Hip-hip-hip-hooray,
I'll be a red giant someday;
And your world will go up in flames...

Throwing anything into the sun that isnt hydrogen or helium is a bad idea, it would reduce its lifespan, hastening its eventual morph into a red giant, and swallowing earth whole!!

You are welcome as always. No one gets humor. It's a wonderfully awful enigma.

Twasn't till last night late that I realized how deep in space I have been not to see the so brightly shining new red giant Ruby Star that is you.

Congratulations my friend. Brilliant work. Your meteoric ascension continues.
In reply to this comment by Boise_Lib:
Hey chic, thanks for the upvote on this one
http://videosift.com/video/Rocketboom-Memories-Black-Holes

I actually thought she was pretty funny--just goes to show I have no idea what makes a good sift.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

The Making Of is good too.

Red Giant TV Episode #57: Behind the Scenes of Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo.

>> ^kurtdh:

Very funny stuff. Completely wrong though. The sun is never going to explode, it's too small. It will, however, eventually become a red giant, completely engulfing earth in the process. I guess that's why he's a comedian and not an astrophysicist


Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes that I'm sure all (successful) comedians live by...
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."

>> ^kurtdh:

Very funny stuff. Completely wrong though. The sun is never going to explode, it's too small. It will, however, eventually become a red giant, completely engulfing earth in the process. I guess that's why he's a comedian and not an astrophysicist


Well I think that's what he meant by "explode". "Expand" I guess is the same thing when you're talking about how a star envelopes and vaporizes your mother planet.

Very funny stuff. Completely wrong though. The sun is never going to explode, it's too small. It will, however, eventually become a red giant, completely engulfing earth in the process. I guess that's why he's a comedian and not an astrophysicist

Alistar McGrath is so full of crap.

"Why are [the laws of physics] so reassuringly fine-tuned to values that lead to the existence of life.."

You've got to be fucking kidding me. The universe, for all intends and purposes, is almost 100% HOSTILE to all life. even if we assume theres a billion planets out there like earth, thriving with life, that still leaves the vast majority of mass in states completely hostile to any life, either way to cold planets and gas-giants, or way too warm, or simply on fire like the stars. And thats only the insignificant part of the universe that actually is something at all. The universe is still almost 100% empty, cold space. Conditions in witch any sign of life would instantly freeze to death in utter darkness, so far from anything that you wouldnt even be able to make out any light at all, if you were there, which we never will be, because its too fucking far to imagine.

The thin film surrounding this tiny rock that we're standing on is the only known place that we, or anything else can live, and in a few hundred million years, the sun will swell to a red giant and turn the entire thing into a lump of coal that it will later swallow, and with the possible exception of the Voyager-1, there will be no signs that life ever existed in this part of the galaxy.

Fine-tuned my ass.

In reference to what i am getting from this thread is there is no God and this is all just one big cosmic coincidence? Now how much belief does that take?

2 points here, firstly, How much belief it takes? well, to me, its not really a matter of belief or "faith", its a matter of evidence. Scientists have studied the universe for a long time and concluded, based on EVIDENCE, that the universe is expanding at an exponential rate. By comparing stars at various distances, we can look back in time, literally, and see how the early universe looked and behaved. Which brings me to point number 2: "cosmic accident" is a gross oversimplification of our current understanding of the universe.

We have deduced, based on evidence that the early universe was much denser and hotter and simpler than it is now. Brian Cox used a snowflake as a metaphor, this old, "frozen" universe is complex and interesting, where as the early universe, like a melted snowflake, would just be a dense , hot gass of sorts, ultimately with only hydrogen in it. As Carl Sagan said: This (meaning us humans, earth and every living creature on it) is what you get when you give Hydrogen atoms 14 billion years to evolve.

