Lightning's been in the news lately, after a paper in Nature described how gamma rays from lightning result in matter-antimatter annihilation.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171122131353.htm

(or DOI: 10.1038/nature24630)

My long time issue with the "they would be too intelligent/evolved to have any interest in us" type scenario, such as he puts as number two here, is that we go through great lengths to try and research and understand very primitive life. There are efforts being made to talk to dolphins and apes. We're looking to build ships to crash or land ships onto Titan to see if there is microbial life on a moon orbiting a gas giant, not to mention work to see if Mars once upon had life. So the very fact we're able to get off our little rock (though not much off it), I think would warrant a stop and look, perhaps to help answer what was life like at such an early stage of evolution.

Not said stop and look doesn't imply any sort of communications. Indeed there may be a Prime Directive like thing with them where by they see and observe, but leave no evidence of such a visit (alien abductions being just mental illness coupled with abuse or other issues).

Now distance is a super valid point, but by far the most likely point is the survivability window, which he talks about in point three. We're still a level zero civilization (Kardashev scale) and decades until we reach a level one civilization (unfortunately it seems delayed even further due to some very anti-science moves being made by certain groups). Moving up that scale is only one thing, avoiding killing ourselves via war is another huge one. With CRISPR technology advancing, there is a very real danger of a Division/Stand/Utopia type disease coming to the foreground, especially if driven by a zealot (ala Division and Utopia). I highly doubt a man made black hole or something, but war or a CRISPR engineered disease... Not to mention the natural disasters he mentioned, and others, such as huge gamma ray bursts and others that we've managed to avoid. And we'd have to think that most civilizations go through somewhat similar phases, with a universe that is fairly hostile to life, even if many planets are capable of at least starting life. Generally I figure that most civilizations never make it past the stage we are at now, and those that do probably don't get to stage two and beyond (to be fair, I doubt any civilization can achieve stage two on Kardashev's scale as it goes beyond knowledge needed, but materials and more).

Back to the technology of communications point. I've generally figured if you are space faring, you gave up on radio communications and are using strange properties or something along those lines.

Thanks! this has been my jam today.

I was expecting a blinding flash of gamma rays any second after I heard that; or perhaps a tornado taking the siren to air...

Ok guys, Genetically Modified Organism refers to both "artificial selection" and "genetic engineering". But both are not the same. Artificial selection has gone on for millennia while genetic engineering has been going on for only a few decades. Genetic engineering comes in many forms: gamma ray bombardments for chaotic mutations, splicing and dicing genes, implanting and hormonal reproduction of clones can indeed create many monsters both visible and invisible. The invisible monsters and the toxins they can create with their genes are the threat here. The manufacture of biological warfare, virus engineering and playing with the elements that make up life without understanding the consequences is the threat here. The bullying of corporations playing God and patenting their spreading genes are the threat here. Not the fact that apples or cows are bred to be bigger and juicier. Give me a fucking naive simpleton break, gawd that was disappointing.

I don't mind if a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required to enjoy a movie but when your writing is shitty or your basic premise is too silly that won't help. Some things just make people cringe, some tropes and clichees just become too stupid. Especially if you take yourself too seriously.
I don't have to watch "The Happening" to know it's a ridiculous movie that'll make me roll my eyes 'till I'm dizzy. Or make me laugh hysterically about it.
It's the same here. A really stupid and completely wrong pseudo-fact about brain is exploited to tell a superhero story. If the very first response you get is "Brains don't work this way. Good night!" you have a problem. And that's coming from someone who's perfectly willing to accept that gamma rays make you a green ragemonster.

Actually, whether or not the dust was dangerous would depend on what sort of emitter it is (alpha particles, beta particles or gamma rays), how quickly it was emitting and whether the actress inhaled the dust or it was just on her skin. For example, alpha particles can only penetrate a few cells deep when attempting to pass through skin but if she inhaled something that was giving off alpha particles then she would be in some serious hot water. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_particle#Energy_and_absorption
and here: http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/alpha.html

Not according to David Thompson, a NASA astrophysicist and deputy project director on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope who compares the risk to Earth from a future gamma-ray burst to "the danger I might face if I found a polar bear in my closet in Bowie, Maryland. It could happen, but it is so unlikely that it is not worth worrying about."

There's a greater chance that one (or more) of the stars within about 6000 light years or so could give off a gamma ray burst that would wipe out any life in the solar system, no matter where we hid it. It's been postulated the previous-to-the-Yucatan-asteroid large scale die-offs could have happened due to GRB.

actually -- Earth being hit by one of those mega gamma ray bursts out there in the universe, that's my favourite

O by the by, neutrons decay in free-space, in other words, free neutrons are radioactive. With a decay time of less than 15 mins, it means 2 things: slow neutrons will be less detectable at distance because they decay, you still need to be relatively close to the source of neutrons to detect them regardless of speed. Neutrons are also the only form of radiation that will make things radioactive, meaning if you get to close and the bombardment is to intense , you can cause damage to your equipment via internal radiation of beta and gamma rays.

This is also why they use water in nuclear reactors, hydrogen, and in particular deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron) slow neutrons better than anything. Water is mostly hydrogen by mole, so it is a very good moderator, both light water (regular water) and heavy water (deuterium water).

