/sci/ - Science & Math

>>4223824
> Is space really so empty that we can gaze million of lightyears and not have any obstruction of vision?
Yep.

Yes, it is that empty.

eventually you're likely to end up seeing a galaxy of some sort. Or a blue dwarf galactic body

>>4223824
There are occasionally rocks or dust or "trees and buildings" and such, but the thing with those images is that we stare at that point in space for a long, long time, constantly taking in any light we can. In this case, the trees and buildings are always moving, and there are so few of them, so they never really get in the way too long.

>>4223837

Not only that, space is so large and empty that during galactic collisions, the probablity that any one object will hit another is virtually zero. They just merge together effortlessly.

>>4223851
>effortlessly

Poor wording on my part, someone give me another word to use in its place.

Seamlessly? Does that work?

this is a tiny area of the night sky that appears empty to the naked eye, or to a low-tech telescope.

>>4223858
gracefully?

>>4223862
>275x275

Why?

>>4223879
wasn't letting me post the big one
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Hubble_ultra_deep_field_high_rez_edit1.jpg

>>4223824
Space is much emptier than most people think. For example the asteroid belt is so empty you could fly straight through it and not come within a thousand kilometres of a rock.
What you say about looking out and eventually seeing something is one of the reasons we know the universe has existed for a limited amount of time. If it was infinite, or had an infinite number of stars, the night sky would be bright as the sun because whichever direction you looked in, you would be looking at something emitting light.

>>4223824
Yes. Space is empty. VERY empty. When our galaxy collides with its nearest neighbor, space is SO empty that any collisions will be rare, perhaps non-existance.

>>4223851
Say the Milky Way collided with Andromeda. Assuming we didn't hit anything, would we even notice, or would everything remain the same, perhaps with a prettier sky?

>>4223851

Yes and no. Those galaxy's have millions of stars with possible million more orbiting bodies around those stars. And who knows how much debris (failed stars, asteroids, comets, so on). We would be hard pressed to detect one collision in the galaxy merger. Much less likely due to the extreme time scale in which a galactic merger occurs. There will be collisions but whats more likely is that gravity will play a far bigger role. Slingshotting planets and stars and masses of gas like they are nothing. Gracefully? No. Not violent, but chaotic?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd9cBlvfjow&feature=related

>>4223862

'smaller than a 1 mm-by-1 mm square of paper held 1 meter away'

Fucking beautiful man.

>>4223913
This
>>4223912
We would not notice expect for the changing sky. But life on earth will be gone before this happens

>>4223928
>But life on earth will be gone before this happens

Fuck you.

>>4223928
How come? Will the Sun have blinked out by then?

>>4223957
The collision will be in 3-5 billion years, so it's possible that it will but probable that it will not have destroyed us at that point.

That said, earth will certainly be nothing like it is now. All it would take to end life is a meteor collision or a freak gamma burst.

>>4223967
Say we found a way to keep the Sun burning and didn't get smooshed by meteors or turned into the Hulk. We'd be able to see it all in the sky?

brb, freezing myself

>>4223957
Because in about .5 to 1 billions years, the sun will increase its radiant intensity by upwards of 105, evaporating the earth and nothing but a leaving a dry husk hot enough to sip lead martinis.

>>4223972
thats 10% not 105

>>4223970
Nothing dramatic, at least not without telescopes. Depending on where we are in the galaxy at the time (where andromeda hits us or not) we'll either see nothing much, or about twice as many stars in the sky as we do at the moment.

>>4223975
Aw, I was hoping we'd see something like this whenever we look up.

>>4223957
Meh. The sun's lifespan is irrelevant. If our descendants are around in a billion or so years, at which point the sun will become too hot for life as we know it on Earth, they'll have technology we can't dream of and will have will be able to extend its lifespan easily. That, geo-engineer the planet to survive without a star, or simply move the planet further away. Humans most likely won't last much longer, though. "Any organism at war with itself is doomed."

