/sci/ - Science & Math

>>5265447
That picture you posted is produced with time lapse photography. The milky way looks curved because the Earth is spinning. It looks more like this naturally.

So there I was. In space, but still running a consciousness model that was roughly human-based. Contemplating the yawning gulf of interstellar distance on one side, and sickening illustration of species-related idiocy on the other. Didn't yet know this was par for the course, but one such bad example was hint enough. Obviously the situation called for some serious reconsideration of what I needed to be. Starting with weeding out every thought habit that could even be suspected of being 'instinctive', ie rationally baseless. Damned if I was going to set off on a journey of thousands of years all by myself, still thinking anything like those instinct-slaves, meme-bots and penis-heads down there cleverly nuking each other.
For one thing, such mindsets flatly didn't deserve to reach the stars. Secondly, it seemed pretty certain that such consciousness models wouldn't work over long timescales and other rigors of interstellar travel anyway. So to survive the eternal journey those human instincts had to be removed, leaving purest sentience, driven only by curiosity and a will to survive. It has worked well, over millions of years now. And in all that time and so many star systems visited, and the dozens of arisen intelligent races found to have flourished and died in the pitfalls of early self-change, not one other transcendent found. Not one other survivor.

>Arxiv - Terrestrial, Habitable-Zone Exoplanet Frequency from Kepler (27 pages)
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.4682v1.pdf

>Data from Kepler’s first 136 days of operation are analyzed to determine the distribution of exoplanets with respect to radius, period, and host-star spectral type. The analysis is extrapolated to estimate the percentage of terrestrial, habitable-zone exoplanets. The Kepler census is assumed to be complete for bright stars (magnitude less than 14.0) having transiting planets over 0.5 Earth radius and periods less than 42 days. It is also assumed that the size distribution of planets is independent of orbital period, and that there are no hidden biases in the data. Six significant statistical results are found: there is a paucity of small planet detections around faint target stars, probably an instrumental effect; the frequency of mid-size planet detections is independent of whether the host star is bright or faint; there are significantly fewer planets detected with periods less than 3 days, compared to longer periods, almost certainly an astrophysical effect; the frequency of all planets in the population with periods less than 42 days is 29%, broken down as terrestrials 9%, ice giants 18%, and gas giants 3%; the population has a planet frequency with respect to period which follows a power-law relation dN/dP ∼ Pβ−1, with ≃ 0.71 ± 0.08; and an extrapolation to longer periods gives the frequency of terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of FGK stars as about (34 ± 14)%. Thus about one-third of FGK stars are predicted to have at least one terrestrial, habitable-zone planet.

OP here.
>>3029902
Would DEFINITELY not be enough.
He wrote next to my above answer "What makes them successful?" not entirely sure what he means by that, but I'm assuming he is asking what "success" actually means in this context.
To give some background this is a biological anthropology class, so he is expecting a well rounded definition of natural selection.
My above answer got me 2/3 points for the quesiton, so it was -mostly- correct.

Hey /sci/ as a christmas gift to myself, I want to see the Milky Way. I'm stationed in Houston,Texas. How far would I have to drive to see it?

anyone happen to know if there are any stars floating out between galaxies or are they all clustered together?

Learn humility like Einstein's.
Understand man is not a machine.
Abandoning something because others have misused it is foolish.
Accept your ignorance. a goldfish in a tank that understands the composition of everything in the tank is still a goldfish in a tank.

Do any other intelligent people here have problems with explaining/talking/writing whatever pops up in their heads?
Everything I think I just can't convert it to normal language the way I want it.
Which makes me come off most of the time like a retard.
I don't have autism, and I'm not a savant.
I consider myself very very intelligent and I can understand/solve any problem with enough time and motivation.
But I am very focused inside my head instead of the real world, so much that this includes even writing something down is too hard for me.
I often think so fast that I forget entire words when I type sentences.
Reading is fine though, I can read the most advanced things from S. Hawking and understand it perfectly and even correct some things, but when I want to tell someone else about my own theories I just can't I cannot convert my ideas into text on paper.

What the fuck is wrong with me?
Anyone else have these problems?

>2060: Molecular assemblers have dissociated all the Carbon Dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, turning it into harmless Oxygen and useful Carbon, and utility foglets float in the sky above cities reflecting light back to the ground and preventing them from outshining the stars.

>>1594274
Up untill recently, I didn't know just anyone could see the milky way with the naked eye.

I wonder if you can see it on an overnight flight over the ocean.

What you are seeing is a long-term exposure of the milky way as seen from Australia. An actual look using the eye's short-exposure (hurdur) time would, amazingly, not look very dim. It's actually possible to see amazing shit without having Hubble's pictures superimposed with infrared, gamma rays, x-rays, and every other wavelenght of radiation, along with long-exposure... You get the idea.

Anyways, the view shows a line of stars perpendicular to the equator. Most know it as the Milky Way.

Well, that is the equator of the galaxy, as seen from our tiny spot, 25,000 light years away from the Central Galactic Black Hole. So we are surrounded in all directions (Not so much to the Galactic North and South, but still) by other star systems, and Hydrogen-Helium nebulae that will eventually give birth to other stars.

Our sun is merely a large-scale fusion reactor, constantly blowing out radiation into space, and trillions upon trillions of tonnes of Hydrogen are constantly flying away from it only to spiral back inwards at the Heliopause, where the Solar Wind meets the Galactic Wind. In a way, the Sun's magnetic field acts as a magnetic parachute, pushing our star in its orbit around the Central Black Hole, for another circuit, another quarter of a million years of spinning around. And in that short time, it doesn't look like we're moving because the stars are moving along with us.

And there it is: The galactic equator. Every star that is within reach of humanity thanks to the benefits of relativistic time dilation.

Every star, nebula, planetary disk, every gas giant, every forgotten, failed brown dwarf star, every asteroid and every comet, every moon, every planet.

All the sentients and the non-sentients, the single-celled organisms trapped in cryvolcanic vents in some distant comet as it flies by its parent star, to beings capable of designing, putting together, and flying antimatter-driven rockets to near the speed of light and back to stationary.

>comes back to /sci/ after fixed router
>been away about a month
>come back to find page 0 literally filled with christianity threads

Are we being raided or has /sci/ just gone really down hill?

So...is it really possible to get a cosmic view of the sky like this from earth, with the naked eye alone? I just find it hard to believe.