Space

[Yevrah]

It's absolutely insane, isn't it?

You hear the numbers when you're a kid (which have been massively revised upwards now anyway) and sort of lol it off, but recently I've been reading a lot about it and my mind is somewhat broken. To start with the easier stuff that's boggled my mind:

Our solar system is just one of something like 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone, which are home to somewhere between 800 billion and 3.2 trillion planets, with something like six billion of these "earth like".

Then you go further afield and in just the bit of the universe that we can see there are something like two trillion galaxies, with 200 billion trillion stars in them and an amount of planets that, well, it's a lot.

I always thought we lived in the best time of history, but imagine how much more we'll know about all this the next thousand or million years and in that sense it's quite gutting that if I had to be born, it was now. But I suppose on the plus side, maybe we will never understand it properly and given that the universe will supposedly last for 100 trillion years, we'd only be 0.014% through that now and therefore may well be some of the first intelligent creatures to have ever lived, if not the first.

Bit of a ramble I know, but one thing that does seem certain is that with current understanding, it's impossible to make sense of all this. Your thoughts?

[niko_cee]

Yeah, space is cool.

On the mind boggling scope thing, at a more local level, I quite liked that Chris Packham history of Earth programme.

And then it rained for 40 million years . . .



As a slight negative, talking to some semi nutcase people about this, and the lengths of time people have existed versus other species led me down the Netflix Ancient Apocalypse rabbithole, which, whilst amusing was quite annoying as an overall experience.

[Yevrah]

I find it weird that among all of the numbers I can't comprehend there's the one that I sort of can that says the Earth will only be habitable for humans for another 500 or so million years, no matter how much we don't feck it up in the meantime. Which is only about three times the number of years the dinosaurs lived for.

Oh and more tv programmes recommendations definitely welcome. I have the box set of "The Universe" on a shelf at home that is definitely getting watched now too. Might start with that Packham earth thing to put it into context mind.

[phonics]

Fucking boring and people that talk about it are dull.

"Oooh we've got a telescope that can see the other side of the universe"
"Looks like a series of blurs"
"Great isn't it"

[Yevrah]

Fucking boring and people that talk about it are dull.

"Oooh we've got a telescope that can see the other side of the universe"
"Looks like a series of blurs"
"Great isn't it"

I will admit that most of the pictures are rubbish. I had a genuine lol at one of three stars being eaten by a black hole that I came across a couple of days ago, it was sub Pacman stuff.

As for it being boring to talk about it, I think it's because it's so hard to comprehend that not much can be added. Having looked at theories too they are also all pretty rubbish, with the one that genuinely makes the most sense is that we're in a simulation/experiment created by aliens and even then that's crap. It does somewhat shit on the idea of a God though (if it were needed) as even if a God could create all of this (they couldn't), why would they bother? Were they cursed by an addiction of creating galaxies, or did they AI it and it got a tad out of hand?

[Adramelch]

Procedural generation was all the hype back then.

[niko_cee]

Who was the guy that wrote the accessible string theory books? Brian Greene or something? I quite enjoyed those alongside Hawking and whatnot and some entry level quantum stuff back in my younger days. Stuff at that scale is immeasurably more mind boggling. Tiny strings folded in 7 dimensions what?

[-james-]

I remember walking home one day when I was about 13 and having my first existential crisis over this stuff ("we're so insignificant dude bro"). Still can't think about it too much or it makes me feel very strange, though it has evolved into a strange comfort of sorts when I worry about some small bollocks thing in my life.

[Spikey M]

Fucking boring and people that talk about it are dull.

"Oooh we've got a telescope that can see the other side of the universe"
"Looks like a series of blurs"
"Great isn't it"

Keep in mind we've seen your Twitter account.

[Baz]

Fucking boring and people that talk about it are dull.

"Oooh we've got a telescope that can see the other side of the universe"
"Looks like a series of blurs"
"Great isn't it"

I’m glad someone said it.

Although this is my outlook on most things tbf

[Spikey M]

Keep in mind we've seen your Twitter account

[Bam]

Keep in mind we've seen your Faceparty account.

[Offshore Toon]

I love walking at night with a clear sky. It's hard to talk about space with anybody because it's either impossible to comprehend or so insanely scientific that it becomes boring. But that feeling when you just kinda take it all in is incredible.

[Disco]

Getting a big 'Int space brilliant!' feeling from this.

[Manc]

Deep.

[Giggles]

Getting a big 'Int space brilliant!' feeling from this.

Paging Mike.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Thinking about stuff like this just short-circuits the human brain, so I tend to focus on earthly questions first. For example: why hasn't bubble and squeak been gentrified?

[Shindig]

Once in a while I'll think about death just long enough to scare me. Space can't do this to me.

[niko_cee]

Thinking about stuff like this just short-circuits the human brain, so I tend to focus on earthly questions first. For example: why hasn't bubble and squeak been gentrified?

It has. The sausage and mash café came, became a chain and went in the blink of an eye.

Think the original one on Essex Road was in the title scenes for some noughties football show. Maybe even Soccer AM but not certain on that.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Come-and-gone hipster joints is not gentrifying. I want to pay £10+ for it in a major chain, with or without truffle.