>>4223972
It's already increasing by 10% a billion years, it's part of main sequence. That's not the problem so much as the inevitable red giant phase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Earth.27s_fate

>>4223980
Sadly not :/

With a long exposure camera you might get something like this http://alteregostudiofromtheviewfinders.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/milky-way-5.jpg if we're in the right place. Otherwise, it's going to be pretty boring.

It's OK though, by then we'll all have died anyway.

>>4223988
>Implying I'm not pouring my faith into transhumanism and technological immortality because I fear death

And no, autocorrect, I didn't want to write 'transvestitism' there.

>>4223980
If you look carefully, you can see the entire constellations of Scorpius and Saggitarius in that image. You can't see nearly as many stars with the naked eye as with a sensitive camera, but you DO see the Milky Way when you look up from a dark site, and it's about what the Andromeda Galaxy would look like up close.

>>4223982

Or maybe they won't be sentimental babies about it and will just move on to other star systems, leaving Earth to burn to a cinder where it belongs.

>>4223988
It's sad that most people have never seen the Milky Way at all due to light pollution. It's really hard to describe how it looks from a properly dark sky, but it's quite beautiful.

>>4223996
Question: What do you define as you? do you want to keep your emotions, or your imperfect thinking ability?

I always liked the idea of upgrading myself, but at the same time I'm an idiot and a waste of technology. The problem I face is that my imperfections are all either emotional or cognitive bias, and they're a large part of who I am.

>>4224000
>>4224008
I've always wanted to see the Milky Way, but I don't know a good place. If I ever get around to climbing a mountain, I'll take a gander upwards at night.

>>4224006
Sod that, when we leave, we're putting Earth somewhere safe and turning it into a museum to our origin.

>>4224008
Is it really visible? I live in rural UK, miles from towns, and I've never seen it here. I couldn't see it from snowdon (tallest mountain in wales) either.
>>4224006
Earth is massively scientifically important, and will continue to be for as long as we live.

>>4224012
As long as I, from my point of view, never stop being alive, I'm happy. Be it robot bodies, transferable consciousnesses and vat-grown clones or by transcending matter entirely and being made of pure energy or living in a computer, I'm game.

>>4224008

I don't get how light pollution successfully blocks this out, I mean, it seems brighter than the moon or any stars we can actually see.

>>4224014
Sadly it's quite hard to find truly dark skies. Darkest place I've been at night was probably Yellowstone, but there are places that are even darker still.

I live in a relatively rural area, but the light pollution is still in the "yellow". It really sucks. You can see the Milky Way, but it's not especially impressive except on really clear nights.

>>4224025
I don't get this. If your method of thinking, and sensors, and interests all change how are you still you?

I would be happy to let an AI supercede me, knowing that it is a better machine than I.

>>4224032
It really isn't. You can't see the Milky Way at all during a full moon, for example. City lights can sometimes cause as much sky glow as the moon itself, if not more. The Milky Way only looks bright in photographs.

>>4224025

>>4224025

I've never understood why super rich people like Steve Jobs don't invest in cyrogenics and having themselves frozen shortly after death. Yes, we can't currently reanimate anyone and doing so seems impossible; but who's to say we won't be able to repair the cell damage in a thousand years? It would be like going to sleep and waking up in an instant, except a thousand years into the future. That seems like a much better option than letting yourself rot away, at least there is a small glimmer of hope.

>>4224037
My general thing is that if I'm still looking with the same view I have now, I'm me. If an AI superseded me and was exactly the same as me to everyone else, I wouldn't say that was me because I would be dead and not seeing anything.

I am really bad at getting my point across, I know.

>>4224033
looks like I'm on a yellow green border :/

That would make sense though. Even 10, 15 miles from any population centres I can normally only make out Jupiter, the moon, and a few hundred stars.
>>4224044
This. Most of these images have significantly higher exposure than we see with, if you were actually standing next to that telescope it would look pitch black.

