The Astronomy Thread

So my takeaways from all this talk is ain't no aliens coming to save us. We are fooked.

Cybsled said:

You still need a reason to do that, though. The problems with those “x should have colonized the galaxy” calculations is they never account for WHY a species would want to do that. Let’s look at mankind. Let’s say we could just send out ships into the void that will make human colonies fresh to order with humans grown at site. That is very expensive and uses lots of resources. We are expending those for something that provides no tangible benefit to the builders beyond the thought that humans will live on another planet and probably never be in direct contact. There won’t be any trade.

Realistically the only feasible drivers would be species survival or some strong ideological push to do as such. #1 only happens when shit is about to hit the fan unless you’re some type of Zerg/Tyranid type life that acts like space locusts, and #2 requires pretty devoted backers (think space Mormons like The Expanse).

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It's an interesting thought experiment.

* Mankind discovers fundamentally new science regarding propulsion, energy storage, energy production, biology, VR and consciousness
* Mankind develops new technology around that science that enables rapid growth of human populations on Earth and around it. People aren't dying that much, they can spawn new children in growth chambers and raise them with AI robots. There is no resource scarcity and people spend as much time in VR chambers as they do in parks and it's still healthy.
* Within a few hundred years the solar system becomes teeming with life largely unencumbered by resource scarcity. Thrill, adventure, self-gratification and propagation become tier 1 objectives for many people.
* Erstwhile, mankind develops massive telescopes to identify stars with high likelihoods of survivable planets, all while developing tech to survive in increasingly hostile planets.
* This combination of changes is enough to motivate people to sign up for 50+ long cruise ships to explore Alpha Centauri or whatever stars might have decent planets. Who cares because we spend most all our time in holodecks anyway.
* Mankind starts blasting out these cruise ships. Some find shit-tier planets, others find mediocrity, some very rarely find goldilocks planets and stay there.
* An interstellar cruise ship with 10,000 people landing on a goldilocks planet engages in a rapid pioneering effort followed by mass population
* Rinse and repeat and we've filled out the milky way in the time it took us to go from using tools to building the internet.

Cybsled said:

The organic materials there might be toxic to us, the air composition different so that we can't breath. You'd be surrounded by life that you're essentially allergic to and air you can't breath without assistance.

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I wouldnt be surprised if this is the great inhibitor to expansion throughout the cosmos.

Though who knows maybe well come up with nanobots that act as terminators in your blood stream.

Tuco said:

It's an interesting thought experiment.

* Mankind discovers fundamentally new science regarding propulsion, energy storage, energy production, biology, VR and consciousness
* Mankind develops new technology around that science that enables rapid growth of human populations on Earth and around it. People aren't dying that much, they can spawn new children in growth chambers and raise them with AI robots. There is no resource scarcity and people spend as much time in VR chambers as they do in parks and it's still healthy.
* Within a few hundred years the solar system becomes teeming with life largely unencumbered by resource scarcity. Thrill, adventure, self-gratification and propagation become tier 1 objectives for many people.
* Erstwhile, mankind develops massive telescopes to identify stars with high likelihoods of survivable planets, all while developing tech to survive in increasingly hostile planets.
* This combination of changes is enough to motivate people to sign up for 50+ long cruise ships to explore Alpha Centauri or whatever stars might have decent planets. Who cares because we spend most all our time in holodecks anyway.
* Mankind starts blasting out these cruise ships. Some find shit-tier planets, others find mediocrity, some very rarely find goldilocks planets and stay there.
* An interstellar cruise ship with 10,000 people landing on a goldilocks planet engages in a rapid pioneering effort followed by mass population
* Rinse and repeat and we've filled out the milky way in the time it took us to go from using tools to building the internet.

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I think you just described the backstory of Warhammer 40k.

Sanrith Descartes said:

I think you just described the backstory of Warhammer 40k.

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The emperor protects.

When do we start purging? I'm ready.

Big Phoenix said:

Theoretical future human spacecraft wouldnt take 40k years to get to Alpha Centauri.