What is happening in this particular case is known as nuclear spallation. When a high energy proton hits something like carbon or nitrogen, it will at times knock a proton or neutron loose. Those neutrons are moving at relativistic speeds in most cases, so on the flip side, when those neutrons bounce their way out back to space, if there is water in the way they get slowed way down...enough that they decay before they reach the detector.

This is the same exact effect that allows for carbon dating, sometimes, the high energy neutrons that come out via spallation will in turn knock out a proton from a nitrogen atom, it then becomes mildly radioactive carbon. This happens at a relatively predictable rate, and since the decay of carbon 14 is also predictable, dating is possible.

Science rant over

Light doesn't have one set speed. Each frequency of light travels at slightly different speeds. I've long had this theory, and NASA has since confirmed it. We have detected very slight differences in the time it takes different frequencies of light to travel a set distance.

As such, we cannot say light has "a" speed, but rather a range of speeds. Therefore, could it also then be possible that the speed of an individual photon can be adjusted by various means in order to either speed up or slow down?

The answer is yes. Scientists have managed to slow the "speed of light" all the way down to 38mph. How is this possible? Well, as light has mass (albeit, a very miniscule amount), it will slow when traveling through a material, such as water, glass, oil, or even air. Passing the light through a super-dense, ultra-cooled material magnifies this effect.

As we already know different frequencies of light travel at slightly different speeds, and as we also already know, we can only visibly perceive a very narrow range of frequencies (for example, we cannot see infra-red or ultra-violet, or x- or gamma-rays), isn't it then perceivable that there are frequencies of light outside of what we can see that do travel faster than "the speed of light"?

And if this is true, then what else could travel faster? Are there things we can't even hope to detect simply because they exist in our timeframe for an impossibly short amount of time?

Part of the reason light is able to travel as fast as it does is its incredibly small (by our standards anyway) mass. What if mass is infinite? What if you could shrink yourself down to the size of a photon, or better yet, small enough to live on that photon as if it were the Earth. From your new perspective, the photon would appear to be very large, and as you are now traveling with it, that photon does not seem to be going as fast. You may see things that are even smaller and appear to move even more quickly, but something like the Earth would be imperceptible to you because you are so miniscule. It would be as the Universe to you--impossibly large, and inconceivably tangible. While you would know it is there, it would stand before you as a gigantic, unknowable concept, and things even larger than that would exist merely as mists of an imaginary daydream.

Now, imagine that the electromagnetic spectrum is infinite in both directions as well. Consider the possibility that, along with light, x-rays, gamma radiation, radio waves, and all the other things we know to make up the electromagnetic spectrum, sound is also part of that spectrum. Consider that light, being high in frequency exists near the top of what we can perceive of the spectrum, and sound is near the bottom. The vibrations become so slow and so wide toward the bottom that they effect the air and other matter around us, creating sound. And while we cannot see it, we perceive it with other sensory organs. Imagine that you could slow down light to the point that you can hear it, or speed up sound to the point that you can see it.

Now take another hit before that feeling goes away.

>> ^CelebrateApathy:

Get up off your couch, walk to your bathroom and look in the mirror. Be honest, If you woke up tomorrow and could all of a sudden do the things this man can, you would likely think you were bitten by a radioactive spider and had become a superhero. It truly is amazing what the human body, even sans gamma rays, can accomplish.

I'd be pissed off that I didn't get a useful superpower.

Get up off your couch, walk to your bathroom and look in the mirror. Be honest, If you woke up tomorrow and could all of a sudden do the things this man can, you would likely think you were bitten by a radioactive spider and had become a superhero. It truly is amazing what the human body, even sans gamma rays, can accomplish.

Hi, thank you for taking the time to reply, and sorry I didn't write back straight away. Obviously you're right in that they clearly don't mean to say that everything beyond the visible is pink, because that's self-evidently not true, and they know it, because they're not stupid. So yeah, it's all bit "well, obviously", if you see what I mean. Again, thanks for the considered reply

In reply to this comment by oritteropo:
I watched it again, and they're not saying that radio waves are pink, they're saying that you can't see them... but that pink fills the spot on the colour wheel that would otherwise be filled by the invisible radiation.

They could've made it clearer, but they didn't say what you thought. What they did say isn't exactly wrong just not clear.

Fair enough that it's hardly worth counting UV vision in certain lens enhanced people, I just thought it was cool.
In reply to this comment by FlowersInHisHair:
>> ^oritteropo:

I think they mean that if you try to wrap the visible spectrum around a colour wheel, then it works for the red,green,blue,violet part and then stops working when you get to the magenta/pink/negative green part.
To quibble a little with your claim that anything out of the visisble spectrum is invisible, people who have had cataract surgery can see potentially light slightly outside the normal visible range (all right, not gamma rays, but still)... http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/605905
>> ^FlowersInHisHair:
The claim made in the video that we see all the non-visible wavelengths of light/EM radiation as pink is patently false. We know this because gamma rays aren't pink, they're invisible.


That's not what they're saying though. They are quite clearly saying that the vast area outside the tiny wavelengths we can see are perceived by human eyes as pink. If that were true, there would be so much light bouncing around that that we percieved as pink that we wouldn't be able to make anything else out.

And I quibble with your quibble: anything outside of the visible spectrum is invisible by definition, isn't it? The slight increase in the visible spectrum in a minority of the people who've ever had cataract surgery is hardly worth counting in this regard as it's not considered normal vision.