The Astronomy Thread

Cybsled

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For it to be a gas giant, it is quite possible it formed closer than it is now and something knocked it into a further orbit. The early solar system was a lot more chaotic and full. For example, Earth is basically two planets that got mashed together billions of years ago. Uranus (uh huh huh huh) also has a messed up rotational axis which has been a mystery - imagine if it was thrown off by an interaction with this mystery planet
 
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Lambourne

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First hint at the next Starship test flight launch date, may 20th. Elon retweeted it so probably legit

 
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Ukerric

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"How far away do you have to go before the sun is merely a star like any other?"



About 1.5 light years. Right now, it is so bright where Voyager 1 in "interstellar space" is that the stars would still be washed out if we were there because it is brighter than a full moon.
 
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Big Phoenix

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The only reason there has been renewed interest in the moon lately is the discovery of water ice (which makes any lunar habitat significantly more viable if we can extract water on site), space mining interest, the aging ISS, and of course competition with China.
Long term the moon is the key to actual space exploration and settlement. It's the perfect place to establish industry to build space infrastructure.

It obviously will take a lot but once you have it up and running it will be what allows us to settle this star system. Case and point, it takes something like half energy to get to low earth orbit from lunar surface than it does from the surface of the earth. And it's low gravity and zero atmosphere allow you to use launch systems that impractical here on earth.
 
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Burns

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Neglected, overlooked, or just plain missed large crater in South America.
 
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Cybsled

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Interesting hypothesis related to the Fermi Paradox - Mitochondria and the creation of eukaryotes was effectively a fluke, so it may not be a guaranteed outcome on other planets even if life or even simple multicellular life is quite common

 
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Lambourne

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Next Starship test now scheduled for 630pm CT on the 27th. First launch with a refitted booster. Engine-out landing burn trial over sea so it will crash into the water, no tower catch attempt this time.

 
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Sylas

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Interesting hypothesis related to the Fermi Paradox - Mitochondria and the creation of eukaryotes was effectively a fluke, so it may not be a guaranteed outcome on other planets even if life or even simple multicellular life is quite common


how is this interesting? (intelligent) Life is rare? that's like the #1 on the list of dumbass reasons for the alleged Fermi's "Paradox" and is instantly debunked. Intelligent life has happened at least once and in a universe as near to infinite as to be indistinguishable it has happened an infinite amount of times, therefore, that ain't it champ.

Click bait title aside, there is a radically simple solution to the "Paradox." There is no paradox, there is no great filter, there is only a great speed limit. FTL travel is impossible, this being the only thing we fucking know with absolute certainty. Thus interstellar civilizations are impossible thus the universe is littered with the graves of single system species incapable of ever interacting with each other in any meaningful way.
 

Big Phoenix

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FTL travel is impossible, this being the only thing we fucking know with absolute certainty. Thus interstellar civilizations are impossible
Lack of ftl travel doesn't make it impossible just slows it down. Civilizations could still colonize the Galaxy in a few hundred thousand years.
 
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Sanrith Descartes

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Lack of ftl travel doesn't make it impossible just slows it down. Civilizations could still colonize the Galaxy in a few hundred thousand years.
Which begs the question of how do they survive the various trips at sub light speed? So either some form of sustainable food/water/other generation or some form of suspended animation?
 

Cybsled

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how is this interesting? (intelligent) Life is rare?

That is an offshoot, but more importantly it makes the suggestion that complex multicellular life itself could be very rare. If you watched the video, it discusses how life on Earth almost went extinct in the far past because it was less effective at adapting to changes in the environment. It also discusses how simple life is thought to have independently arose multiple times in Earth's history. Mitochondria and the creation of eukaryotes is thought to have only happened once, though. Of course, over a long enough time you could potentially get a replicated result on another planet somewhere in the universe. Or perhaps mitochondria/ eukaryotes are not the only path to complex multicellular life. I do agree that the Fermi Paradox/Great Filter are flawed hypotheses because we just have a sample size of 1 currently, so it is hard to extrapolate a universal truth just from that.

Which begs the question of how do they survive the various trips at sub light speed? So either some form of sustainable food/water/other generation or some form of suspended animation?

Depends how fast. Sub light but approaching the speed of light creates time dilation, so people on the vessel moving that fast would experience the passage of time slower than the rest of the universe. Of course, in that instance you're also talking about insane power requirements and other advanced technology to protect your ship - hitting even a single spec of dust at that speed would be catastrophic without some type of protection/defense.

