Tag Search for "supermassive"

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@enoch

I think what you are doing with the argument about consciousness is rather confusing to me. It seems to me that you are applying our own consciousness to the universe as a whole, in the same way I look at my dog as a human ie: applying human reasoning to an animal that I really know isnt capable of it. (such as predicting or planning future events, like "My dog feels a sense of abandonment when I'm on vacation" etc.) My dog, and even more probable, the universe, doesnt give a shit that I'm in the next room or 4000 miles away, it doesnt know that I'm in a different country and it has no idea how long I might be gone. But its in our human nature to treat the things around us, and even the environment itself, as if it was socially connected with us, the way a fellow human might be.

Now, dogs may be more perseptive than one would think, and us dog-owners may be more right about our relationship with these animals than our research has been able to establish at this point, and there is even some mounting evidence that they understand us better than we could imagine. But again, we are talking about complex animals with very sophisticated brains that have undergone domesticating selection for thousands of generations. In other words, the human and conscious qualities that I unwittingly apply to dogs may not be entirely fictional.

But to apply this (consciousness,awareness,prediction or social behaviour of some kind)to the universe itself, is another matter entirely. Unlike the case with dogs, for example, there really is no evidence for this, there is no known mechanism, or even a credible potential mechanism, to give the universe an intelligence capable of conscious thought. In fact, all the evidence and knowledge we DO have, suggests that the universe is overwhelmingly indifferent, unintelligent, unconscious, and contains nothing but physical energy condensed into matter.

If the universe was conscious in some way, why would it, for instance spend 4 billion years evolving life, and eventually creating conscious creatures like ourselves around a burning fireball thats destined to explode and destroy it all within a few additional billion years, rendering the entire excercise completely pointless in the grand scheme of things. The universe will go on existing for at least a hundred billion years after that, and there will be no, absolutely NO sign that life ever existed in this part of that insignificant little galaxy (one out of a hundred billion) In fact that galaxy itself would be nothing but a supermassive black hole with fading stars(literally) around it. All our books and all our efforts, all our suffering and all our triumphs will be gone. forever.

Allright too gloomy, I know, but its the truth. we live here.. now, and we should appreciate our tiny visit to the spotlight. We are the universe understanding parts of itself, in a few short decade I will be no more, and in a few million years, mankind will be no more. We are conscious, now, and we are as far as we can tell, the only things that are.

We are the universe's consciousness.
As far as we can tell.
I say enjoy it while it lasts.

PHJF

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That makes up for Supermassive Black Hole.

siftbot

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You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Horizon: Supermassive Black Holes (2000 space documentary). Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

dannym3141

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>> ^charliem:
Like she said...she still didn't get it down to the schwarzschild radius. Either their model for black holes is wrong, or there isn't a black hole there.

Like she said, there are imperfections in the tools they are using. In her own words, correcting the atmospheric imperfections will allow us to see stars closer still than those we can see, meaning more mass, meaning closer to the radius. And who is to say we'll ever be able to see everything that is at the centre? Who's to say the means of correction don't provide false positives or negatives - if i corrected an image of a pebble under a stream, would i see 1 pebble, 2 pebbles, or half a pebble, and if i could never put my hand in and check, how would i know the truth? We'd need more and powerful telescopes outside our own atmosphere. What about the masses of objects that we don't yet know about that we have to identify through means other than direct observation? Yes?

God damn but her voice was annoying. Great video though.

BicycleRepairMan

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>> ^gwiz665:
I don't think the animations of a black hole as a 3D dent on the map is a simulation.. I think it's just an animation, and a poor one at that. (That's only in the beginning I've seen though, so I'm sure it will pick up later in.)

Yes, some of it isnt exactly top-notch animation, I agree with that, but those are visualizations of invisible stuff, so they would probably look atleast inaccurate, no matter if Pixar spent two years on them. I am talking about the awesome bits where you can see early universe web forming supermassive black holes, the galaxies colliding etc, which is simulated on a supercomputer, and then rendered as animation

BicycleRepairMan

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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.

joedirt

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Almanildo

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^Ornthoron
The graphics were horrible, but they did raise the interesting possibility of the two supermassive black holes merging. The extreme interactions between the two accretion disks would indeed be spectacular.

youdiejoe

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>> ^MarineGunrock:
Maybe it's because my heart has died and shriveled to the point that it collapsed upon itself creating a supermassive black hole, but all I can say is: "135 votes? Really? Meh."

You underestimate the power of the cute side...

MarineGunrock

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Maybe it's because my heart has died and shriveled to the point that it collapsed upon itself creating a supermassive black hole, but all I can say is: "135 votes? Really? Meh."

MarineGunrock

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I think I saw that documentary. They said they have compelling evidence that there is a supermassive black hole at the center of each galaxy. How cool is that!?