This is wonderful. But. It's more of a eulogy for Pink Floyd than a critique or analysis of the song.

I love it. But it's the weakest in a fantastic series.

But. This and its predecessors have definitely convinced me that I want a subscription to Nebula for Christmas. A thank for a job well done. My attention is limited, but I can see myself spending a bit less time here on the sift than I have, just because the sift has been so good.

Let's see. I'm not leaving you all. At all. Let's see.

Your video, Flight Through Orion Nebula in Visible and Infrared Light, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I know it's mentioned at the end of the vid, but I want to do a quick PSA for Nebula. Don't mean to sound too much like an ad, but if you like edutainment-type videos there really is a lot there for your money.

I will say Nebula's platform tech is a bit rough at present. So far as I know there's just the web version and iOS / Android apps. I really want a Roku app, which should exist eventually. I'll note that for some reason the web version is limited to the most recent 100 videos on each channel, while the mobile versions don't have that limit (a bug of which the service is aware).

I tend to watch quite a few of what had been my favorite YT channels on Nebula now, to get the ad-free / slightly longer versions (I think they show up slightly earlier too). This channel, Legal Eagle, Wendover... discovered a few others I'd not have run into as well. So yeah - unpaid endorsement over.

(Edit - I didn't realize he mentioned Logistics of D Day at the end of the video - it's damned excellent if you're into WW2 stuff.)

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.

So for anyone else who thinks "Oh, that's cool, I'm going to sign up at Curiositystream to watch the rest" - yeah, turns out if you don't do it through the referral link you don't get the Nebula trial. Whoops.

Your video, Fly Through a Nebula 163,000 Light Years Away (30 Yrs...), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 251 Badge!

Yay Nebula!

Your video, Hubble Space Telescope fly-through of the Gum Nebula, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 12 Badge!

Quite a few have fallen past me, I have no console, only play PC.

New Austin - Red Dead Redemption
Bullworth Academy - Bully
City 17 - Half Life 2
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New York - Mafia
Trevelyan's Bunker (Cuba) - Goldeneye
2Fort? - Team Fortress 2
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Nos Astra, Illium, Crescent Nebula - Mass Effect
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Mario somethingorother
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Panau - Just Cause 2
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Rapture - Bioshock
San Andreas - GTA:SA
Skyrim - Elder Scrolls V
USG Ishimura, in orbit around Aegis VI - Dead Space
Vice City - GTA-VC
Midway - Battlefield 1942
XEN - Half Life
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Meh. Keep yer X-Playwiis.

Hacked it all off for the role of Nebula in Guardians of the Galaxy.

You sir clearly do not fully understand the nature of entropy (and nor does about 95% of the human race so you can be forgiven there).

You have however stumbled into making a genuinely worthwhile point here (though I must state I think for completely the wrong reasons).

The idea that the universe inevitably moves towards a complete "heat death" is I think incorrect, it fails to account for the effect of ever increasing complexity within the closed systems the universe produces (i.e. evolution which applies as much cosmically as it does to organic life on earth).

If the universe remained with no more complexity than it currently has then yes everything would eventually "burn out" and spread the energy of the universe so thinly that everything would cease to work (if only on a space-time level).

But the nature of the universe does not remain static, it creates ever more complex and actuated systems dialectically. Energies>Particles>Compounds>Nebulae>Stars>Planets>Organisms>Unconsciousness>Consciousness>???>God! (not intended to be an exhaustive list it's purely for illustration)

Evolution does trump entropy IMHO but this is largely because the actual laws of entropy are crazy complicated to understand and most people (including to some extent myself) don;t fully understand the subtleties of how it really works.

If nothing else; to say that the whole universe eventually enters a state of complete entropy assumes that every complex closed system that does or ever will exist will eventually break down. This is far from a forgone conclusion, we alone as evolving conscious creatures are capable of developing means to circumvent or even prevent this. Let alone what other wonders we have yet to observe or the universe has yet to manifest!

In conclusion: The Universe evolves until it reaches God (or dies trying ). God does not then create the universe but rather commits suicide (what else is God to do? Eternity is a very long time for someone that already knows and has done everything...). Process repeats ad infinitum.


