Home » Open thread 10/1/21

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Open thread 10/1/21 — 38 Comments

  1. “The Great Nothing.”

    Yeah that was my boss a number of years ago. But he certainly wasn’t that large.

  2. Food for thought;

    There are BILLIONS of stars (our Sun is a medium sized star) in our Milky Way Galaxy. A percentage of these stars (don’t know how many, but it really doesn’t make a difference) have planets revolving around them, similar to how earth revolves around our Sun.

    And there are BILLIONS of Galaxies.

    And earth is supposed to be the only place in our galaxy or any other galaxy, that contains “intelligent” life.

    I don’t think so.

    Anyway, I personally saw a bunch of bizarre “points of light” moving very fast and erratically (i.e., sudden changes of direction and reversing direction ) across a clear night sky.
    There was no way on earth ANY man made or natural celestial object could move as fast AND erratically as these light “points” moved across the night sky.

    I had to look up the difference betwixt revolve and rotate; I always was confused if the earth revolved or rotated around the sun; it revolves.

  3. There are BILLIONS of stars (our Sun is a medium sized star) in our Milky Way Galaxy. — John T.

    I always thought that the sun was at the lower end of the medium size group (main sequence). But the video pegs it as being at the large end of the dwarfs? Odd. Here is a graph of star groupings. Supposedly, the sun = 1 in luminosity on the left vertical axis which places it a bit brighter (bigger?) than the middle of the main sequence. So John is correct, I think. I also notice that there are many more stars at the upper (brighter) end of the main sequence, so it matters how you determine “the middle.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence#/media/File:HRDiagram.png

    If one is interested in intelligent life on planets, the size of the star matters greatly because stars that are considerably bigger than our sun burn out quickly. Perhaps a billion years or less. Intelligent life on earth took roughly 4 billion years.

  4. When I used to teach intro astro for the non-science types we would head out to the large college green. I gave them a basketball and said that was the sun, and a box of other very small round objects: BBs, marbles, lead shot etc. Then had them calculate each planet’s diameter and pick out of the box the appropriate object for each planet. Then the fun began: setting each planet at its correct distance. We ran out of room with Saturn at about 1800ft. Being in eastern CT, Alpha Centauri was close to NYC. With the Earth about the size of 1mm lead shot, it gave them a real sense of this tiny place.

  5. I don’t know if they, or someone, has done a similar video, but going in the other direction on size, from a human down to sub atomic, is also humbling.

  6. TON 618 (the largest supermassive black hole known so far) is pretty insane. With a 198 billion kilometer event horizon, it’s so colossal that if you were to replace are Sun with it, it would engulf the entire solar system including Kuiper belt (which is only 4.4 to 14 billion kilometers away), and get a fair amount of the way to the Oort Cloud (which is about 30 trillion kilometers away).

  7. geoffb,

    I’m pretty sure kurzegesagt (German for, “stated succinctly”) did a video depicting human scale down to subatomic. I’m searching for it now and found a few interesting videos along the way. Since neo’s spam filter limits links I’ll post two you may like as I continue my search.

    This one is on black hole scale and size:
    https://youtu.be/0FH9cgRhQ-k

    This one is on the size of animal life and how different sizes are affected by air, water, land…:
    https://youtu.be/f7KSfjv4Oq0

  8. I don’t know, the mere fact we can express the size of the known universe pretty easily seems to make it not that big. I mean, sure it’s big compared to the size of my car but what about compared to other universes?

  9. Back in the prehistoric age when Time-Life was flogging books, it did a series on science. One volume was “powers of ten” that zoomed way way out and then way way in, with impressive photographs at each stop along the way. It was quite beautiful and, again, humbling.

  10. On a slightly related note: about 12am as I was just about fast asleep, the house shook and a large boom occurred. I had no idea what was happening. Checked outside, no sirens…all quiet. Turns out is was the sonic boom from the re-entering Dragon spacecraft and the boom was felt and heard all across northeast Florida.

  11. Is it more humbling to think that all that was “caused”
    Than to think it was just “chance?”

  12. physicsguy,

    When I moved to Orlando that happened with each shuttle landing. My co-workers warned me, but I still forgot and was surprised the first few times I heard it. Great at setting off car alarms.

  13. Owen,

    My father-in-law had bought that series and I encountered them as an adult, about 30 years after they were written. I read them all many times. The science was outdated on most of them, but they were still well written, concise explanations on many topics. And, as you stated, the imagery really helped with comprehension.

    I also highly, highly recommend Larry Gonick’s, “Cartoon History of the Universe!”

