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100,000 stars

workshop.chromeexperiments.com

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Re: 100,000 stars

#81

Post by shanelja »

altrego99 wrote: post #79
shanelja wrote: post #6

This is without a doubt one of the coolest and most beautiful webgl experiments I have seen in the last few years, it actually struck a real chord with me - music, lighting, effects, the zoom and the sheer beauty of it. For those people unlucky enough to not be able to load this app (it took me quite a while) here is a particularly fantastic image I took (without asking or any right to, of course) - http://shanearmst…

I am guessing you have liked this too - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U Being a video it is not interactive, but definitely does strike something in me. It's almost the Total Perspective Vortex.

Until now I had not seen this video, but thank you.

This really puts in to perspective the brevity of human life and how little we have achieved so far, from leaving the primordial soup to firing Glee across our television network to entertain teenage girls and travelling to and from the moon.

We are irrelevantly small and unimportant and yet we have already done the hardest thing, of what we know for sure, there are 8.5 million species on the planet and we are the only constructively intelligent one present here, there are 400 known satellites in our solar system, if you assume that every solar system in the milky way has a similar amount of planetoids on which some minor form of life could have grown, placed around 300 billion stars. I'm going to take a complete guess that only 1 in 10,000 of those contain a similar amount of life, which could be light years off, or could be spot on, or could even be far, far less tan the actual number - we simply don't know yet.

The maths is breathtakingly overwhelming:

(1 / ((8500000 * 400) * 300000000000)) * 10000 = 0.000000000000000098

Our significance in the Milky Way is 0.000000000000000098.

We account for only 0.0000000000000098% of potential life in this galaxy.

But we survived. We made it this far. From here the only way is up, or down, or left or under (depending on the location of the camera when we finally make it far enough off this rock to consider it interstellar travel.)

Disclaimer: This maths was about as well as I could do at 5.30am and is the product of a Google search of the accumulated human knowledge of the last few thousand years

Re: 100,000 stars

#83

Post by Jarihd »

wow, awesome visualization.

I always wondered how scientist determine the position of earth in our galaxy and the center of the galaxy. can somebody throw some light on this ???

Re: 100,000 stars

#84

Post by grn »

equalarrow wrote: post #20

WOW, that is amazing. I'm always blown away by stuff like this, where you can actually get a sense of how small we all are and how distant even the closest neighbor stars are. I just close my eyes for a minute and think (or try to), what would it be like for those people that are finally able to reach, say, Vega (I know it's not the closest). Sure, this is not a big deal in sci-fi, but for reality, it's pretty mind b…

You could also take a look at http://htwins.net/scale2/. It's also a very nice demonstration of the scale of the universe from the smallest to the largest objects.

Re: 100,000 stars

#86

Post by juanre »

For those of you interested in the topic, the best publicly available database I've found is http://www.astronexus.com/node/34, and The Book for astronomical computation is Astronomical Algorithms, by Jean Meeus, http://www.willbell.com/math/mc1.HTM

(Shameless plug: I used both to implement the Common Lisp sky renderization engine for my startup, http://greaterskies.com, that makes pretty personalized posters out of thousands of stars)

Re: 100,000 stars

#87

Post by gerhardi »

I wonder if there are clusters where distance between neighbouring stars are much less than with Sun and Proxima Centauri. Would these locations provide better opportunities for space faring civilizations to reach other star systems?

Re: 100,000 stars

#88

Post by adastra »

scott_s wrote: post #56
equalarrow wrote: post #20

WOW, that is amazing. I'm always blown away by stuff like this, where you can actually get a sense of how small we all are and how distant even the closest neighbor stars are. I just close my eyes for a minute and think (or try to), what would it be like for those people that are finally able to reach, say, Vega (I know it's not the closest). Sure, this is not a big deal in sci-fi, but for reality, it's pretty mind b…

Obligatory buzz-kill, Charles Stross on why we're unlikely to leave the solar system: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456

He's wrong.

For starters, there's this assertion: "The far-fetched version is to use back holes as power sources [1] as this is, as far as I've read anyway, the only remotely viable method of providing propulsion without reaction mass to speak of and reaction mass is the death of any form of interstellar propulsion."

Not true. We can definitely build something with today's technology that allows for propulsion without reaction mass: light-sails pushed by lasers[1]. I can address some of his other points but it's not necessary. If you crunch the numbers, it should be doable to travel to another star in about 150 years.

[1] See Humble's canonical text on space propulsion design: http://www.amazon.com/Propulsion-Analysis-Design-Ronald-Humb...

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