Makes a lot more sense that way around don't you think? (and no ancient books of dubious origin need ever be consulted to derive it either)

Saying God created the universe only leaves you with more questions which by their very nature cannot be answered. We would have to be God itself to ever answer them, so we are left with a judgement call. No logical certainty, only faith.

This way around we can by pure rationalism and empiricism arrive at an explanation of how the universe might evolve God via ever increasing complexity of consciousness and actualisation (true post-humans alone would be like demi-gods, it's not a huge leap to keep taking this idea further)

Further to that Ontological mathematics (that is to say "really real mathematics") can assess a framework to understand how the universe itself came to be (we can arguably go pre-big bang with this but that's always going to be a controversial idea here).

^ Now I might be wrong about some or even all of that but it is at least a reductive argument. Using God as an explanation for anything without first explaining God is always going to be a circular argument. If your going to use circular logic you can prove basically anything you feel like!

"God is dead!"

Old hat.

"We cannot observe supernova remnants across our entire galaxy – basically nebulae. Supernova events we can see across the visible universe, but the actual gaseous remnants are much fainter because they are more diffuse. Because of dust and gas in the way, we cannot see all the objects in our own Galaxy. Probably the farthest we can see into the galaxy is maybe to a distance of 10,000 light-years. The galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across. Doing a simple calculation of the area of a disk 10,000 light-years vs. 100,000 light-years (but 50,000 light-years in radius) yields an area of our galaxy about 25 times larger that we can NOT survey for supernova remnants vs. what we can.

So now, we need to multiply our 10,000 years by 25, giving us 250,000 years for the age of the galaxy.

The next part is that supernova remnants don’t just form out of nothing, they form from the explosions of dying stars. The stars that live and die the fastest still take about 10,000,000 years before they “go nova” and release a cloud of debris that will later become what we observe. That’s pretty much the minimum time a star can “live” during the current epoch of the Universe. Only after that will we see a supernova form.

So, add that to our estimate of the age by the number of stars and we have 10,250,000 years, or 10.25 million years for the age of the galaxy. You should note at this point I’ve been saying “age of the galaxy.” That’s because this would only be used to date our galaxy, not the Universe as a whole. So you need to add in the time for galaxy formation … which is still a number that’s hotly debated, but no respected astronomer will say happens instantaneously.

BUT, there’s another complication to this situation which shows why this apparent “method” for dating our galaxy isn’t valid: Supernova remnants fade! They only are visible for a few tens of thousands of years. What does this mean for our estimate of 1,000,000 years for the age of our galaxy? Well, by the time the “oldest” supernova is fading, we starting to observe supernova 200! We should only expect to see in the neighborhood of a few hundred supernova remnants in our vicinity, regardless of how old our galaxy actually is."

I've heard this "nubula-as-nursery" metaphor since I was 5 years old going to the planetarium, and I don't like it. If anything, nebulas are the galaxy's wombs primarily. Babies don't come from nurseries.

That said, I've learned a whole lot of new and interesting things about the Milky Way. Well worth my time.

Jesus Christ, the people who make that about Obama supporters just drive me nuts. (Segues into personal anecdote)

I used to work in an office in NYC. Not being from NYC, I was SHOCKED at the amount of people I worked with, smart capable people, who thought that it was so weird that I spent my spare time reading books. I used to have conversations like this about history all the time. I used to tell them stuff they couldn't believe, things that I thought at least a few people might know, but they were never interested, and they certainly could never even care to grasp the concept of history repeating itself. Again, these were capable, hard-working people that I respected. BUT...

They were the same people who were shocked, shocked, to find out that a presidential candidate could have the middle name Hussein. The same people who told me they heard about Obama's "true Muslim beliefs". The same people who questioned Obama's birth certificate when it was still a new idea. The same people who sent me chain e-mails with pictures of the Helix nebula that said things like: "astronomers call this the 'god's eye' and it's the biggest thing we've found in space".