[niko_cee]

Think that place had been going for years and years before their disastrous attempt to take bubble and squeak to the masses.

Almost proper institution levels.

I guess Islington being gentrified to death around them probably put pay to it as all the Broadway Market/London Fields places sprung up to replace them in areas you felt a little more like you might get robbed in.

What you want is McDonalds coming up with a bubble and squeak hash brown alternative for their breakfasts.

[Lewis]

Keep in mind we've seen your Faceparty account.

[7om]

The waitbutwhy article on this was pretty good. It was something like, there is a star in the universe for every grain of sand on Earth. Or something similar.

There has to be some other form of life out there. Sad that we will never see it as you'd imagine at some point humans will find a way to travel through worm holes or warp time. Either that or Putin will blow us all to smithereens within five years.

[Spikey M]

The waitbutwhy article on this was pretty good. It was something like, there is a star in the universe for every grain of sand on Earth. Or something similar.

There has to be some other form of life out there. Sad that we will never see it as you'd imagine at some point humans will find a way to travel through worm holes or warp time. Either that or Putin will blow us all to smithereens within five years.

There's just no way to say with a dataset of one. Perhaps what happened here really is a complete freak occurrence that requires exactly our environment. Stable orbit, perfect atmosphere, perfect distance from the sun, etc.

Or, perhaps life is as common as Bamsters mum and there's Silicon geezers bowling round Omicron Persei b.17924 drinking pints of Uranium by the bucketful.

[Jimmy Floyd]

I think there's sure to be life out there, no matter how unique our circumstances. Think of it this way: if you curl out a turd in Benfleet Wetherspoons on a given Saturday morning, what are the chances of someone curling out the same turd - identical to the nanometre in shape, weight, consistency and composition - in the whole of Essex for the rest of that weekend? Small, you might think, but that fails to understand just the sheer number of people having a shit and the limited number of outcomes that are actually possible given the laws of physics and, in this case, biology. Sure, you'll never know, because there are logistical challenges involved in checking out everyone's toilet bowls / front doormats in time, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

[Yevrah]

There's just no way to say with a dataset of one.

I used to think the same but look at those numbers above. 6 billion planets in our galaxy alone that are earth like and two trillion more galaxies in the universe with even more planets on top of that.

What seems much more likely is that there is life elsewhere, it’s just a fucking long way away and we can’t detect it. Maybe we never have any hope of doing so.

I mean, the closest star to us is 4.2 light years away and would take Voyager 73,000 years to get there.

I’m pretty convinced there’s life elsewhere, we just need a cheat code or a fuck of a long time to find it. Which is part of the reason I’m gutted to have been born now. The chance of us finding it in my lifetime is as close to zero as you can get. The only hope is it finds us and if it does, we’re probably in trouble.

[Lofty]

I remember walking home one day when I was about 13 and having my first existential crisis over this stuff ("we're so insignificant dude bro"). Still can't think about it too much or it makes me feel very strange, though it has evolved into a strange comfort of sorts when I worry about some small bollocks thing in my life.

Yes I quite enjoy remembering everything that ever has or ever will happen is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things on that scale, some people are unnerved by it though.

[Yevrah]

And it’s when you look at the numbers, distances and time involved, which are all incomprehensible, you realise how outdated the Fermi paradox is.

[Yevrah]

I remember walking home one day when I was about 13 and having my first existential crisis over this stuff ("we're so insignificant dude bro"). Still can't think about it too much or it makes me feel very strange, though it has evolved into a strange comfort of sorts when I worry about some small bollocks thing in my life.

My Sister feels this way but the Earth alone is enough to make me realise how insignificant my solitary life is, so it being made even less significant by space doesn’t really register.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Yes I quite enjoy remembering everything that ever has or ever will happen is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things on that scale, some people are unnerved by it though.

For me it makes the most insignificant things carry more weight and value. The five minutes I just enjoyed watching an old 8 out of 10 Cats video on YouTube will ultimately end up in the same oblivion as the Israel-Palestine war, so I'm winning really.

[-james-]

My Sister feels this way but the Earth alone is enough to make me realise how insignificant my solitary life is, so it being made even less significant by space doesn’t really register.

You're right, it is a different thing to insignificance on a cosmic scale which is a mindfuck.

The idea that billions of plebs from the stone age to now had the same base worries, feelings and emotions as me is quite a nice one.

[-james-]

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Bruv.

[SvN]

I was trying to talk to my wife about this a few months ago. The fact that the moon is tiny compared to the sun, yet it's the ideal distance away from the Earth to be perceived as the same size is just mind boggling. She didn't really get what I was so perplexed about.

[Spikey M]

Have her watch the cow episode of Father Ted.

[Don]

One in a trillion probability seems very wrong in an infinite universe.

[Jimmy Floyd]

I don't want to be all Bernard Manning / Jim Davidson about this, but women are the worst people to talk to about stuff like this. All they care about is whether there's enough butter in the fridge.

[Ben]

All they care about is whether there's enough butter in the fridge.

To be fair that is a major issue. Butter is life.

[niko_cee]

Shouldn't be put in the fridge though.

[phonics]

You keep it in the fridge and then have a butter bowl where you get a bit out. Wax cloth cover obviously.

[John Arne]

"As far as we know"