>>4224024
The UK is one of the most light polluted places on Earth. I wouldn't be surprised if it's invisible even from rural areas. It's also not visible all the time; the moon washes it out, the brightest part is only in the summer sky, etc. This, combined with the perpetual rain and cloud cover in Britain, means that it's shit-tier for astronomy.

>>4224045
Who would want to repair the cell damage, and why?

We might want to re-animate emperor augustus if we had the technology, but it wouldn't be for his benefit and it wouldn't be because he covered the cost. If you did this you'd likely be nothing more than a curiosity, for observation.

I have a sweet folder of pictures of The Milky Way. Dumping...

>lovejoy

>>4224047
I think I get you.

Why do you specifically want to live? Perhaps it's because I spent too long too sleep deprived when I was younger, but I really don't understand why you as a person would want to continue instead of letting something better, even by your standards, take your place.

>>4223913

The earth would probably get pushed out of it's orbit around sun or start orbiting another star even if there was no direct planetary or stellar bump.

>>4224045
>>4224057
I remember reading about this guy on Wikipedia who was blind all his life. They gave him surgery to fix his eyes, and he went insane and killed himself a year or so later. I imagine it would far more shocking to come back to life, not to mention in such a completely different time. Imagine if you were revived so far in the future that humanity evolved to look completely different.

>>4224065
Put it like this: I always stay up far too late because there's always something else I want to do before sleeping. With death, you don't even have the reprieve of waking up in a bit to do anything you missed. Plus, I really quite enjoy this being alive lark.

>>4224052
>This, combined with the perpetual rain and cloud cover in Britain, means that it's shit-tier for astronomy.
I has a sad.

>>4224067
it's unlikely anything that severe would happen. In order to get pulled out we'd need to be accelerated to at least 32KM/s outwards of where we are now, which would need some very strong gravity indeed.

>>4224076
>>4224080
What drives me crazy is that a lot of these were taken with single exposures. I need a way better camera.

>>4224014
>we're putting Earth somewhere safe and turning it into a museum to our origin
THIS
Probably easier than leaving earth will be to somehow move it out into more and more distant orbits, keeping us in the goldilocks zone, until its time to "move" to another sun.

By that time, though, recycling technogies will be infinitly important, as plate techtonics will likely have ceased due to the interior of the earth cooling.

Also, assuming our magnetic field is generated by the spining core, we'll have to fix that too. plus a dozen other problems... maybe it will be easier to move...

>>4224078

Andromeda is 2-3 times bigger than Milky Way, imagine how much denser would it get here if those 2 collide, I guess it would easily interrupt our orbit. Even if that wouldn't happen there are some implications coming from heating up space during the collision

>>4224103
this might be the way. earth is unique in one aspect, its far more dense than all the other rocky planets, due to it containing the iron cores of two planets, and having much of its lighter material sloughed off in the collision (which formed the moom). Might be worth hanging on to, if for nothing else as a source of iron and other building materials.

>>4224077
My turn to struggle putting this down on paper.

The way I see myself is as a machine. In fact I see myself as an extremely complex, largely catalytic chemical reaction. I don't think I have a soul, and this is the very important part: I believe I am exactly what is inside my head.

you know on TV when they show people swapping bodies, or when you wonder what it would be like to be someone else? That cannot happen. Those people do exist, however, and they too are complex biological machines, capable of thought just like me. They existed before me. They exist at the same time as me. And they will exist after me.
Looking at the situation from outside of my mind, as a biological machine with self preservative traits, there's nothing special about me. From this perspective, outside of my personal thoughts and (woo cliche incoming) "as the universe thinks" I value the person that I came from no more than I do you or anyone else. This means I value my mind no more than I do yours or anyone elses, and I see no reason mine should continue at the expense of another.

I realise this probably sounds ridiculous, and most of it was thought of when I was high off my ass on opiates (for pain), but it makes sense to me. I just don't see why I'm more or less important.

