• Naz@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    I think the primary reason there’s so much psychological revulsion in this thread is because the only times you see something like this on Earth is in deep cave footage

    And typically these types of ecological niches are completely filled with insects

    Evolution primes the brain to pay attention to threats

    No insects? They’re hiding. —> Dread/Fear

  • Eddbopkins@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    This is fascinating, this rock that hurtals threw the black void of space for billions of years, and here it is. Photographed. If we can get here, we can go anywhere.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Voyager could reach Proxima Centauri in about 75000 years at the current speed (if it was aimed at it).

      The biology, sociology and physics of interstellar travel are brutal and unforgiving.

      • iglou@programming.dev
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        20 hours ago

        Yes, but as long as we don’t self-destroy, I’m pretty certain we’ll master it. The achievements of humanity are already remarkable. I mean, being able to split atoms and safely harness the produced energy is pretty incredible. Fusion, which seems impossible in many aspects, is closer and closer to our grasp every day. I am convinced that interstellar travel in a reasonable time for humans will be achieved eventually. But of course not in our lifetime, far from it.

        • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          The problem is it is a hard, physical limit imposed by spacetime itself. No matter the source the energy required to go even a fraction of the speed of light is beyond belief.

          • iglou@programming.dev
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            19 hours ago

            Disclaimer: I’m nowhere close to being a professional in the field. If you are or simply know more than I do, please correct me.

            But interstellar travel doesn’t have to be based on higher speed, just like we didn’t expand our energy production by mining and burning coal faster. We found ways that produce much, much more energy in the same time without needing to keep improving our fuel production. Why wouldn’t we be able to find ways to travel much, much further in the same time without improving our speed?

            We know spacetime can theoretically be manipulated: anything with a mass does to some extent. Why wouldn’t we be able to harness that someday?

            • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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              14 hours ago

              If you REALLY want to dive into it there are a lot of good videos on youtube that go deeply into it. I have a background in astrophysics so I’ll toss a few points out.

              First of all space is massive. REALLY REALLY massive. Don’t let small numbers like 4 light years make you think it is trivial. If the sun and earth were reduced to a distance of 1 inch the nearest star would be over 4 miles away. This isn’t like crossing an ocean faster. Theories of spacetime manipulation (I assume you mean wormholes or “bubbles”) are just pure conjecture. No evidence of such has ever been seen in nature and even in theory they require exotic forms of matter (such as negative mass) that are purely theoretical and massive (solar level) amounts of energy.

              1. I want to get there within a generation. Therefore you must go at a significant percentage of light speed just to reach the nearest star.
                1.1. Energy costs grow ASYMPTOICALLY with relativistic speeds, not linearly. You’d have to carry so much fuel (fusion or fission doesn’t matter) that you hit the rocket tyranny issue very quickly. More fuel to move requires more fuel which requires more fuel, etc. To move 1 kiloton of mass at 10% of light speed requires about as much energy as 2,000 Tsar Bombas, the biggest thermonuclear weapons ever made. Using hydrogen fusion it would require 1,440 metric tons of hydrogen at a 50% efficiency (very good) rate for each kiloton of mass.
                1.2. Solar power isn’t an option. Chemical fuels aren’t energy dense enough. Nuclear power helps but even that requires massive amounts of propellants, not to mention the radiation they produce. Matter-antimatter is the strongest but containment for decades is unlikely and the total amount of antimatter produced by all of our particle accelerators is about 20 nanograms. One glitch would cause the instant destruction of the ship.
                1.3. If you want to send people that means you are talking about many, many kilotons of mass. Most spaceship designs we’ve imagined go from thousands of tons to billions for multigenerational ships.
                1.4. At relativistic speeds even the vacuum of interstellar space, at about 1 atom per cubic cm, starts to resemble having a particle accelerator aimed at you for decades. Even small dust grains hit with tremendous energy. Light becomes blue shifted in front of you and more energetic. This would require even more mass for shielding. Magnetic shielding requires massive magnets and incredibly strong fields at those energies so even more fuel.
                1.5. If you intend to visit anything and not fly by it you now need DOUBLE (at least) the fuel and cannot depend on earth based schemes.
                1.6. Scooping up interstellar hydrogen for fuel costs more energy than it produces.

