To be honest, in reading this and considering the vastness of space, my initial impression was "what, only twelve?!"
Every object in the universe attracts any other object. My initial impression was : not only one ?
A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
31–40 of 89 posts
Re: A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only we didn't waste all of the antibiotics on non-human animals. Such a bad use of brilliant biotechnology.
Or freely prescribe them for small ailments (looking at China here)
Antibiotics for human use are nothing. There's around 70 billion domesticated land animals being born and dying every year. That's 700 billion Petri dishes with varying antibiotic power in just 10 years, and that number is more than all of the humans that ever lived on Earth. More than enough for some massively superior bacteria to evolve.
Re: A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
#33Wasn't this some thing that puzzled cosomologists a few years ago that some galaxies emit GRBs at scary intensities?
Suddenly it sounds plausible when we consider that at a certain density of these smaller black holes, the peaceful neighborhood of these other objects and their companion stars can start to get really violent, causing collsions and whatnot which then leads to these GRBs.
Re: A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
#34Are discoveries about black holes legit? Isn't it still the case that they have not been experimentally confirmed to exist, and all talk of discoveries is just conceptual?
They are actually quite visible - their accretion disks (matter falling into the black hole) are very hot and radiate on a broad range of frequencies.
Re: A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the box IS more-or-less bounded by the limiting cultural restrictions we place on the word "invention"? In our cultural spectrum, we constrict our inventions to optimize for "use", but perhaps "use" is too narrow. If you look at cultural events like Burning Man, you see all sorts of completely useless inventions. Fascinatingly useless inventions. I actually hope that one day when we do enter post-scarcity tha…
You are describing evolution without an utility function. That won't work. We may be able to come up with an alternative utility function but, given past history, I'm afraid we won't and will be aimlessly exploring the solution space. A good parallel can be draw to evolution in painting. Up until the invention of photography, painting evolved to be photo-realistic. It made amazing strides, with breathtaking results.…
New utility function seems to be consensus-based monetary value as modern art becomes a store for value and/or an investment.
Re: A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the pedantic tradition around here: To be fair, I remember an E Coli outbreak in spinach that laid a lot of people out. (I probably eat as much spinach as I do any meat :| and here I like to say I’m not much of a gambler) —— Not to take away from your collective points at all. Rehashing the entire situation makes us look like a foolish species to have burned through such an advantageous technology so quickly. One…
Well, spinach E Coli is there because we use cattle poop all over it. Nothing better than fertilising our vegetables with manure rich in antibiotics resistant E Coli.
I actually think it came from tainted water. Which is also potentially where Botulism can hit vegetables, too.(Or the bloody air)
Of course it’s all part of the same cycle
Re: A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
#37Let me try an optimistic thought experiment. Roughly around the end of the Napoleonic era, call it 1815, 9/10ths of humans lives in what we would call abject poverty. today it is reversed and only 1/10th does. (This is still a travesty, but it is objectively better) In that period we have seen incredible technological, political and economic improvements. But it's not clear if we will continue to see them "we might h…
People have been saying "we might have invented everything" for hundreds of years. I like the "invention wavefront" analogy, but I unfortunately can't remember where I learnt it. Imagine the high-dimensional space of all possible things that can be invented. In the "centre" of the space is a hypersphere containing everything that has been invented to date. Every new invention is invented by "poking outwards" in one s…
>People have been saying "we might have invented everything" for hundreds of years.
No, they really haven't. In fact for a good chunk of centuries (from 16th century onwards), the optimism for the eventual future developments was endless. At some point there was a few scholars saying that during the end of 19th century, but still not some widespread belief.
That said, discovery probably also follows an 80/20 rule, and we're somewhat at the tail end now. We haven't had any major new discoveries, of the kind that we had regularly until the 60s-70s, for decades now.
Progressive refinement (like going from the workstation to mobile phones and watches) yes. But nothing like the advent of the computer, the internet, and so on.
And even less earth-shattering stuff than the time before that (which got us from the steam engine and electricity, to nuclear energy, radio and tv, flight, space exploration, the digital computer, QM and relativity, the DNA, and so on). Stuff like that was coming decade after decade up until the 60s-70s. After that, not so much.
>"We might have invented everything" would imply that the space of all possible inventions is bounded, and we're running up against the edges of the box. But I don't see any reason it should be bounded.
While there's some quasi-religious optimism (like the universe owe us endless discoveries forever), there are real limits, and notions like "low hanging fruit" and "marginal returns" do come into play.
Re: A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
#38Are discoveries about black holes legit? Isn't it still the case that they have not been experimentally confirmed to exist, and all talk of discoveries is just conceptual?
It's a bit a matter of definition or interpretation but I would count the LIGO observations as direct observations of black holes. But as others pointed out there's lots of evidence for their existence.
Re: A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have recorded a video[1] of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7xl_zjz0o8
That’s incredible! Definitely love to see / hear more about this if anyone has any pointers?
The video came from this study -
"Monitoring stellar orbits around the Massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center" -
https://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4674
the wiki article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*
Re: A dozen black holes may lie at the centre of our galaxy
#40Let me try an optimistic thought experiment. Roughly around the end of the Napoleonic era, call it 1815, 9/10ths of humans lives in what we would call abject poverty. today it is reversed and only 1/10th does. (This is still a travesty, but it is objectively better) In that period we have seen incredible technological, political and economic improvements. But it's not clear if we will continue to see them "we might h…
> with no other information we can only plump for "in the middle".
This is because the derivative of e^x is e^x, so when undergoing exponential growth the rate of change tells us nothing about where we are on that curve. And this is also why people (not GP, of course) who talk about the 'knee' in an exponential graph really annoy me...!