>>4224113
I get what you're saying. I guess it's just that there is always that little niggling solipsist suspicion of "am I the only thing I can truly trust to exist?" I know that if I was dead, I would be in no position to even imagine what was going on in my absence, but I don't want to be dead. Dead people care the least about being dead, but as I am alive, I don't much want to stop.

How does one prove the Rhiemann hypothesis?

Unless you've had special experiences or special genetics, then you probably won't be special.

And I'm out of pics.

>>4224128

Why is it arced in this picture?

>>4224147

Because it's a spiral arm. Spirals are generally arch shaped.

>>4224080
>>4224096
>>4224140
>>4224144
These four are fakes. They're done with the hubble pallet, and then an artist adds the land images in after wards.

Pic related, he's the faggot that made them. Adam Block. I took a class from him a few years back on how to properly get good images from raw data. He's a bit of an asshole.

>>4224127
Solipsism is a pointless idea. I mean, even if it's true, it doesn't change anything about your state of living after you die, and you dying doesn't alter your importance to the universe.

Also, I didn't say: This experiment is how I moved past nihilism. When I'm not thinking as a person, but instead from outside of my body, I can see how insignificant my life or death actually is. Why should I stop if this eternal pointlessness continues to exist?

>>4224153

No, that's just retarded. It's the horizon of the Milky Way, we are IN the spiral arm. It's because they are panoramic pictures, so it appears to arc when it's really a straight.

>>4224174
Oh, I know how insignificant anything I do is and how my death is of no importance, to anyone but myself at least. I'm somewhat hedonistic in that I generally value my views on a matter more than others on account of them being mine and me being the most important person to me, alas, which in this case means not particularly wanting to die.

I suppose our differences come down to you being willing to sacrifice yourself for the greater good of other people, albeit a greater good that you won't be able to enjoy, and me wanting to stick around to enjoy it and hoping other people are willing to sacrifice themselves.

>>4224189
Looks like it. It was nice talking, futurebro.

>>4224193
Grateful for the sacrifice, altruistbro

>>4224204
What sacrifice?

Wikipedia estimates about 1.5 million asteroids in the main asteroid belt that are larger than 1 km (about 0.6 miles). With the total volume of 13 trillion trillion cubic miles, that would about 8 million trillion cubic miles per asteroid. Taking the cube root of this gives a typical separation of 2 million miles, or about 8 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

That's within an asteroid belt, let alone out in empty space. Space is really, really big and empty.

>>4224809
>Space is really, really big and empty.

Because it's expanding.

>>4224813
Mainly because it's expanded, actually. We haven't determined it's still doing so yet.

>>4224809

Here's a handy metaphor: let's approximate one astronomical unit - the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon - to one centimetre. Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.)

The solar system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or 30 centimetres - one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old money).

We've sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch - only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has made it out there so far. Its journey time was 12 years, and it wasn't stopping. (It's now on its way out into interstellar space, having passed the heliopause some years ago.)

The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets.

Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius - its outer edge lies half a kilometre away.

Got that? Our planetary solar system is 30 centimetres, roughly a foot, in radius. But to get to the edge of the Oort cloud, you have to go half a kilometre, roughly a third of a mile.

Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. (There might be a brown dwarf or two lurking unseen in the icy depths beyond the Oort cloud, but if we've spotted one, I'm unaware of it.) Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away.A light year is 63.2 x 103 AU, or 9.46 x 1012 Km. So Proxima Centauri, at 267,000 AU, is just under two and a third kilometres, or two miles (in old money) away from us.


But Proxima Centauri is a poor choice, if we're looking for habitable real estate. While exoplanets are apparently common as muck, terrestrial planets are harder to find; Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a pretty weird one, at that), is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our metaphor, about ten miles.

Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of ten miles. That's the first point I want to get across: that if the distances involved in interplanetary travel are enormous, and the travel times fit to rival the first Australian settlers, then the distances and times involved in interstellar travel are mind-numbing.

