, ofc, but at least we can do away with the absurdity of infinite density...instead we have possibly infinitely nested, inverted spacetimes either extending outwards forever or possibly wrapping back around upon itself.

Yaos posted:

It's pretty simple. You just send a tachyon burst through the deflector dish and cause a positive feed back loop in the phaser banks.

Folks, we don't understand what makes you who you are and not somebody else so don't bring your "you'll be gay some day in the future" poo poo into my house.

Brannock posted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future have fun

Brannock posted:

this cycle repeats infinitely at a speed impossible to perceive until the universe forms a sentient observer

Ocean Book posted:

once the universe is at thermodynamic equilibrium does time continue to elapse? probably right? but isnt time basically a feature of thermodynamic disequilibrium? im all confused

Moridin920 posted:

a thousand years in the future aliens will live in ghettos and bemoan the capitalist imperialists who have taken over the quadrant

The Protagonist posted:

Another interesting thing to note: given the projected lifetime of the observable universe, it is still very young.

One possible explanation of the Fermi paradox is then that we are the very first advanced civilization to wake up. All those super advanced beings in our fiction that already have everything figured out? It's our duty to become them.

Brannock posted:

supervoids are creepy as poo poo

there's already like an impossible-to-conceptualize distance of just sheer nothing between galaxies in even dense parts of the universe

supervoids are an impossibly huge space of just sheer lack of anything

The Protagonist posted:

I hope not. One of my sources of optimism about the intent/needs of other possible species and our own is that if you have the ability to make the interstellar trip, then you've got the ability to live fine in the unpopulated vacuum with raw materials alone.

...unfortunately this doesn't preclude the possibility of an arc that can just barely limp the trip and didn't know there were natives already there

Moridin920 posted:

a human boot, stomping an alien face

forever

Omi-Polari posted:

i think the aliens should get off their vorlon butts and come smoke a blunt

Fojar38 posted:

btw back in april a new theoretical model suggested that a warp drive might not require as much energy as we thought

but itd still need to use fusion power

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/04/23/warp-drive-research-key-to-interstellar-travel/

naem posted:

This is a good book

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem

Ocean Book posted:

but does vacuum fluctuation happen at thermodynamic equilibrium? and if it does, does it not happen as a function of time? or does time stop until vacuum fluctuation produces thermodynamic disequilibrium? but how could vacuum fluctuation happen if time stops?

Alan Smithee posted:

Frackie Robinson posted:

Is there oil on other planets?

Elukka posted:

3.6 billion years from the birth of the sun to multicellular life, a billion years from that to intelligent life, only 0.6 billion years from now the window will close. All in all the process took a third of the universe's lifetime.

quote:

There have been only a few generations of stars where this could happen. What would it imply for the odds of intelligent life arising if we assumed there's nothing near us because it's so early? I can't tell if the end result would be plausible.

The Protagonist posted:

it's sexy as hell though, it's "The Milky Way" because Hera sprayed milk all up from her tits over the night sky to make it

Noyemi K posted:

I don't ever wanna see you on my errf again

Zen Punk posted:

The sun's name is Sol. That's why our star system is called the Solar System.