With fusion you could get there in around 100 years or so. Which is why on million+ year timescales we could easily colonize most of the galaxy.

Which makes you ask where are the Aliens? Is fusion impossible? Is other intelligent life nonexistent?

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Well there does seem to be enough hoopla about unexplained things buzzing around that it's hard for me to go "where are the aliens?"

It's occurred to me a few times that any ships we deploy towards Alpha Centauri (and Voyager for that matter) are going to just get passed up by future ships with better technology.

So at some point we might have some generational starship chugging along on a 400 year trip to Alpha Centauri with a crew whose descendants are going to finish the trip, and 70 years in they'll get zipped past by a smaller ship with hyperdrive technology on the same mission except it takes 8 years for them.

Maybe a faster ship is sent to stop and pick up the inhabitants of the slower ship, only to find that it's the grandkids of the original crew and they're all gripped with Space Madness, dressed in rags and acting like Khan's posse, enraged at the human race for marooning them before they were even born.

Anyway, I think space travel is actually incredibly hard, mainly because of the energy requirements and sustaining those levels of energy, not to mention that even the smallest bit of debris can turn into a vaporizing bullet if it hits a ship going at high speeds, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if almost zero advanced life-forms in the entire universe ever leave their own solar system / local planetary area for any reason because there just isn't enough of a reason to do that with the incredible difficulty of it.

In order for space travel to work well you'd need a species working in perfect synergy with each other over long periods of time, with a singular focus/goal and scientific know-how that doesn't deteriorate over time (plus power sources that are essentially infinite and self-perpetuating). Maybe a species of mechanoids or single-minded clones could do such a thing.

So yeah, part of me thinks that nobody ever leaves their own neighborhood and almost nobody can either, which is kind of depressing. Any unidentified advanced craft buzzing around our planet might well be from here (pick one: the ocean, the future, an alternate dimension, the far side of the moon, maybe one of the many Jovian moons we haven't gotten a good look at yet) rather than from somewhere else because even they can't do that.

meStevo said:

Roscosmos reports their Luna-25 lander has crashed in the moon.

It had an anomaly yesterday that last I saw they thought they had recovered from. Guess not.

Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft crashes into Moon

The unmanned craft spun out control before its planned landing on the Moon's south pole.

www.bbc.com

Meanwhile India's Chandrayaan-3 is doing very well so far, landing in a few days.

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I wonder how many of these crashes would have been avoided if they had a human crew on board flying it.

Sanrith Descartes said:

I wonder how many of these crashes would have been avoided if they had a human crew on board flying it.

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Considering the lander itself was like 70lbs, probably not a lot. Apollo's lander was ~30k lbs. A manned mission is on such a different scale that it's hard to compare it.

Besides the difference in scale, these kinds of missions really need to rely on unmanned operation to be sustainable. Even a manned mission to the moon that deploys a permanent base needs to be as remotely operable as possible.

Ukerric said:

127 seconds. Any computer engineer recognizes this.

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I don't recognize 127 seconds as a noteworthy number, but I also have never stored time as seconds in a signed char. I'm a 64 bit IEEE float seconds from unix epoch man myself, but also wouldn't be surprised if they used nananoseconds since GPS epoch since it's space and GPS doesn't have leap seconds.

My guess on what happened is: A number of things fucked up that we'll never find out about and even if we did, we wouldn't understand it without neil degrasse tyson explaining it with crayons. Anything we do hear will probably be equivalent to "the front fell off".

Tuco said:

I don't recognize 127 seconds as a noteworthy number, but I also have never stored time as seconds in a signed char. I'm a 64 bit IEEE float seconds from unix epoch man myself, but also wouldn't be surprised if they used nananoseconds since GPS epoch since it's space and GPS doesn't have leap seconds.

My guess on what happened is: A number of things fucked up that we'll never find out about and even if we did, we wouldn't understand it without neil degrasse tyson explaining it with crayons. Anything we do hear will probably be equivalent to "the front fell off".

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Im surprised no one in DC has said we hacked the code to avenge Ukraine.