51–60 of 191 posts
I wonder if this is an opportunity to detect intelligent life. If the black hole is affecting any intelligent life on the way, they might do something to save themselves or their planet, which might be detectable?
Or this itself just two alien race fighting with each other. Wait till we see another black hole going other way.
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You can imagine the pivotal moment here, where someone (according to Wikipedia, it was Immanuel Kant, which is a neat fact all by itself) said "hey, that band of faint stars could be a gravitationally rotating disk seen from the inside, and what if those other oblong smudges we see are entire other disks really really far away?" For residents of our hypothetical planet, that moment, which seems very important to me,…
This is an analogy to the Three Body Problem from Liu Cixin!
> Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. What's the speed of sound in intergalactic space, anyway?
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I don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.
Is that a reasonable assumption to make? I don't think we have any evidence of other places we look being "largely the same" with respect to life conduciveness. It took billions of years for our own planet to achieve multicellular life, which is a significant fraction of our best estimate of the lifetime of the entire universe up to this point.
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Before any of that is possible, a "Cambrian Explosion" is required. It may be that prokaryotic life is common, but the mitochondria and plastids of eukaryotes took a very long time to emerge (absent for more than half of the total habitable life of the earth).
also, how long does it stay emerged Was it this billion years or that billion years probability of our experience matching another planet’s experience in the same time frame is low
Chloroplasts enabled direct harvest of photons from our parent star.
We are actually older than the plants.
These are going to leave a signature in the gas of an exoplanet, if they happen.
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This is an analogy to the Three Body Problem from Liu Cixin!
I’ve heard that book(series?) pop up quite a lot recently. Is it worth a read?
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This is an analogy to the Three Body Problem from Liu Cixin!
I’ve heard that book(series?) pop up quite a lot recently. Is it worth a read?
You see it a lot in space conversations because it covers planetary gravity in an interesting way.
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To be fair, that does seem to describe the existence of life on our own planet.
I don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.
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I get incredibly frustrated with popular science articles that use only artist’s impressions and avoid the real images. To me, the real images are much more exciting. You don’t need fake clarity and fake colour when you’re seeing a (candidate) high speed black hole sucking the life out of some fricking ginormous balls of flaming nuclear fusion.
The figures in the primary literature are great for scientists and reasonably educated adults, but they're trying to capture the imaginations of children and those not so scientifically literate. It's understandable. If you show the actual figures to a layman, many of them would respond in disbelief or disappointment. You have to build a bridge, and that begins with illustration. It's a communication and education to…
This means that the aren’t being exposed to reality and how we can use such noisy low resolution images to make important discoveries. They are lead to believe that there is no advancement that they can potentially follow a career to achieve. The work is done and they shouldn’t aspire to make science better.
The JWST has been an excellent example of what can be achieved by showing the damn images.
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This is an analogy to the Three Body Problem from Liu Cixin!
I’ve heard that book(series?) pop up quite a lot recently. Is it worth a read?
It is, somehow, very bleak and pessimistic compared to your average (western?) sci-fi.