Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yet(nytimes.com) |
Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yet(nytimes.com) |
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
-Bill Watterson
We’re not the good guys. We rationalize the inescapable selfishness placed there by ages of evolution.
I see no malice in the decision to make peace with the fact that no mere mortal is capable of putting a dent into the level of suffering around the world as a whole.
Living one’s life reasonably and not being a burden is remarkably beneficial to society. At the very least, it’s one less unhappy and broke individual.
For comparison, the Milky Way has an estimate of 5x10^36 Watts so we're talking about the energy output, very briefly, of roughly a trillion Milky Way galaxies.
The other that gets me is amgnetars. These are neutron stars with an insane magnetic field. The strongest detected exceeds 1 billion Tesla, making is 30 trillion times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. Get too close and it would flatten atoms and ultimately break molecular bonds and rip electrons out of your body. Google seems to think that happens at ~1000km, which is pretty close to get to a neutron star but still, that's a magnetic field.
These things are quite rare and quite unstable. If you think about it, they must have a lot of protons to generate a field so strong, which means that the gravity is overcoming the strong nuclear force but also the electric repulsion.
Not necessarily. Neutrons have a magnetic moment. As I understand it, there is a magnetohydrodynamic model of how a magnetar's field gets generated, which would require protons, but it's not the only model and we don't have enough data to be able to rule out other models.
I don't like that our culture has developed statements like this.
Every single action you make on planet Earth is more consequential and impactful than the countless parsecs of worthless unobtainable space dust that astrophysicists and science promoters like to glaze over.
Space is nothing compared to the unfathomable amount of synaptic connections in your brain, or the impact you can have on someone's life by hugging them.
Let's piss away all the small blue dot sentiments. They're old and pointless.
"NO I AM NOT MEANINGLESS I CAN HUG PEOPLE! THE STARS ARE BASICSLLY DUST GUYS WHO CARES? I MATTER! RIGHT?! RIGHT?"
You can argue that makes it that much more special, but so what? To the universe, there very well could have been numerous other specials that have come and gone.
Being unable to accept that is pointless.
And I mean okay, alien intelligence life must be very smart and not contact us because we are so evil and petty and self involved etc. And every single living species we encounter is also the same. Why are we grandstanding these aliens? They are likley sipping coffee in their corner of universe and wondering man why do we keep doing all this nonsense when we are so insignificant etc. That is far more likely to me than aliens who know we exist but willingly stay away because we are humans.
Without new physics that isn’t even remotely visible on the horizon and that utterly contradicts most of what we believe to be true, this isn’t going to happen. Robotic AI probes sent to other star systems to send back telemetry? Sure, fine. Flesh bags sent to self-replicate on terraformed worlds out in the stars? Not a whisper of a microscopic chance.
[1]https://www.wcrf.org/preventing-cancer/topics/meat-and-cance... [2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...
But it is really interesting to read.
Hence why the articles title - which is based on when the light cone of the event reaches us - is actually the better way to think about it. At least there's no "depends how you feel like defining the speed of light today" in it.
I don't know how many of the kids are going to retain the knowledge.
That said, what good is changing a tire, when there's no tire to change.