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The Tunguska Event

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Re: The Tunguska Event

#41

Post by alexandre_m »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #32

My favorite conspiracy theory on Tunguska: http://www.reformation.org/tesla-and-tunguska.html

The Tunguska+Tesla event is quite fascinating (the whole life of Tesla is actually).

People love to make up a lot of theories and conspiracies, it's nothing new.

What is particularly worrisome is that Tesla was a very brillant man and that he believed himself to have caused this. From the information that we have, it wasn't a marketing stunt by his entourage. The guy himself was working on this particle-beam for some time and claimed to have triggered it that night. He tried to sell the technology for more almost 3 decades.

Was this made up, was this a coincidence, or did it actually happen?

It's been over 100 years and no one is certain.

Re: The Tunguska Event

#42

Post by lomnakkus »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38
stingraycharles wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the universe bounded by time? Perhaps it's bounded by our perception of time, but that doesn't mean time cannot be infinite.

Because things can only happen until entropy heat-death. Then there's not enough energy to do anything. Stuff stops happening. And that's in, what, 20 trillion years? So bounded. { edited: trillion } Ha! 10^30 years by some estimates. So, a thousand billion billion billion years. Anyway, bounded.

I believe heat death is something like on the order of trillions of years.

... but there are also built-in assumptions in that calculation. For example that certain constants will remain constant.

EDIT: Typo

Re: The Tunguska Event

#43

Post by [deleted] »

Beltiras wrote: post #30
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to do this is to make it profitable to worry about it. Some say that certain asteroids are worth trillions. While they're probably not worth quite that much, they're a pretty penny. Investors might be interested in a company designed to capture and harvest asteroids. It will probably take a few centuries before that's a possibility, but it's interesting that it's probably just a matter of time before it doesn…

Someone trying to make it profitable: http://www.planetaryresources.com/#home-intro

[deleted]

Re: The Tunguska Event

#44

Post by jacquesm »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38
stingraycharles wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the universe bounded by time? Perhaps it's bounded by our perception of time, but that doesn't mean time cannot be infinite.

Because things can only happen until entropy heat-death. Then there's not enough energy to do anything. Stuff stops happening. And that's in, what, 20 trillion years? So bounded. { edited: trillion } Ha! 10^30 years by some estimates. So, a thousand billion billion billion years. Anyway, bounded.

> And that's in, what, 20 billion years? So bounded.

That's not even close to the most conservative estimates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Ba...

Re: The Tunguska Event

#45

Post by raattgift »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38
stingraycharles wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the universe bounded by time? Perhaps it's bounded by our perception of time, but that doesn't mean time cannot be infinite.

Because things can only happen until entropy heat-death. Then there's not enough energy to do anything. Stuff stops happening. And that's in, what, 20 trillion years? So bounded. { edited: trillion } Ha! 10^30 years by some estimates. So, a thousand billion billion billion years. Anyway, bounded.

Glad you did the edit. Still off by a lot...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

Re: The Tunguska Event

#47

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

mikeash wrote: post #27
grondilu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more interesting question is : what kind of delay is worth worrying about? I mean, for instance it is known that life will remain possible on Earth for about 500 million years, after which the Sun will be too bright. We don't seriously worry about it, since so many things can happen in half a billion years that it does not make much sense to try to plan or predict anything in such a timeframe. Similarly, I personal…

Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. The professor is lecturing, and says, "The Sun will grow to be a red giant, destroying all life on Earth in about a billion years...." A distracted student suddenly sits up and cries out, "Oh my god!" The professor says, "What's wrong? A billion years is a long time, you know. Nothing to worry about." The student is visibly relief. "Oh, great! I thought you said a million years…

I strongly suspect that our species is already on its way to inevitable extinction, and much more quickly than a few hundred years.

Barring some science fiction scenarios, fertility has dropped below replacement and is of a nature where it never truly rises. Children who grow up in a low-fertility environment learn behaviors and personality traits that encourage and enhance the already-low fertility, and any who are atypical and have above-replacement fertility themselves are never enough to get the global average back to (or above) replacement. Not only have we trained the kids to have few kids themselves, we've trained them to train those few kids of their own the same (but with extra!).

You can disagree, almost everyone does. But the implications of disagreement are bizarre, you must imagine some future where all 5th generation-only children wake up and say "I want 2.1 children" or 10 percent of those 5th generation children wake up and say "I want 20 children".

Re: The Tunguska Event

#48

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

bsenftner wrote: post #25

A fun science fiction read is "Singularity" by Bill DeSmedt; the premise is the Tunguska event being a mini-black hole - and it's caught inside the earth, eating it from the inside out.

David Brin did that too. Then an earth goddess showed up, some white guilt about overpopulation and coke can pull tabs.

Is the DeSmedt book better?

Re: The Tunguska Event

#49

Post by greglindahl »

alexandre_m wrote: post #41
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #32

My favorite conspiracy theory on Tunguska: http://www.reformation.org/tesla-and-tunguska.html

The Tunguska+Tesla event is quite fascinating (the whole life of Tesla is actually). People love to make up a lot of theories and conspiracies, it's nothing new. What is particularly worrisome is that Tesla was a very brillant man and that he believed himself to have caused this. From the information that we have, it wasn't a marketing stunt by his entourage. The guy himself was working on this particle-beam for some…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. "No one is certain" is not the right way to approach the possibility that Tesla actually caused Tunguska.

edit: clarified what "this" means

Re: The Tunguska Event

#50

Post by raattgift »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #34
michaelcampbell wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seen from the other side, given a universe of infinite possibilities, what's the probability that a given thing WON'T happen?

The universe is actually quite bounded in time. Almost anything weird we can think of ... will never happen. Not enough time.

Numbers aside, there is nothing in our universe that suggests that we shouldn't take the concept of future timelike infinity seriously, and some evidence that we should, notably the accelerating metric expansion of space.

That in turn gives us a receding horizon, which gives us Unruh radiation, which gives us fluctuations (and there are other sources for those), and that in turn poses all sorts of theoretical problems ranging from outright Poincaré recurrence to "mere" Boltzmann brains. Getting rid of these when you take infinity seriously is a theoretical challenge.

If we could prove that the universe will not expand forever, that would be a nice outcome of research in physical cosmology.

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