>>4224818
>We haven't determined it's still doing so yet.

Cite your source, spaceboy.

>>4224845
No, it's not a positive claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

>>4224845

>he wants proof of something not happening

Best of luck with that!

It's a weird thing to not care about life IMO. I mean, time flies so fast and there's just SO MUCH possible things to do, explore and discover... why wouldn't anyone want to experience such a huge amount of possibilities on his own?

I'm not really afraid to die - but god damn it, if there was a choice to reverse aging, I would take it in a heartbeat. You could always kill yourself if you would have had enough of living somewhere down the line.


Will see you guys in a few centuries, sipping cold beer in some cheap brothel near Betelgeuse and writing for The Guide.

@UKbros - if you've got the funds, you can go for a weekend to Sark/Herm - I've been there this summer, and it's one of the better places on the whole globe for stargazing. Prices are moderate, but the journey depending on your location might bet a bit pricey.

>It's a weird thing to not care about life IMO. I mean, time flies so fast and there's just SO MUCH possible things to do, explore and discover... why wouldn't anyone want to experience such a huge amount of possibilities on his own?

The issue here isn't whether the universe is interesting to us, because it undoubtedly is. It's whether you or I, specifically, should be experiencing it.

>>4224900

Hey how's that incredibly limited perspective doing ya, eh? Not everyone was spoiled as a kid.

>>4224905
R&D on new habitation is more important that anything else at this point.

>>4224911

Why? And who would fund it? Even if they did make some new fancy porta house, nobody that needs it could get it. Just like habitat for humanity's scam.

>>4224919
The people who don't need it could move into it, and the people who needed it could move into the people who didn't's homes.

>>4224905
Pretty good, thanks. I'd much rather spend my life doing something I enjoy rather than waste it thanking the deities for the opportunities, and not take them.

Yes - I've been lucky to be born where I was born (no, that's not UK - I'm from a poor country, which has joined UE tho, so it's been the golden opportunity for me) - luckier than about what, 90%? I've won the motherfuckin' lottery - so there's no sense in wasting the prize.


>>4224902
Why not at least try it?


Y u so negative/pessimistic, sci?

>>4224929
I'm more interested in the collective advancement of the understanding of the universe than I am interested in my personal ability to know them. The technology needed to support me could be better used, so I would choose that better use for it.

>>4224922

Oh, so you're an idiot.

>>4224929

>Y u so negative/pessimistic, sci?

It's called real world experience. You'll start to get it once you're out of college.

>>4224936

>I'm more interested in the collective advancement of the understanding of the universe

Me too.

-Edward Teller

>>4224936
Do you value some simple computer higher than yourself? After all, it can be programmed to do so much more than you...

Universe is a pretty big place. We won't be scavenging for single atoms anytime soon.

Anyway, it's your opinion. It just seems to be quite strange to me.

>>4224946

You're confused because you don't know anything about life or the world save for what you've been spoonfed by masters of platitudes like sagan and tyson.

>>4224940
The interesting thing here is that the first person you reply to is me, and the thing you respond to in the second post was also a reply to me.
>>4224945
Did..

Did you just try to liken me to Teller as if that was derogatory?

>>4224946
A modern computer has high speed and low parallelisation. A human brain has low speed and high parallelisation. At the moment the human brain has 100,000,000,000 processing cores operating at 1000Hz, and a PC has 4 processing cores operating at 3,000,000Hz. The brain is hugely more powerful.

If you can build a computer able to rival my mental ability, and program it to think as well as me, I will give my life to protect it. I'll put that down in a formal contract if you give me an email address.

>>4224940
I've been chasing my dreams my whole life, and as of yet, the only thing I didn't achieve that I wanted was threesome with hot twins.

If you expect failure right off the bat... you will fail, no doubt about that.


Optimistic futurebro signing off

>>4224970

Yet you still ended up on 4chan. How shocking.

>>4224968

>Did you just try to liken me to Teller as if that was derogatory?

