Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

First images from Euclid are in

dlmultimedia.esa.int

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 404 posts

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#321

Post by kortilla »

mmooss wrote: post #309
kortilla wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jokes don’t always have meaning. “I want to play a joke on Bob” can very easily mean “I’m just going to torture Bob a bit for my amusement”. The joke will not have meaning to Bob.

There is a lot of subtle meaning layered into that: Cleverness: I'm funny and I'm confident enough in it to risk doing it publicly Status: The statuses of you and Bob allow you to play a joke on them. Often such jokes are a public demonstration of status, like children do more explicitly and often unconsciously in the schoolyard. Empathy: 'I say suffering is funny'; it asserts a willingness to violate a taboo, be une…

Yes, none of that meaning is apparent to Bob, which is my point.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#322

Post by kortilla »

alonsonic wrote: post #198
kortilla wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jokes don’t always have meaning. “I want to play a joke on Bob” can very easily mean “I’m just going to torture Bob a bit for my amusement”. The joke will not have meaning to Bob.

It has a meaning to Bob because the joke exists for a reason he can comprehend even he doesn't like it.

No, bob doesn’t know he’s even being intentionally fucked with. There are many videos of this style of “prank” available on the internet.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#323

Post by phito »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #285
phito wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but you know very well that when people say "the planet" they mean "the ecosystem". It doesn't change what I meant. There's been mass extinctions before, way worse than what will happen with human-made climate change. Life has proven to be very resilient and ecosystems re-emerge. 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…

I take it you're also a smoker?

... What? No.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#324

Post by adamredwoods »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #292
Night_Thastus wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion reactors won't really help. Sure, you can accelerate indefinitely - but only at maybe 1G or a bit more if you don't want to kill the occupants. Then you have to flip and decelerate. Unless we find a way to freeze/stasis people, the limits are still shockingly small. We'd need to start cracking some kind of jumping/FTL/etc technology to have any hope of real exploration.

Well... you don't need to freeze people if you can travel at a substantial fraction of c, because of time dilation. Caveats: 1. It's really, really hard to supply enough energy to go that fast, even with fusion power. 2. Your passengers won't be able to go home again, because by the time they get back everyone they've ever known will be long dead. 3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually hit a speck of du…

F=ma

At 1% the speed of light (approx 3000000 m/s) and a medium-mass dust (1x10-5 kg, stationary), not enough force or area to dent steel (350 N/mm^2), but over time, lots of dust could cause erosion (quick math/estimates).

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#325

Post by valval »

elteto wrote: post #264
IAmGraydon wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How arrogant for anyone to look at these incredible pictures and think they know ANYTHING at all. We may be the center of it all, we may not, this may be a massive simulation, or a massive random accident. The only correct answer is to admit we know nothing. Humans are so fixated on knowing everything.

I do know one thing: fairy tales are not real.

To be fair, as a christian I don’t believe in goblins and unicorns. I do believe in something though. I suppose you do too, and in the end our core beliefs might not even be that different.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#326

Post by adamredwoods »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #97
geenkeuse wrote: post #30

We still have a long way to go to beat this draw distance, but we are on our way. The day will come when we have "sentient" beings, living in a massive world created by us. And they will ponder the same things as we do now. And we will remain invisible and out of reach, but completely observant, and influential in their world. After all, we wrote the program. And they will study the code and discover their own "natur…

The more I learn about physics the more I am convinced this is a simulation. In a way our universe is very lazy, at large scales where consciousness exists the universe is coherent, predictable. The smaller you get the lazier and fuzzier the universe gets to save computational work. The actual state of things is only computed on small scales when you measure them. The speed of light puts limits on how far humanity ca…

Or the universe is so massive that a human mind cannot ever comprehend the magnitude of it all, so in order to cope, a human mind must use a definition it feels comfortable with.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#328

Post by thierrydamiba »

jawilson2 wrote: post #265
thierrydamiba wrote: post #40

Fun to imagine someone or something out there mapping us as well. What a cool video. I think one of the best things about space travel will be the loss of ego we go through when we really understand how vast the world is.

Douglas Adams keeps coming up in this thread, but this sounds a lot like the Total Perspective Vortex.

Can you elaborate on this?

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#329

Post by mr_mitm »

behnamoh wrote: post #319
dreamcompiler wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... you don't need to freeze people if you can travel at a substantial fraction of c, because of time dilation. Caveats: 1. It's really, really hard to supply enough energy to go that fast, even with fusion power. 2. Your passengers won't be able to go home again, because by the time they get back everyone they've ever known will be long dead. 3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually hit a speck of du…

> 3. Even if you could go that fast, you'll eventually hit a speck of dust and disintegrate. Can you elaborate on that? Do you mean if we clash with anything (even as small as a space dust) while traveling at a substantial fraction of c, it would disintegrate us?

It would cause damage. The faster you go, the worse is the damage. Even just the cosmic microwave background will eventually turn into dangerous gamma radiation, so you will need heavy lead shields in the front, which makes traveling even more expensive and difficult. At certain speeds, you should think of your spaceship as a drill penetrating the inter galactic medium. And even then the journey will take millions or billions of years (in the reference frame of those staying at home).

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#330

Post by jiggawatts »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #115
jiggawatts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typical galaxies the size of the Milky Way have 100 to 2,000 billion stars and could have as many as ten trillion planets. That’s about 100^5, so one way to think of this is that if you categories these by any four properties (temperature, stability, hydration, day length) then you’d expect about 100 samples for any point in that 4D space. So even if you believe Earth is unique along four critical metrics, there are…

But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a severe limit upon their complexity.

Then use that as one of the four critical parameters.

E.g.: You might believe that some variability in conditions (hot-house Earth, iceball Earth) is required to "kick start" evolution. Okay, then simply pick out the subset of the parameter space with that amount of variability.

Post reply on HN