At lower speeds, protection/defense is still a concern, but time dilation isn't as pronounced. At that point, you're either looking at generation ships or some type of advanced stasis technology. Both have their issues. Even if you could get to 1/3rd the speed of light, you're looking at trips that would take hundreds of years to travel anywhere outside our most immediate vicinity.

If there is advanced life out there capable of interstellar travel and they exist right now and are relatively close (let's say within 15 light years), without FTL travel they're still looking at a very long journey. Plus one concern is that even if you find a planet capable of supporting life, it doesn't mean you can survive on it. Atmospheric gas composition aside, it could simply be that every form of life, from bacteria to plants to bugs, are so genetically incompatible and alien to you that your body basically is allergic to everything and/or incapable of dealing with those things in general. War of the Worlds may have been the earliest example of fiction to potentially highlight this issue.

A more recent example was the fictional docu-drama Mars: It followed a fictional colony/base on Mars. in the 2nd season, they find evidence of primitive life on Mars and even revive some which was dormant. However, the primitive micro-organism was evolved for basically feast/famine mode due to the extreme dry conditions on Mars, so water rich bodies of people caused it to go into feast mode and basically rapidly grow/reproduce in our water rich environment (us), causing a rapid fatal reaction in infected people. The Expanse books also touched on this in the later part of the series.
 
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Sylas

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Lack of ftl travel doesn't make it impossible just slows it down. Civilizations could still colonize the Galaxy in a few hundred thousand years.
Missing a few zeroes there. Average distance between stars is 4LY in a close cluster. Average number of stars with a habitable earth like planet is 1 per 1-10k stars, (7% of stars are sun like, and up to 10-20% of those have earth like planets, based on current optimistic estimates. But "earth like" just means rocky/iron core/magnetic field and includes massive planets 3-10x the mass of earth which is bullshit.) Earth is the absolute limit of chemical energy's ability to reach escape velocity. meaning if Earth were even 10% more massive than it is, we could never escape orbit. Actual number of planets you could potentially colonize and then eventually leave again with a new generational ship to continue spreading is off by an order of magnitude.

Even ignoring all the things that make it fucking impossible (see quotes below), the time and distance separating any world and it's generational ship heading out to colonize the closest habitable neighbor would be 40k-400k years, assuming they could find a way to accelerate to 10% c. That's a big IF in and of itself, but you're talking 20k generations of people living in space, You'd be a completely different species by the time you arrived, and you're so separated by time and space that you'd never, ever be able to communicate with your ancestors.

That's not an empire, that's just moving.

Which begs the question of how do they survive the various trips at sub light speed? So either some form of sustainable food/water/other generation or some form of suspended animation?
Depends how fast. Sub light but approaching the speed of light creates time dilation, so people on the vessel moving that fast would experience the passage of time slower than the rest of the universe. Of course, in that instance you're also talking about insane power requirements and other advanced technology to protect your ship - hitting even a single spec of dust at that speed would be catastrophic without some type of protection/defense.

At lower speeds, protection/defense is still a concern, but time dilation isn't as pronounced. At that point, you're either looking at generation ships or some type of advanced stasis technology. Both have their issues. Even if you could get to 1/3rd the speed of light, you're looking at trips that would take hundreds of years to travel anywhere outside our most immediate vicinity.

If there is advanced life out there capable of interstellar travel and they exist right now and are relatively close (let's say within 15 light years), without FTL travel they're still looking at a very long journey. Plus one concern is that even if you find a planet capable of supporting life, it doesn't mean you can survive on it. Atmospheric gas composition aside, it could simply be that every form of life, from bacteria to plants to bugs, are so genetically incompatible and alien to you that your body basically is allergic to everything and/or incapable of dealing with those things in general. War of the Worlds may have been the earliest example of fiction to potentially highlight this issue.

A more recent example was the fictional docu-drama Mars: It followed a fictional colony/base on Mars. in the 2nd season, they find evidence of primitive life on Mars and even revive some which was dormant. However, the primitive micro-organism was evolved for basically feast/famine mode due to the extreme dry conditions on Mars, so water rich bodies of people caused it to go into feast mode and basically rapidly grow/reproduce in our water rich environment (us), causing a rapid fatal reaction in infected people. The Expanse books also touched on this in the later part of the series.
 