  14. Thanks, PA+Cat! I had no idea there were frogs and bats that tiny. A cockroach could eat them!

  15. Nonapod,
    I haven’t read that Federalist piece yet, but I’ve wondering about the political philosophy aspects of this new cultural revanchist movement in China. Too big of a topic to say much here, but …

    Many of the old guard free market conservatives from many decades ago (and probably Nixon even though he doesn’t really fit the category) thought that a country converting to a major capitalist economy would, of itself, push that country towards individual freedoms.

    Then looking at China over the last couple decades, many people (including myself) have thought that maybe (probably?) this was a silly notion. China is now an alternative version of authoritarian communism merged with a type of crony capitalism and it is preparing to eat the world.

    Back to Nonapod’s point; the new cultural revolution in China. Maybe this innate economic stimulated push towards individual freedoms was bigger and more problematic for the dictators than we in the west appreciated.

  16. More astronomy. Here is a video of a “scale model” of the solar system, mostly the more traditional planets out to Pluto (the on again, off again planet). Its done in the desert of Nevada making it easy to understand the relative distances involved.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg

  17. Another video, this one on the scale of pandemics in history. For comparison, about 4,800,000 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported worldwide as of October 1, with some estimates running about 10 million. Nonetheless, looking at the toll of the Black Death between 1331 and 1353 (200 million deaths, when the total world population was much smaller than it is today), humankind is much better off today than in the past.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okER9evZlZU&ab_channel=MetaBallStudios

  18. I’ve read more than once that we are placed precisely in the middle size wise between the vastness of the universe and the subatomic universe of which we are made…

    Matter is simply condensed energy held within tight bonds. The animating energy we know as life is another mystery alltogether.

    Gregory+Harper,

    We don’t know if there are other universes. But if there are, whether they consist of the same physical parameters which govern ours. Multiverse? Hyperspace? SciFi writers love the latitude.

    Cap’n Rusty,

    The odds of the universe being caused by chance are mathematically impossible. Roughly comparable to winning the lottery a million times consecutively by sheer chance.

    See this: “Why Some Scientists Embrace the ‘Multiverse’”
    https://dennisprager.com/column/why-some-scientists-embrace-the-multiverse/

    “In my Father’s house are many mansions” a 1st century itinerant preacher and sometime carpenter

  19. PA+Cat,

    How many of those 4,800,000 – 10,000,000 deaths ‘from’ COVID-19 are due to the suppression of HCQ and Ivermectin? How many of those deaths are counted as caused by Covid-19 when it may have merely been a contributing factor?

    Last night, Tucker pointed out that in Australia, if you die within 14 days of getting a vaccine shot, they count it as caused by Covid-19 even though the deceased was Covid free when they got the shot… same thing happening here. Amazingly, we had almost no flu deaths in 2020…

    They’re lying and spreading the fear. To what purpose?

    Clue: Tucker also showed Australia’s top ‘health bureaucrat’ slipping up and mentioning “The New World Order”…

    “Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
    1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
    2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests.

    In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves.”
    Thomas Jefferson

  20. GB–

    I’m on the same page as you are about the inflated figures of “COVID deaths” and the fear-mongering on the part of public health bureaucrats. A number of people have noted that Fauci smiles with apparent delight when he tells us that we must all suffer and sacrifice some more, and that he’s redefining “fully vaccinated,” etc. I just pulled the WHO’s figures on the COVID-19 pandemic for off-the-cuff purposes of comparison with the video. The video, of course, doesn’t go into detail about the horrors attending the earlier pandemics. According to the historian Procopius, 10,000 people were dying daily in Constantinople during the plague of Justinian, and the bodies of the dead had to be stacked in the streets. We are nowhere near that kind of horror; we just have to watch Australian police beating up lockdown protesters in the streets of Melbourne.

    Did you notice, BTW, that according to the video, HIV/AIDS has killed more people to date than COVID-19? I can remember when the AIDS pandemic was a righteous cause, and people praised Princess Diana for touching and hugging AIDS patients rather than observing social distancing.

    Anyway, I should have mentioned where I got the figure for COVID deaths, and that I don’t accept it but was just using it as background.

  21. PA+Cat,

    We are indeed on the same page.

    dh,

    Humility in the face of God’s creation of such vastness is appropriate. Thinking it makes us insignificant is nihilism.

    It’s not the size of the animal or world it inhabits but its capacity to imagine that defines its worth. Our self-awareness, compassion and creativity is what sets us above all else.

    The largest star is simply a big candle in comparison.

  22. @Owen:

    Brings back memories of, you know, bookshops and libraries, that Powers of Ten book! IIRC it was all monochrome or pencil sketches. Made an impression on me too.

  23. Astronomy has always been “scary” to me – the sizes of things, the length of time, etc. are just oh so humbling and make everything else seem so meaningless to me.

    But, it is still fascinating!

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