How many supernova explode every year? • Hacker News Board

Re: How many supernova explode every year?

#191

Post by SwtCyber » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 7:00 AM UTC

Wobbles42 wrote: post #105

SwtCyber wrote: post #25

Absolutely mind-blowing how much our ability to observe the universe has exploded

Arguably, our ability to observe in any meaningful sense is still limited to light waves occuring inside a volume not much larger than the earth itself. I mean this in more than just a semantic sense surrounding the verb "observe" -- for all practical purposes everything outside of our solar system is indistinguishable from a preprogrammed light show being projected on a sphere centered on our sun with a diameter of…

But at the same time, it's wild what we can infer from just those shadows

Re: How many supernova explode every year?

#192

Post by SwtCyber » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 7:01 AM UTC

jxf wrote: post #116

SwtCyber wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something kinda poetic (and maybe even logical) about the idea that what we perceive as scattered galaxies and physics is actually just the internal processes of something far bigger than we can comprehend.

Poetic, or maybe Lovecraftian. A lot of "cosmic horror" has the trope of vastnesses too big to comprehend, where even trying to think about it (or in some cases merely learning of the possibility) causes you to go mad.

It's like the deeper we peer into reality, the more it starts to look like fiction we were never meant to read.

Re: How many supernova explode every year?

#193

Post by Iwan-Zotow » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 11:44 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #157

drbig wrote: post #3

The universe is vast and full of nothing... Which in case of explodey stars is a very good thing indeed!

It’s full of radiation everywhere, regardless in which direction we look and how highly we resolve it.

and neutrinos, there ought to be CNB

Re: How many supernova explode every year?

#194

Post by dostick » Sun, Apr 20, 2025, 9:02 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #153

dostick wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we don’t know if other universes exist. So it’s 50/50 infinity or one. Then if our universe came into existence, then probability is not 50/50, because we know that something exists, therefore something else is more likely to exist, probability towards infinity. If you were observer of emptiness and no universe or anything existing then you would say it’s more likely there will be nothing, so probability towards…

> There’s likely universes within our elementary particles or our universe is a particle in parent one. This is a very nonstandard use of the word "likely".

The recursion dimension can not be only having something in this narrow band where we are. There can’t be nothing if you go deeper than subatomic level. Because it has to be made of something in order to support larger recursion.

Re: How many supernova explode every year?

#195

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Apr 21, 2025, 12:42 PM UTC

dostick wrote: post #194

pfdietz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s likely universes within our elementary particles or our universe is a particle in parent one. This is a very nonstandard use of the word "likely".

The recursion dimension can not be only having something in this narrow band where we are. There can’t be nothing if you go deeper than subatomic level. Because it has to be made of something in order to support larger recursion.

Please don't present your fantasy as anything to do with actual established science, please.

Re: How many supernova explode every year?

#196

Post by Wobbles42 » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #126

Wobbles42 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. They didn't say it happened an "int" time ago. They didn't even say a "long" time ago. They said a "long long" time. I'd have to pull up a copy of the C standard to be sure, but even if the units of "time" are plank times, I suspect the implications could easily be that the story occurs before the big bang.

I suspect you're thinking of a double (floating point). A long long is only a 64 bit integer. 2^64 planck times is 9.9e-25 seconds. Planck times are really tiny. 2^64 nanoseconds is 584 years.

Oh, you're right! I do remember doing this calculation with integers at some point. I might have been using something like a UUID as my bitfield length.

The context was timestamps -- I (playfully) figured out how many bits we'd need to count Planck times before the expected heat death of the universe, thus being truly future proof. I was expecting the answer to be a rediculous number, but in fact it was more in the "not efficient, but definitely feasible" range.

Floating point gets us there too, of course, but it has its own drawbacks and it isn't nearly as funny.