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Sylas

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That is an offshoot, but more importantly it makes the suggestion that complex multicellular life itself could be very rare. If you watched the video, it discusses how life on Earth almost went extinct in the far past because it was less effective at adapting to changes in the environment. It also discusses how simple life is thought to have independently arose multiple times in Earth's history. Mitochondria and the creation of eukaryotes is thought to have only happened once, though. Of course, over a long enough time you could potentially get a replicated result on another planet somewhere in the universe. Or perhaps mitochondria/ eukaryotes are not the only path to complex multicellular life. I do agree that the Fermi Paradox/Great Filter are flawed hypotheses because we just have a sample size of 1 currently, so it is hard to extrapolate a universal truth just from that.
I did watch the video. It's click bait, it's sci-fi.

This super rare thing that only happened once? Of course the video then admits and glosses over that it happened multiple times. Hello, Chlorophyll. So that super rare thing has happened more than 100% of the time. 100% of the time it works every time. And once you break it down to a fundamental level its "how often do 2 life forms form a parasitic/symbiotic relationship where one lives inside the other?" and the answer is all the goddamn time. The 10 billion bacteria living inside your gut would like a word.

Yes with a sample size of 1 it's hard to really make the math work but that's kind of the point.

The truth is kind of depressing and doesn't inspire anyone to dream so we dress up fantasy and pretend it's science, I guess that makes me a debbie downer but i wish we'd stop giving shit like this any credence, it's not even pseudo-science it's straight fantasy. The fermi paradox is less realistic than Warhammer 40k. It requires magic so may as well throw in space elves and the god emperor.

The gravitational forces of supermassive blackholes that hold galaxies together can't even accelerate matter to the speed of light but we're going to do it, or we're going to lasso together a couple of black holes, shrink them down so they fit on ships (things that are by definition already the smallest thing that matter can even be, we'll find a way to fit them on our space ships), and use them to tear holes in the fabric of spacetime so that we can jumpdrive, stargate, portal our way around the universe, yeah ok.

The only way we're reaching FTL travel is via some event horizon, warhammer warp portaling through hell.
 
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Cybsled

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Right, unless we can figure out how to fold space or wormholes are real or we discover some completely new aspect of physics, then FTL based on our current understanding isn't possible. And if that is the case, then the only feasible reason to invest in such a journey would be because you need to GTFO of the solar system or die.
 
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Chanur

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That is an offshoot, but more importantly it makes the suggestion that complex multicellular life itself could be very rare. If you watched the video, it discusses how life on Earth almost went extinct in the far past because it was less effective at adapting to changes in the environment. It also discusses how simple life is thought to have independently arose multiple times in Earth's history. Mitochondria and the creation of eukaryotes is thought to have only happened once, though. Of course, over a long enough time you could potentially get a replicated result on another planet somewhere in the universe. Or perhaps mitochondria/ eukaryotes are not the only path to complex multicellular life. I do agree that the Fermi Paradox/Great Filter are flawed hypotheses because we just have a sample size of 1 currently, so it is hard to extrapolate a universal truth just from that.



Depends how fast. Sub light but approaching the speed of light creates time dilation, so people on the vessel moving that fast would experience the passage of time slower than the rest of the universe. Of course, in that instance you're also talking about insane power requirements and other advanced technology to protect your ship - hitting even a single spec of dust at that speed would be catastrophic without some type of protection/defense.

At lower speeds, protection/defense is still a concern, but time dilation isn't as pronounced. At that point, you're either looking at generation ships or some type of advanced stasis technology. Both have their issues. Even if you could get to 1/3rd the speed of light, you're looking at trips that would take hundreds of years to travel anywhere outside our most immediate vicinity.

If there is advanced life out there capable of interstellar travel and they exist right now and are relatively close (let's say within 15 light years), without FTL travel they're still looking at a very long journey. Plus one concern is that even if you find a planet capable of supporting life, it doesn't mean you can survive on it. Atmospheric gas composition aside, it could simply be that every form of life, from bacteria to plants to bugs, are so genetically incompatible and alien to you that your body basically is allergic to everything and/or incapable of dealing with those things in general. War of the Worlds may have been the earliest example of fiction to potentially highlight this issue.

