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Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#31

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

gerdesj wrote: post #26
_yb2s wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen very often. The odds of a specific event like this are astronomically small, but there is an even more astronomically large number of different possible unlikely events. The sheer number of possible events is orders of magnitude greater than the odds of individual unlikely events, causing them to occur regularly. The universe is a really weird place, wher…

Sir Terry Pratchett often declaimed in his novels that "Million to one chances happen one times in ten". The statistical terms used are completely wrong but the intention is clear: weird shit happens.

"Fiction has to make sense, reality can do whatever it wants."

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#32

Post by pixl97 »

Alan_Dillman wrote: post #28
vikingerik wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odds of this group of people, on this day, finding this piece of the shuttle, are of course astronomically small. The odds of some group out of millions of people, on some day out of ten thousand since the incident, finding some piece of debris out of thousands, are considerably higher. This is the multiple-endpoints fallacy. You only notice the events that happened after the fact, you never notice everything tha…

Exactly. This is why it is dumb when people say "The odds against life arising at random is astronomical." It did happen, therefore, the convoluted path to life wasn't what the skeptic speaker thinks it was. Multiple-endpoints fallacy and overly anthropomorphizing reality also makes a fool out of the Drake Equation, and the idea of "The Great Filter" is dumb too.

Let's give this one a few centuries and see how many exo-planets have life before deciding how rare it actually is.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#33

Post by hutzlibu »

gerdesj wrote: post #26
_yb2s wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen very often. The odds of a specific event like this are astronomically small, but there is an even more astronomically large number of different possible unlikely events. The sheer number of possible events is orders of magnitude greater than the odds of individual unlikely events, causing them to occur regularly. The universe is a really weird place, wher…

Sir Terry Pratchett often declaimed in his novels that "Million to one chances happen one times in ten". The statistical terms used are completely wrong but the intention is clear: weird shit happens.

I just thought, he made fun of the stereotypical heros taking their one in a million chance and allways succeeding, meaning it is a physical or dramatic law that one in a million chances are 100% guaranteed.

(mainly refering to "Guards! Guards!", where they intentionally make one guards bow shot harder, to make his shot (at a dragon) a million to one chance, so it becomes a 100% shot, nice absurd logic and of course it does not work, but the chance for them surviving the stunt was one in a million..)

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#34

Post by WalterBright »

_yb2s wrote: post #6
wwwtyro wrote: post #2

The odds of this seem astronomically small.

Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen very often. The odds of a specific event like this are astronomically small, but there is an even more astronomically large number of different possible unlikely events. The sheer number of possible events is orders of magnitude greater than the odds of individual unlikely events, causing them to occur regularly. The universe is a really weird place, wher…

Sometimes, I drop something by accident, and the object falls in a strange way. I think "I could never in a million years duplicate the path that took."

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#38

Post by klabb3 »

taylorhou wrote: post #36

Speaking of finding, we still haven't found a significant trace of MH370. T_T

There's a lot found that very likely belongs to the airplane. It's just not a particularly sexy story. Most likely it's pilot murder-suicide, they did find a highly suspicious looking path in the pilot/copilot's flight sim. Iirc, during the handover from Malaysia to Vietnam ATCs, the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar, and once out of radar reach heads south across the ocean until the fuel runs out. Perhaps to have time to himself or maybe deliberately to not be found, out of shame.

It explains why the two main mysteries – why the initial search was a failure, and the lack of radio and transponder data.

It's also easy to see why authorities and airline operators want to silence it, especially if they have plausible deniability to do so. There is simply less prestige lost in a failed international search-and-rescue than a national airline pilot killing innocent people for god knows what reason.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#39

Post by ck2 »

Before 9/11 it was the most traumatic incident.

News showed that footage so many thousands of times over so many weeks, months, that I still hear the phrase in my head sometimes and I am really, really uncomfortable watching rocket launches even decades later.

Re: Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle

#40

Post by anshumankmr »

klabb3 wrote: post #38
taylorhou wrote: post #36

Speaking of finding, we still haven't found a significant trace of MH370. T_T

There's a lot found that very likely belongs to the airplane. It's just not a particularly sexy story. Most likely it's pilot murder-suicide, they did find a highly suspicious looking path in the pilot/copilot's flight sim. Iirc, during the handover from Malaysia to Vietnam ATCs, the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar, and once out of radar reach heads south ac…

>the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar

wtf... Why is there a way for one person to depressurise the cabin?

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