I always though NYC was supposed to be this educated, literate, liberal place and I heard shit there that completely blew my mind (and not in a good way). These people are everywhere, in every age and in all walks of life. Never let yourself believe that they aren't.

And for that matter, never try to explain to them that history moves on, and common anecdotes and interests like the Titanic disaster become irrelevant and inessential to newer generations. Just like the survivors of the Titanic would've been mortified that you don't know the outcome of the Battle of Chancellorsville. I'm not trying to defend them, but I've certainly heard a lot fucking worse.

There have been a few possible theories, a more like a strong hypothesis, that has alternate ideas for the presence of Dark Matter. One of which is simply more a misunderstanding by us of the nature of what is happening at a fundamental level concerning the internal structure and spin of galaxies; their part and full presentation into the full dynamics--the true inner workings--isn't fully realized yet, but they assert a new reason for the discrepancy in how the galaxy spins at different radii in that galaxy and in fact kill off the need for Dark matter. Secondly, it's our mathematics involved that have created this absolute need for Dark Matter to even exist, which is explained in the last part about this subject below. Lastly, a few findings like the outer arms, the large gas/ice/dust/etc... volumes (nebulae and plasma lit regions) and the stars (and their systems)--their movement rate on the outside edge of their respective galaxies, which if like "normal physics" (I quote that because if we made a mistake, the fault will always be ours and not the Universes ) would seem to show that the inside should rotate faster than the outside edges, which is not what happens at all--they rotate at the SAME speed. The actual math involved to solve this little mystery shows that there HAS TO be a large chunk of the Universe missing to get the mathematics to finally spit out numbers that work out. They have provided their own set of new cosmological equations that describe the motion within a galaxy; as of this writing they have tried the new math equations on four different galaxies that are known well. The reason this one has most likely been called a theory as of late is due to their new equations completely and correctly describing the motion of those galaxies, from origin, even until their virtual deaths--that makes this small theory the strongest front-runner for getting rid of Dark Matter altogether. This was a large paragraph, I made it small to make it a tad more readable.

But, Dark Matter is a very well-held theory for the scientific community though and it still has quite a bit of evidence for it's case as well. It has much more proof than this smaller theory does, but it's good to keep an open mind and let your mind run free with new ideas every so often as it may give you a new idea as well. Due to an idea I heard from a physicist: Lawrence Krauss, I was thinking about the Universe and some implications concerning Quantum Mechanics with possible larger scale events that are occurring with cosmologists looking for ways to explain things, but they are basically on the run--the fresh ideas are gone. Because, of the little creative idea above that explains away Dark Matter it triggered a provocative idea, one that I'm not qualified to answer or really even guess at (beyond it's initial qualities)--so I will send the idea off and see if they can maybe visualize what I'm implying just a little more clearly. I'm not entirely sure there will be a correct way to view this idea due to it's near "virtual"-like impact on our Universe, one that may be unprovable except for three possible ways I can think of. Two of which are beyond are capability right now, but we will have the ability later and the last using Quantum Foam experiments to look for certain types of superposition maybe even using entanglement (it would need to be a semi-radical setup that is "one-sided" in nature and using information concerning Dark Energy, as I'll finish here at the end of the sentence) that may relate to information that might be probable to gain through later scientific gathering, like the expansion rate or if it's nature is confined merely to space-time or if it actually occurs eventually all the way down to the subatomic.

I had the idea that perhaps Dark Energy could actually be the tell-tale signs of an existing second Big Bang merely hidden under our collective noses due too space-time and it's nature (maybe it's fairly "structurally sound" when it comes to a bubble fight) or it's an active component of the Quantum Mechanical universe, perhaps directly attributed to the Quantum Foam. I'm wondering--and of course I've got no real idea what a Universe "pressing" upon us might do, if this could even happen--if Dark Energy is the pressure wave of perhaps a secondary Universe, probably very much like ours,but the logical, mathematical,constants, and theories have either become slightly different to a lot or the Universe is unlike anything in our book; but I'm assuming it came from the same Quantum Foam that got us here which means it may have more in common with us that we know.

I'm going to try and get some more feedback on this and see if it proves to go elsewhere and opens new doors.