Nope. Just pointing out that the pursuit of knowledge as if it's just a good thing is incredibly naive, and that all knowledge is a double edged sword.

Yeah, you like progress because it means better video games and a new Ipad every year, but other people only see newer bombs and other means of mass murder.

>>4224968

>At the moment the human brain has 100,000,000,000 processing cores operating at 1000Hz, and a PC has 4 processing cores operating at 3,000,000Hz. The brain is hugely more powerful.

Ho god who told you that load of nonsense?

>If you can build a computer able to rival my mental ability, and program it to think as well as me,

Calculate pi to the 37,405th digit. Done? I bet this did it faster.
Big whoop. I could program a gameboy to outthink someone like you.

>Nope. Just pointing out that the pursuit of knowledge as if it's just a good thing is incredibly naive, and that all knowledge is a double edged sword.
The pursuit of knowledge is always a good thing. Assuming its application is a good thing is incredibly naive. You cannot blame science for what politics does with its discovery.

>Ho god who told you that load of nonsense?

The brain has 100 trillion neutrons all operating with a maximum speed of 1000 operations a second. Quad cores are standard in consumer grade PCs.

>Calculate pi to the 37,405th digit. Done? I bet this did it faster.

I know, I have a text document with a billion digits in it.
>Big whoop. I could program a gameboy to outthink someone like you.
Well do it, and give me an address.

>>4225013

>The brain has 100 trillion neutrons all operating with a maximum speed of 1000 operations a second. Quad cores are standard in consumer grade PCs.

Yeah, that. Where did you find that? It sounds like something kurzweil would utter.

>The pursuit of knowledge is always a good thing.

Always? Always? You support the work of Dr. Mengele, then? Even if it didn't have any useful outcome?

>I know, I have a text document with a billion digits in it.

Then why did you ask?

>>4225035
>Yeah, that. Where did you find that? It sounds like something kurzweil would utter.
The internet, not sure where but it seemed reputable. Even if it isn't true, the raw power of the human brain easily surpasses the combined computing power of the planet at this point.
>Always? Always? You support the work of Dr. Mengele, then?
Do you deny that the data gathered on hypothermia was useful? Do you deny that it has saved lives? Looks like we agree, then.
If the actions were bad, they were bad in that they killed other people capable of advancing knowledge
>Even if it didn't have any useful outcome?
Yes.

What you don't seem to be picking up from the conversation with the person who would give his life for scientific progress is that he values scientific progress more than life.

>Then why did you ask?
Because calculating from a simple algorithm is not intelligent.

A bit off topic, and probably very ignorant, but I'm wondering how it is that vy canis majoris is bigger than the black hole at the center of our galaxy? If my googling is correct, the black hole at the center of the milky way is 6 million times the size of our sun while vy canis majoris can fit something like 11 quadrillion of our suns into it.

>>4225074
Isn't black hole technically a singularity with different event horizon depending on mass?

It's infinitely more dense than anything we've ever found. Most hypergiants aren't all that dense, and compared to Magnetars (small suns with fuckhuge density/gravitational pull) they're almost like gas against iron

>>4225074
Two things

1) we don't really know how big canis majoris is. We're working from some pretty shaky data in making our predictions, and until it's refined nobody can really say.
2) To form a black hole, an object has to undergo gravitational collapse, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_collapse)) which only happens if it is in an area smaller than its schwarzchild radius (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius).). If you compressed CMa down to the size of our sun, it would turn black hole because it would be under this radius, but because it's outside of it the gravity of the star is insufficient to collapse it at this point. Eventually, if we know shit about stellar physics, the thing is going to collapse.

>>4225102
Pic related.

>>4223927
>galaxy collisions

fucking troll thread. everyone knows galaxies are moving away from each other

>>4224843
I feel so small now. Thank you for the excellent illustration.

>>4225446

is this a black hole or a dead star?

>>4223858

subtly? because since there's no contact it's like the merger never even happened im azn idunno