Right now, our Sun with its immense gravitational pressure fuses 700 million tons of hydrogen into 695 million tons of helium, EVERY SECOND. 5 Million tons of pure energy is released, equaling something like 200 million Hiroshima bombs EVERY SECOND. Yet these extreme numbers are peanuts compared to the events that shaped our universe. Our sun simply isnt powerful enough to fuse helium and create heavier elements. For that, we need bigger "Weapons of Cosmic Destruction Creation" Supernovae, red giants, galactic collisions and supermassive black holes, nebulae and gas clouds beyond all imaginations. From cosmic events like this, all the ingredients we take for granted here on earth, (like carbon etc) were originally created. Again when talking about grand stuff like this that I know little about, it is best to qoute Carl Sagan again:

We are the Stuff Of Stars.

I love that quote because it is literally true.

So thats the "accident" before life arose. The exact chemical reactions that gave rise to the first self-replicating molecule is not fully understood, but once that first barrier was crossed (achieving high-fidelity replication) Evolution by natural selection is INEVITABLE.It still took a good 2 billion years before cells start grouping into multi-cellular organisms, but when that revolution happened, we went from flatworm to primates in a measly 700 million years.

That account of the Cosmic accident is a far to brief, incomplete and rough draft of what happened, of course, I only mean to point out that this isnt some mad scientists guesswork. The processes and events above have been predicted, discovered, tested and examined and calculated and peer-reviewed and-- you get the point. They are our current best shot at understanding the universe, based on the available evidence. Naturally, much is left to discover, and thats what makes science interesting.

>> ^Shepppard:
I find the question to be loaded.
There's nothing anybody can do to prove the sun will come out tomorrow, Atheist or Christian.
There's always the possibility that the sun can supernova and that would A) First off, make it not come out the next day because there's no sun
and B)Not make it come out tomorrow because we just exploded.

Actually, no, our sun can never go supernova because it simply doesn't have the mass to go supernova. It will go red giant during its final stages, but that can only happen when it burns up a certain percentage of its fuel. And we know this won't happen soon because we can deduce at which stage our sun is.

Here are the translated lyrics:

In the space of just one slipped beat of the tongue
there is big bang and total entropy
from red giants to white dwarfs
the whole scale
of cosmic dimensions are falling
out of my mouth
in the description of a kiss
of the interimlovers

of the interimlovers
in the interim

between microphone and macrocosm
between chaos and on no course
between plankton und philisophia
between semtex and utopia

there they are
the interimlovers

in their communal mouth
lives a hummingbird
with each humming beat of its wings
too swift for the eye to see
cultures flourish and perish
whole continents vanish
here are no harmless words
all by far too large
an example most simple explodes
in 10^14 for
the interimlovers

the interimlovers
in the interim

between toothache and oil of cloves
between genesis and sixsixsix
between c'' and vitamin c
between ultramarine and navy frigate

the interimlovers are intimate

the interimlovers
in the
INTERIM

in the course of just one winking beat of an eye
they have putsched
the government was felled
parliament dissolved
elections held
results annulled
new elections called
then finally exiled
in history reviled
I wade through the filth of mighty
metaphors
meta, meta, meta by metre
with gestures far too wide
for the interimlovers

the interimlovers
are lovers in the interim

between temporary and tenpura
between rope and sword dance
between times and on the seafloor
between semtex and utopia
they lay in each others arms

thirstily devour
that last little drop of light
they are not there yesterday
and tomorrow not yet
the lovers
the interimlovers
they are not there yesterday
and tomorrow not yet
not really
the interimlovers
they are not there yesterday
and tomorrow not yet)

If black holes could be formed by random high energy collisions of particles on a micro scale you would expect black holes to randomly, accidentally, be formed at any time during the life of a star. According to the maxwell-boltzmann distribution, in the core of a red giant, with a temp of 100,000,000K, a few protons per million would be moving at half the speed of light.

It might be the case that black holes don't really exist. That would solve the conundrum of how the big bang could ever have happened without forming an event horizon and collapsing back in on itself.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12089-do-black-holes-really-exist.html

It may remain slightly less dense than what is necessary to form an event horizon, by some quantum mechanical mechanism, but still cause enough gravitational redshift of outgoing light to render it almost undetectable.