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Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

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Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#61

Post by Symmetry »

jp555 wrote: post #38
michannne wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that the idea of a base on Mars is not to somehow secure humanity's position in the Solar System, but to give us something to aim for so we have a reason to pump money into space exploration and aerospace research

Don't you think two self-sufficient instances of a civilization separated by a ~dozen light-minutes decreases the risk of species extinction events?

Self-sufficiency is a bit of a sliding scale. You can be self sufficient as a band of hunter gatherers at only a dozen people but technological civilization certainly takes a lot more than that, there's more total knowledge involved so it has to be spread out over many heads and spread redundantly so that a single death doesn't remove a technology.

One can imagine a Mars that's been terraformed and grown to a population of 1 billion people in the very distant future. But at that point I expect most of the mechanism of technological civilization to live inside AIs rather than human heads.

If you imagine a colony of just 1 million people on Mars that's pretty doable in the medium term. But it's only a very narrow range of disasters that would reduce Earth's population to less than a million and not also spill over to wipe out Mars's more fragile civilization as well.

Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#62

Post by _bxg1 »

They probably would've mentioned this in the article were it the case, but I wonder if it was visible at all in the night sky? We can see part of the Milky Way, after all. I guess there wouldn't have been writing yet but could such a thing have made it into oral history? Was there even oral history yet?

Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#63

Post by windsurfer »

_bxg1 wrote: post #62

They probably would've mentioned this in the article were it the case, but I wonder if it was visible at all in the night sky? We can see part of the Milky Way, after all. I guess there wouldn't have been writing yet but could such a thing have made it into oral history? Was there even oral history yet?

Dust and gas surrounding the galactic center blocks almost all visible light. Sadly most events simple wouldn't be visible.

Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#64

Post by rbanffy »

725686 wrote: post #46
ifdefdebug wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that movie.

Forget the movie. I didn't like it either. Read the book. It's fantastic.

I have to strongly disagree with that. 2001 is a master class of storytelling. Everything, from audio-only prologue, the triviality of the dialog, the stiffness of the acting, the awkwardness in zero G, the looooong scenes, to the breathing in the spacesuits is there for a reason. Even the Douglas Trumbull acid trip is there maybe to remind you humans are not supposed to understand everything any more than the monkeys did in the start of the movie.

The book is good, of course, but it doesn't approach the brilliance of the movie.

Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#65

Post by rbanffy »

narag wrote: post #60
725686 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget the movie. I didn't like it either. Read the book. It's fantastic.

The book? I read a book long time ago that was a "novellization" of the movie. I was young, in my early teens, and clearly remember that I wasn't sure what the end meant. Later I watched the movie and realized that it was even less clear. And later learned that the movie was based on a short story (Rendezvous with Rama) that I haven't read.

It's actually based on "The Sentinel". The short story is more or less the starting point for 2001.

Rendezvous with Rama would be an AMAZING movie. I only hope SyFy doesn't get to do to it what it did with Childhood's End.

Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#66

Post by eloff »

ekianjo wrote: post #42
facethrowaway wrote: post #36

I am guessing this would lead to solar system-scale destruction? Putting a base on Mars doesn’t seem like it would do much to counter such an event if it headed our way?

A Mars base would do a lot to prevent extinction of human life because of an "unlikely" but "it's just a matter of when, not if" situation where we get hit by a massive rock.

Actually there's only a period in time where we're vulnerable to such things. Eventually we'll know of all the potential threats with enough advanced warning and have the capabilities to deflect them. Maybe we're vulnerable for another hundred years, but not likely still vulnerable in a thousand. Given the rarity of such events, we should be fine.

Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#67

Post by frogpelt »

dwoozle wrote: post #59
vonseel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While these books sound interesting, “amazing and incredibly influential achievement” sounds more like something someone might say about a President than a sci-fi author.

Larry Niven is still relevant while Millard Fillmore is not.

And yet few have ever heard this Larry while Millard Fillmore maintains the distinction of being the president with the coolest name.

If only Spiro T. Agnew would have made it.

Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#68

Post by indigo747 »

ljf wrote: post #41
FrameworkFred wrote: post #35

Given that we're able to aim telescopes at things that are billions of light years away, I wonder how close we are to being able to see the reflection of such a thing when it actually happens on some celestial body 3.5 million light years away.

I remember as a child thinking I had fixed time travel (in a very limited sense) when I wondered why we didn't just stick a bunch of mirrors far far away, and then aim them back at the earth and use telescopes to look back at the dinosaurs etc. While that wouldn't work for heaps of reasons, I like your idea. I guess the issue would be discerning 'when' such a thing happened, and finding the right item to look back at…

I have a distant childhood memory of a book based on this concept, in which the protagonist is projected back in time through light beams bounced off of distant mirrors. I think I stopped reading because I could tell the science was completely impossible, and ultimately just an excuse to write an historical fiction book which I didn't feel like reading. Perhaps I judged it too harshly?

Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#69

Post by marcosdumay »

eloff wrote: post #66
ekianjo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Mars base would do a lot to prevent extinction of human life because of an "unlikely" but "it's just a matter of when, not if" situation where we get hit by a massive rock.

Actually there's only a period in time where we're vulnerable to such things. Eventually we'll know of all the potential threats with enough advanced warning and have the capabilities to deflect them. Maybe we're vulnerable for another hundred years, but not likely still vulnerable in a thousand. Given the rarity of such events, we should be fine.

> we should be fine

Every time somebody says that, I remember of this:

https://xkcd.com/1159/

Re: Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded

#70

Post by yourapostasy »

jacobush wrote: post #55
yourapostasy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also if there was any form of life orbiting a star in the path of this flair... Based upon a couple other articles I read [1] [2], it sounds unlikely there were other galaxies or smaller structures in the path of this flare. I only see references to a very directional cone at the poles of the Milky Way, and the cone only intersects a trail of gases left behind by the Magellanic Stream. Were there somehow orphaned p…

Is there a name for some kind of inverted Kardashev scale, where higher civilizations decide to slow down and go miniature, conserving as much energy and information as possible? Possibly as a) some kind of bet to hide from other civilizations and b) to delay the heat death as long as possible.

My go-to entry point for exploring those kinds of questions was Isaac Arthur. He goes into the Kardashev scale [1], dying Earth [2], dying stars [3], farming black holes [4], and going past iron stars [5]. A Boltzmann Brain's description bears remarkable similarity to the Judeo-Christian concept of God before time begins, and has been fertile ground for ruminations [6], though none with any verifiable claims backing them in our current knowledge of physics [7].

Now if we could only restructure our implementation of capitalism to be pinned to advancements towards resolving physics questions to survive those kinds of timescales and challenges instead of locked down to a single planet's worth of baryonic matter and cognitive capacity...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p58yFf7aZsM

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpYGMIZ9Bow

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk

[6] https://turingchurch.net/does-god-emerge-from-boltzmann-brai...

[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/6btjud/what_if_...

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