              2. Ok, we’ll go slowly. We’ll putter along for maybe TENS OF THOUSANDS of years.
                2.1. Multigenerational ships now must be totally self contained with NO outside resupply, raw materials, energy, parts, etc. Absolutely nothing can be lost. Practical issues that exist regardless of the technology appear. Things break, things wear out. You have to have the means to manufacture your own equipment and fix those repair machines too. You have to be totally self sustained and we have never been able to keep a totally enclosed biological environment going for more than a few months.
                2.2. Sociologically you hit issues of who will lead? What are the ethics of knowing generations will be born into a ship they can never escape on a mission they never chose? What if things break down sociologically like they have on expeditions and remote bases on earth? After thousands of years they may decide they have had enough of being isolated.
                2.3. Fast or slow you’ve left the protection of earth’s magnetic field and even the sun’s heliosphere. You are now subject to the constant barrage of high energy radiation permeating space. Cosmic rays that can punch through 20 stories of concrete cannot be blocked by any reasonable shield. They will constantly cause biological, especially genetic, damage. Slap on more shielding? Ok, that’s more fuel.
                2.4. Communication with earth becomes a year long process or more. Anything you ask will take at least 2 years to get a response at 1 light year.
                2.5 The fastest object we’ve sent out so far is the Voyager. It used gravitational assists due to a rare planetary alignment. At its speed it would take ~75,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

              3. Forget sending people, we’ll send robots!
                3.1. Sending gram sized probes with massive solar sails has been proposed. You are now trying to cram all of your tech into something the size of dice.
                3.2. The solar sail would need to be huge, thinner than a human hair, but still able to handle the intense power of gigawatt lasers from earth without deforming. The lasers would have to produce energy equivalent to that produced by the entire USA.
                3.3. It wouldn’t be able to stop, it would be a flyby mission with less than a day to gather any info.
                3.4. A tiny object would have to transmit this back to earth somehow and be picked out of the noise and radiation of the star it is visiting. Like detecting a match on Mars while staring into a searchlight.
                3.5 It would also be subject to the barrage of interstellar atoms, radiation and occasional dust particle.

              I’m sure I’m leaving some points out but these are the basic issues people have run into analyzing it. Many of them are fundamental to spacetime itself and cannot be “out teched”.

              • iglou@programming.dev
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                13 hours ago

                Thank you for the very long and detailed reply! I do understand that our current understanding of spacetime makes it impossible to do interstellar travel.

                I have a background in physics, and although I ended up switching to a different field, there is some fundamental aspects of the field that it helped me understand. The most important one is that it is not an absolute truth, it is the best truth we came up with based on our interpretation and modelling of reality. So I am always careful with tossing around words like “impossible”.

                Yes, all those hard limits make it impossible for our generation, the next, and probably 4, 5, 10 or 20 more down the line to even consider it. I unfortunately do not remember enough of my uni days to give out examples, so perhaps you can help me here… Brilliant minds in the past have proven that some things considered impossible by the understanding of physics at the time were actually possible.

                Now, yes, anything with spacetime manipulation today is conjecture and science fiction, and again, I’m not saying we’ll be travelling to even the closest neighbouring star system anytime soon. What I am saying is, we don’t know that much about spacetime yet. We know some, we have proven some, but not much. My point is: We have found so many ways around impossibilities that I doubt that (if our civilization doesn’t collapse under its own collective stupidity) we can’t find ways around these ones too, wether it’s in 200 or 2000 years.

                Edit: Of course there are some things we’ll probably never do. We’ll probably never go below the absolute 0, we’ll probably never go close to the speed of light either. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work around these hard limits to achieve goals that they are gating.

                • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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                  4 hours ago

                  Glad you are curious! Maybe you’ll have a dramatic daydreaming insight and solve it. :D

                  One thing worth looking into is the “Fermi Paradox”. It concerns not only the possibility of intelligent life and communication but interstellar travel. If interstellar travel were possible in even thousands of years and the development of intelligent life capable of achieving it were possible in the current age of the universe then we should’ve seen signs of it flooding the galaxy by now. We haven’t seen a single peep.

    • eleitl@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      Not quite anywhere. The rocket equation is a bitch that way. Nor does the hardware live forever, or even us.

      • KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works
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        24 hours ago

        Space isnt quite empty either. There maybe extremely few particles in space, but its more than zero. Spacecraft will slow down and stop eventually. It just takes a long time.

    • eleitl@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      It is a very safe place, as all people are extremely far away.

    • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      Have you ever thought about what it must be like in space? That shit is scary. We take for granted that we have an atmosphere to disperse light, as well as a ground for light to reflect off of. In space, some shit could be right in front of you and you would have no idea. If there were an asteroid between you and the sun, you wouldn’t realize until it was so close that there was a huge black spot covering the sun up.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Perhaps because you can see mountains at the same scale that allows you to clearly see the object’s horizon/curvature. It would be like if Earth had mountains thousands of miles high. It’s a landscape that feels deeply unnatural.

  • Thorry@feddit.org
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    3 days ago

    Scientists: Yes, we finally did it! We captured a picture from our probe that touched down on a big rock in space! We are awesome!

    Me: Holy shit! That is so cool, you are awesome! What did the rock look like?

    Scientists: Like a big fucking rock

    Me: Dude, no way!

        • DokPsy@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Cries in astrophotographer in the suburbs who’s had one cloudless night in a fortnight

            • DokPsy@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              I had a few glorious dark (for bortle 5-6) nights and was able to get a lot of nice eagle nebula shots a month or so ago. I’m constantly battling the hippie ‘don’t cut down the few old trees left in this suburb’ part of me with the ‘get your leaves and branches out of my damn shot, I’m trying to capture space’ part

  • Iconoclast@feddit.uk
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    3 days ago

    With pictures like this it’s so hard to convince my brain that it’s not just a picture of a random boulder taken with flash at night.

    • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I worked on Landsat 9 a few years ago, and when I got on-console for my first shift after it launched, I remembered seeing the telemetry come down and thinking, huh, doesn’t look any different than when we simulated the data…how do I know we actually sent it up there?

      Then something went wrong that i had to fix and I snapped back to reality.

    • BigBrownDog@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I was looking at pictures of Mars’ surface from Curiosity with my uncle who is a lunar landing and science denier. He said, “That could be taken at any desert on Earth.” I was like NO SHIT! You mean to tell me that other planets have rocks too?!?! No fucking way! What do you expect it to look like?

      You and your 6th grade reading level somehow outsmarted two generations of NASA scientists and their massive coverup and lies about space exploration? No, you fucking dunce.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I mean, you’re not wrong.

      Except this specific boulder isn’t stuck in earth’s gravity well, it’s got its own thing going on.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      There are barely visible tiny features that would have eroded away on Earth.

      That said, they are barely visible and tiny. If somebody said it’s just some weird concretion, I’d completely believe it.

    • Obinice@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      When you think about it, that’s kinda exactly what it is. Which is very cool :-D

      Just a big random boulder in space amongst a whole solar system of random boulders, taken with a light for illumination because it’s dark, yo

    • ShadowRam@fedia.io
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      3 days ago

      There’s absolutely no sense of scale here.

      What we see as rocks, could absolutely be boulders…

      We’d tend to error of the side of ‘small’ but with no fluid (liquid or air) erosion, these could be massive.

  • billwashere@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I’m not sure why but this fills me with such inconsolable dread. Something about a dead cold rock floating through such vast nothingness.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      No, no, no. It actually isn’t lifeless. It contains some small microbes that are virtually undetectable. Their only effect on the human psyche is to create paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and remove all traces of empathy.

    • dantheclamman@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It kind of reminds me of the comet from Outer Wilds, which was kinda spooky, in terms of having to land on this tiny object traveling very fast through space and navigate it

    • Joeffect@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Yeah, and knowing the only reason you can see it is because of the lighting from the robot taking the photo. Otherwise it’s just this thing shrouded in darkness flying through space at whatever ridiculously fast speed only to eventually run into something.

    • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net
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      3 days ago

      This image is ripe for an SCP to be written up based on it.

      Imagine being one of the first humans to try to mine one of these, and you feel like you saw something moving in the corner of your eye, just where the light meets the shadow of one of the sharp lumps, but you can’t be sure.

  • PushButton@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I’m just thinking about all the technical challenges to land a flying metal cereal box on a moving asteroid…

    Man, this rocks.

    • DokPsy@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It just took a collection of bombs and careful aiming. We as a species are really good at throwing things pretty accurately and at messing with controlling fire

      I kid, it’s awesome we were able to make it happen and the wealth of knowledge gained by doing it

  • k0e3@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    It would have been cool if they had named the spacecraft Urashima since they were going to Ryugu, but I guess it wouldn’t make sense because in the story, the gift Urashima brings back from Ryugu ends up fucking him over. At least, that’s how I understood it as a kid.