A more recent example was the fictional docu-drama Mars: It followed a fictional colony/base on Mars. in the 2nd season, they find evidence of primitive life on Mars and even revive some which was dormant. However, the primitive micro-organism was evolved for basically feast/famine mode due to the extreme dry conditions on Mars, so water rich bodies of people caused it to go into feast mode and basically rapidly grow/reproduce in our water rich environment (us), causing a rapid fatal reaction in infected people. The Expanse books also touched on this in the later part of the series.
This is why you would use technology to do the work for you. Either mechanical or bio/mechanical drones/robots etc.
 

Chanur

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Right, unless we can figure out how to fold space or wormholes are real or we discover some completely new aspect of physics, then FTL based on our current understanding isn't possible. And if that is the case, then the only feasible reason to invest in such a journey would be because you need to GTFO of the solar system or die.
Which is a 100% certainty.
 

Sylas

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This is why you would use technology to do the work for you. Either mechanical or bio/mechanical drones/robots etc.
?? we've done this. Voyager is heading out to space right now. few million years it'll even escape the Oort cloud. We'll long since have lost the ability to communicate with it or receive any information from it so it's kinda a moot point, assuming we're even still alive.

The human mind simply cannot grasp how big space is and the futility of it all.
 

Sylas

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Right, unless we can figure out how to fold space or wormholes are real or we discover some completely new aspect of physics, then FTL based on our current understanding isn't possible. And if that is the case, then the only feasible reason to invest in such a journey would be because you need to GTFO of the solar system or die.
I know you are a smart person so i know you realize that your statement can just as easily be re-written to:

"Right, unless we can figure out how to make hogwarts real and start casting spells, then FTL based on our current understanding isn't possible."

exact same sentence.

Also I never really liked the cop out of "our current understanding of physics". It makes it seem like we can just slightly change some algorithm and all of sudden up becomes down or black becomes white or FTL becomes possible.

Einstein didn't invalidate Newton, and nothing Newton said was wrong, just incomplete, for edge cases. Gravity didn't stop working just because the mathematical formula explaining it was slightly updated. Just Like relativity isn't exactly correct either, and someday someone will come along with a slight variation of e=mc2 that accommodates for quantum gravity. Einstein and everything he said will still have been right, and the energy required to accelerate matter to the speed of light will still be infinity.

Teacher (Newton): 1+1 = 2
Little johnny: but what about edge cases huh? What about negative numbers? -1+1 is 0, not 2!!
Teacher (Einstein): Ok, absolute value. |1+1|=|2|.

The answer never becomes 3 just because we really want it to. FTL is still impossible, and anything that even could (theoretically) travel FTL would still go through time backwards.
 

Chanur

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?? we've done this. Voyager is heading out to space right now. few million years it'll even escape the Oort cloud. We'll long since have lost the ability to communicate with it or receive any information from it so it's kinda a moot point, assuming we're even still alive.

The human mind simply cannot grasp how big space is and the futility of it all.
You misunderstood what I'm saying. At our tech level it's not really feasible. How ever another hundred to a thousand years androids caring for a massive ship full of fertilized embryos and food could spend a few generations taking us to other worlds to populate.
 

Sylas

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Then i'll ask you to show your work on where the energy comes from. Ignore fueling the ship even, just tell me where the energy comes from to run the robots for 400k years it'll take us to get to the closest habitable planet? Let's say we even get to 30% c (which makes fueling your ship even more impossible, but lets pretend) so it only takes 150k years through mostly empty void with only distant starlight, what powers the robots?

The answer is always fantasy. matter replicators and perpetual motion machines. Just say you put on your robe and wizard hat and cast a spell, it's more realistic.

No, we'll send robots into space that'll be slightly better versions of Voyager who have initial velocity granted by chemical propulsion of the rocket and the occasional assist from planetary gravity that we knew about and calculated in the initial trajectory and it'll hit a speed many many many thousands of a % of c and that's the speed it'll have forever. And once it's too far away from the Sun to receive energy it too, will die. adrift in space.

If we were super concerned with perpetuating life we'd just load up space rocks with bacteria and let gravity do the work, floating around the Oort cloud, hoping a rogue planet comes by and throws off it's gravitational orbit and casts it out into the ether. Which is most likely the only method life has of escaping it's initial solar system and the probable source of life itself.
 
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