231–240 of 404 posts
Euclid is stationed at L2. I like to think it grabs a drink at the end of the day with other satellites out there like James Webb and Gaia. They discuss the day's discoveries.
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Ecosystems do adapt. They look broken to us because of our ridiculously small life span. That's why I dislike framing climate change actions as "saving the planet". The planet will be just fine. We won't.
"The planet" is really just a ball of mostly iron and silicates. Of course it'll be fine no matter what. What's important is what's on the surface, namely lifeforms and the biosphere. They're what make this orb so special. Climate change will harm humans, sure, but not just us: it'll harm many other species too, ones which can't adapt fast enough.
I think people are attached to the current state of life on earth, not realizing that it is transient. Life itself and the many forms it can embody is amazing, the exact form it currently takes is not that special.
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It’s ridiculous. That final zoomed in image that showed one galaxy has maybe 300 million stars in it. Just that one. The scope is… unbelievable silly.
Probably closer to 300 billion stars. (It's roughly the same size as the Milky Way, which is estimated to have ~ 100 to 400 billion stars.)
Some of that zooming in made me feel pretty damn uncomfortable. It really is f'ing massive out there huh. Makes me wonder what this is all about, I'm sure it's something, I wonder what. :)
No Man's Sky
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They are all wondering the same thing. Distances are so vast that the overwhelming probablity is that we'll just never notice each other.
How long did it take modern humans to completely colonize Earth, such that there are few places you can go on Earth and not meet any humans? Less than 10k years for sure. If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few places you can go and not find evidence of humans around? Not more than a million years or so. So if intelligent life -- capable of be…
Maybe it doesn't have to be common; incredibly rare is totally fine when your multiplier is the entire universe.
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Many years ago I read some sci-fi novel, and in it was a sub-plot of a warring alien species that started destroying anything and everything they came across in their travels. The story went that their local system was in some sort of a dust cloud, so they had no stars visible from their planet. At some point, that cloud somehow dissipated. On the planet, one of the inhabitants bothered to look up one night, and it h…
The end of Chapter 12 from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything. The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are all wondering the same thing. Distances are so vast that the overwhelming probablity is that we'll just never notice each other.
How long did it take modern humans to completely colonize Earth, such that there are few places you can go on Earth and not meet any humans? Less than 10k years for sure. If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few places you can go and not find evidence of humans around? Not more than a million years or so. So if intelligent life -- capable of be…
Euclid is stationed at L2. I like to think it grabs a drink at the end of the day with other satellites out there like James Webb and Gaia. They discuss the day's discoveries.
How big approximately is this L2 for practical purposes? Sounds like it will be valuable space-estate one day.