that title should read "Water found on a potentially life-friendly exoplanet"
Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
331–340 of 410 posts
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
The speed of light is just a compute constraint imposed on the physics simulation that is our universe. If we can just get the gods who are running that simulation to give us a little extra compute time in our neck of to woods then we can all be galactic explorers.
Just for the sake of argument, let's run with that. If we're in a physics simulation, we don't experience at the rate that the simulation is processed. One "tick" of the simulation could be processed in one second of the host universe, or one hour: and we wouldn't feel the difference. We are processed at the same tickrate as the rest of the universe, so we experience the passage of time at the same rate that the simu…
@mesid asked in a now dead comment:
> What does speed of causality mean? And how is light so close to that?
Take a look at this video by PBS Space Time on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msVuCEs8Ydo
You may need to go down the rabbit hole and watch the earlier videos on relativity and related topics.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
History does not favour the civilization which is visited.
Our history doesn't.
Given what we see in non-human nature, the tendency of visitees to get rekt by visitors is much, much more likely due to the dynamics of competition for life than to some human-specific variable.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't 1g be perfect? I've been enjoying it for a few years now on this planet.
I took it as 1g of acceleration. I don't know. Wouldn't plain old 1g mean no acceleration at all? Edit: Oh... I guess not. :) I got confused with the extra g's we'd need to escape earth, but that's so short-term that it can be ignored. Yeah, I think 1g would be perfect.
When you sit in a car and it accelerates forward you can feel your back being pushed into the seat. When you lie in bed gravity will also push you into the bed. In both cases it's a force acting on your body. So being pushed in space in a ship accelerating at 1g will feel like normal gravity with the 'ground' being the back of the ship.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#335I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it w…
Progress in physics was much faster in the early 20th century when it wasn't so fascinated with deep space. Yes, you needed to observe eclipses to verify relativity, but that was a tool, not the end in itself. Cosmology involves distances that are so great that it seems like it's pouring a whole bunch of smart people's efforts down the drain in an ultimately futile waste of brain power that will never amount to anyth…
> when we get faster than light travel we can just pick up exoplanet research where we left off
if we get FTL, we'll be able to pick up that research before we left off ...
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could ask the host to update their algorithm to let c be a property of objects and then just do spaceship.c = 1000 * c. Would probably be a heck of a refactor to get it working without bugs though.
Just leave the bugs in for the speedrunners to use.
speedrunners can restart the game if they crash it.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
The speed of light is just a compute constraint imposed on the physics simulation that is our universe. If we can just get the gods who are running that simulation to give us a little extra compute time in our neck of to woods then we can all be galactic explorers.
Why would time outside of the simulation have any bearing on time within the simulation?
Only via side-channel attacks.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#338So they finally got there. Detecting atmospheric water vapor on a planet 110 light years away. amazing.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. It's mostly a number of Euros away and we haven't been funding it very well.
Could you give some sources for that or explaing where exactly the problems in fusion technology lie and how it could be solved by throwing money at it?
ITER is planned to be completed in 2026 and it'll generate a net 0 of electricity at 300MW in/out.
It seems the issue with fusion is that it actually works much better at scale. But the same could be said about nuclear reactors - it obviously is much harder to build a compact one.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any book in particular you'd recommend?
Anything in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks; The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey; The Commonwealth and Void trilogies by Peter F. Hamilton, and the Night’s Dawn trilogy also by Peter F. Hamilton; The Dune saga by Frank Herbert.
Neal Asher's Polity Series as well.
It's the culture with more detailed worlds and villains.