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What YOU Can SEE Through a $1 Billion, $32,000 and an $800 T

StukaFox says...

I remember the first time I saw the Ring Nebula through my Dobsonian and thought "man, that thing is really far away". Then I swung my scope to Cassiopeia's "W" and looked at the ghostly smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy. I tried to fathom the distance and came up lacking. My eyes were better then and I could see things in the mid-6s, but even with full night vision and using averted vision, I couldn't make out any detail; it was just a little wisp of light where the middle was a touch brighter than the edges.
That was the day I fully became an atheist. It made no sense that God would put a smudge of light 2.5 million light years away that was actually a trillion purposeless stars. I had no answer for that. Standing on that runway in the Sierra mountains, enveloped in blackness and looking at Andromeda, I felt a direct link between myself, time and the universe. I didn't need heaven anymore and I never felt the existential dread of death ever again. I understood that I was part of infinity and that was enough.

Vox: Why video games are made of tiny triangles

CrushBug says...

MDK2
Neverwinter Nights and expansions
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Jade Empire PC
Mass Effect PC
Mass Effect 2-3
Dragon Age 1-3
Mass Effect: Andromeda
Anthem

ant said:

Which games, you guys? I almost worked for Activision in 1998, but they didn't want me after my job interview.

Unreal Engine's Human CGI is So Real it's Unreal

Quantum Mechanics (Now with Added Ducks) - exurb1a

AeroMechanical says...

Because you look at your duck, you see that it's feet are sticking out of the water and you say to yourself, "aha, that means the other duck's head is out of the water."

And you're right, but, that's all you know (which is neat, but not useful). Moreover, it's not until either you or your buddy with his duck in Andromeda actually looks at their duck that the ducks actually take on their state. So you unfortunately cannot attach any significance (and thus information) to the state of a couple of ducks.

newtboy said:

Wait...so WHY can't duck buddies be used to make intergalactic phone calls?

The Ultimate Troll

Starships Size Comparison (Star Trek)

Vsauce - Human Extinction

MilkmanDan says...

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

krazyety (Member Profile)

The Helical Model

GeeSussFreeK says...

Ya, there is a group using this visualization to show that "gravity is a lie" so your spidey sense is right on the money. When you get down to it, the motion around the center of the galaxy is inconsequential, the orbit of the planets around the sun would be the same. And the gay spiral bs at the end, well, that is not taking into account the motion of the galaxy through deep space, making the the pattern of our motion through space just look like an oscillating mess, not a spiral. Not to mention we might get ejected when Andromeda smashes into us. In the end, all the mass in our solar system was created with angular momentum around the galactic core, and internally, the system was embedded with angular momentum around the sun.

rottenseed said:

This is a cool presentation and idea, however my spidey senses....they be tinglin'. The number one reason why is because of the various planar discrepancies this model offers. For the most part, relative to our point of view, the planets' orbits are coplanar (on the same plane). Maybe this model would offer the same "effect" but I'm not about to try the math. It just seems like a "earth is flat" theory to me (although more convoluted).

14 BILLION YEARS OF EVOLUTION IN ONE MINUTE

shagen454 says...

Boner: It is still confusing...

Astrophysicists have created the most realistic computer simulation of the universe's evolution to date, tracking activity from the Big Bang to now -- a time span of around 14 billion years -- in high resolution.

Created by a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) in collaboration with researchers at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), the Arepo software provides detailed imagery of different galaxies in the local universe using a technique known as "moving mesh".

Unlike previous model simulators, such as the Gadget code, Arepo's hydrodynamic model replicates the gaseous formations following the Big Bang by using a virtual, flexible grid that has the capacity to move to match the motions of the gas, stars, dark matter and dark energy that make up space -- it's like a virtual model of the cosmic web, able to bend and flex to support the matter and celestial bodies that make up the universe. Old simulators instead used a more regimented, fixed, cubic grid.

"We took all the advantages of previous codes and removed the disadvantages," explained Volker Springel, the HITS astrophysicist who built the software. Springel, an expert in galaxy formation who helped build the Millennium Simulation to trace the evolution of 10 billion particles, used Harvard's Odyssey supercomputer to run the simulation. Its 1,024 processor cores allowed the team to compress 14 billion years worth of cosmic history in the space of a few months.

The results are spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda that actually look like spiral galaxies -- not the blurred blobs depicted by previous simulators -- generated from data input that stretches as far back as the afterglow of the Big Bang, thus portraying a dramatic cosmic evolution (see the above video for a sneak peek of that evolution from four billion years after the Big Bang).

"We find that Arepo leads to significantly higher star formation rates for galaxies in massive haloes and to more extended gaseous disks in galaxies, which also feature a thinner and smoother morphology than their Gadget counterparts," the team states in a paper describing the technology.

Though the feat is impressive -- CfA astrophysicist Debora Sijacki compares the high-resolution simulation's improvement over previous models to that of the 24.5-metre aperture Giant Magellan Telescope's improvement over all telescopes -- the team aim to generate simulations of larger areas of the universe. If this is achieved, the team will have created not only the most realistic, but the biggest universe simulation ever.



>> ^BoneRemake:

this video is a waste without addition information.
what am I looking at. spiraling gas' or something.
what is the significance, why did nine people upvote something they probably do not understand.
what part of the universe is this ? why didnt it start at the beginning ?
WHY WHY FUCKING WHY.

Andromeda Software Development/ASD's Chameleon Demo (2009)

Andromeda Software Development (ASD) - The Butterfly Effect

Size of Galaxies Compared

Evolution is a hoax

Ryjkyj says...

>> ^shinyblurry:

There were about a hundred proofs in that series from all areas of science..typical of someone intellectually incurious, you pick one out and focus on that ignoring all the others..don't you get it..if even one of those are correct the theory of evolution can't be.
>> ^Ryjkyj:
OK, I watched it all and I have to say I am completely unmoved.
The only people who contend that radio-carbon dating is an exact science are people who don't know anything about it. The fact that carbon dating is inaccurate does not change that fact that it's the best method we have to try and determine the age of anything that precedes culture. You know what else is an inaccurate science: cancer treatment.
There are all sorts of reasons that carbon dating can get messed up, they are not hard to research, and no one out there, no one, is saying that they never get messed up. But it is still an infinitely better estimate than trying to determine the age of the Earth through someone's interpretation of scripture.
We need to use estimates all the time to try and paint our picture of the universe as we know it. If you look up the Andromeda Galaxy on wikipedia, wikipedia will tell you that the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away. The fact is, that's our best estimate. It might be only 2 million light-years away, or it could even be 4 million. We use our best estimate and our best understanding of science as it works at that time.
I'm curious, does the bible say anything about the distance of the Andromeda galaxy from Earth?



Oh, my apologies, I thought you were asking me to watch the video. I'll see if I can't watch the whole series.

Evolution is a hoax

shinyblurry says...

There were about a hundred proofs in that series from all areas of science..typical of someone intellectually incurious, you pick one out and focus on that ignoring all the others..don't you get it..if even one of those are correct the theory of evolution can't be.

>> ^Ryjkyj:
OK, I watched it all and I have to say I am completely unmoved.
The only people who contend that radio-carbon dating is an exact science are people who don't know anything about it. The fact that carbon dating is inaccurate does not change that fact that it's the best method we have to try and determine the age of anything that precedes culture. You know what else is an inaccurate science: cancer treatment.
There are all sorts of reasons that carbon dating can get messed up, they are not hard to research, and no one out there, no one, is saying that they never get messed up. But it is still an infinitely better estimate than trying to determine the age of the Earth through someone's interpretation of scripture.
We need to use estimates all the time to try and paint our picture of the universe as we know it. If you look up the Andromeda Galaxy on wikipedia, wikipedia will tell you that the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away. The fact is, that's our best estimate. It might be only 2 million light-years away, or it could even be 4 million. We use our best estimate and our best understanding of science as it works at that time.
I'm curious, does the bible say anything about the distance of the Andromeda galaxy from Earth?



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