People Who Are Disproportionately Excited About Space

[Wittles he/him]

I don't like e

[alder24]

I don't like i

[NerdyAarakocra They/Them]

i is worse than e.

Also, space is cool.

[Cash67 he/him]

On 4/12/2023 at 5:42 PM, alder24 said:

The idea that the time moves backwards when moving faster than the speed of light comes from the fact that the faster you go, the slower time moves for you until you hit the speed of light, when time stops for you - everything is happening at once to you. That's how photons experience time. Because of that if you were to exceed the speed of light you would move backwards in time.
I don't know how much is it confirmed mathematically, but google says that special relativity does indeed predict what would happen if you were to exceed the speed of light - you would move backwards in time. But the problem with this is that no object with mass can even reach the speed of light, so the nature of our Universe might just prevent this from even happening.

Buuuuut, you could use a warp drive (Alcubierre drive) and move spacetime around you faster than the speed of light. Spacetime has no mass, so physics allows this, and you would be moving faster than the speed of light, but from the point of view of a distant observer. Wormhole works as well. But good luck finding negative mass for this.

That's why I don't believe there is a way to achieve FTL other than warp drive or a wormhole. You can't just do the Star Wars and go into hyperspace or something like that.

I know that pain  

I can say that most of the sub-light effects of special relativity have been experimentally proven. I think that some subatomic particles have been accelerated to like 95% of the speed of light and the particles lasted for much longer than they should have. 
 

Making energy and information travel FTL is forbidden by our current understanding of physics, so it’s kinda hard to talk about that. The math tells you that you’d move backwards in time though, so there’s that.

[Channelknight Fadran]

9 minutes ago, Cash67 said:

I can say that most of the sub-light effects of special relativity have been experimentally proven. I think that some subatomic particles have been accelerated to like 95% of the speed of light and the particles lasted for much longer than they should have. 

99.99999%*

[Cash67 he/him]

1 hour ago, Channelknight Fadran said:

99.99999%*

Ooooooo I just relooked it up and STORMS people have made stuff go fast

(As a physics major, this is the most scientifically accurate way I could think of to describe this)

Edited April 26, 2023 by Cash67

[Channelknight Fadran]

I mean, neutrinos are barely matter as is. They’re probably the closest thing to light that isn’t light

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

GAH

WHY HAVE I NOT POSTED HERE BEFORE

WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT

[alder24]

7 hours ago, Cash67 said:

I can say that most of the sub-light effects of special relativity have been experimentally proven. I think that some subatomic particles have been accelerated to like 95% of the speed of light and the particles lasted for much longer than they should have. 
 

Making energy and information travel FTL is forbidden by our current understanding of physics, so it’s kinda hard to talk about that. The math tells you that you’d move backwards in time though, so there’s that.

So it is mathematically proven that you'll move backward in time if you exceed the speed of light? Fascinating.

What about quantum entanglement? Doesn't information there travel instantaneously? If superposition collapsing is considered information at all.

40 minutes ago, The Bookwyrm said:

GAH

WHY HAVE I NOT POSTED HERE BEFORE

WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT

SPACE! ALIENS! Anything at all.

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

Hypothetical types of biochemistry?

[alder24]

22 minutes ago, The Bookwyrm said:

Hypothetical types of biochemistry?

Silicon-based life! 

But have we ever made non-carbon-based life in the lab? Is there non-carbon-based on Earth? Did we even manage to just put a bunch of proteins on the petri dish and create the right conditions for it to just spontaneously self-assemble itself into a primitive lifeform? I don't think so. So it's really hard to say what are the right conditions for carbon-based life to arise, not to mention non-carbon-based life. We know more or less what to look for in the case of carbon-based life, but how would we know how to look for something like a silicon-based life?

[Frustration he/him]

3 hours ago, alder24 said:

What about quantum entanglement? Doesn't information there travel instantaneously? If superposition collapsing is considered information at all.

No, because entangled particles are technically one particle, so information isn't traveling anywhere.

[Cash67 he/him]

1 hour ago, Frustration said:

No, because entangled particles are technically one particle, so information isn't traveling anywhere.

 

4 hours ago, alder24 said:

So it is mathematically proven that you'll move backward in time if you exceed the speed of light? Fascinating.

What about quantum entanglement? Doesn't information there travel instantaneously? If superposition collapsing is considered information at all.

SPACE! ALIENS! Anything at all.

Yeah what Frust said, info can’t travel faster than the speed of light so quantum entanglement might be able to transport info at high speeds, but not faster than using literal light (radio waves) to transmit information. 

[Channelknight Fadran]

Entanglement was another thing that Einstein thought up of before deciding it's stupid

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

By hypothetical types of biochemistry, I had in mind carbon based life forms that utilized another fluid as a solvent to facilitate chemical reactions.

Earthlife uses water, but what about ammonia? Or methane?

Second topic, who here is familiar with the Loss of Simultaneity?

[Immortal Platypus]

3 minutes ago, The Bookwyrm said:

Earthlife uses water, but what about ammonia? Or methane?

 

I was watching a NOVA and they talked about a planet that has a methane cycle instead of a water cycle. They thought maybe life could be found there.

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

2 minutes ago, Being of Cacophony said:

I was watching a NOVA and they talked about a planet that has a methane cycle instead of a water cycle. They thought maybe life could be found there.

Titan, the moon of Saturn, has a methane cycle. So it could have methane based life. I personally think ammonia based life would be more probable as ammonia has the polar structure that makes water such a good solvent...

The other interesting thing about titan is that it has a bunch of solid water-ice. Once the sun expands into a red giant, the habitable zone will actually extend out to Saturn, and thus Titan. All the water will melt, and the methane will evaporate, making Titan a water world not unlike Earth, where water-based life could evolve.

Downside is it doesn't have that much time to evolve before the sun dies altogether. Can't really get enough energy from a white dwarf.

[alder24]

8 minutes ago, The Bookwyrm said:

By hypothetical types of biochemistry, I had in mind carbon based life forms that utilized another fluid as a solvent to facilitate chemical reactions.

Earthlife uses water, but what about ammonia? Or methane?

Methane solvent life would be good to exist - on Titan! Even bacteria would be cool to discover, as this is so close that we can study it. But I'm not too good with chemistry tbf.

8 minutes ago, The Bookwyrm said:

Second topic, who here is familiar with the Loss of Simultaneity?

I don't think I am. And reading about it now kind of rings a bell, but it's not enough for me.

9 minutes ago, The Bookwyrm said:

The other interesting thing about titan is that it has a bunch of solid water-ice. Once the sun expands into a red giant, the habitable zone will actually extend out to Saturn, and thus Titan. All the water will melt, and the methane will evaporate, making Titan a water world not unlike Earth, where water-based life could evolve.

Doesn't Titan have oceans of liquid water beneath the surface?

[The Bookwyrm he/him]

1 hour ago, alder24 said:

Doesn't Titan have oceans of liquid water beneath the surface?

No, but many other moons might. Most notably Europa of Jupiter and Enceladus of Saturn, where those subsurface oceans are basically confirmed.

In fact, Enceladus has giant geyser plumes of water spewing from it's south pole. The Cassini spacecraft flew through that plume at least once, and detected organic molecules. So it's a rich ocean with lots of good chemicals, and the possibility of hydrothermal vents, which we know support ecosystems unreliant on any star on Earth. So life in these subsurface oceans is highly possible, in theory.

Other worlds like Pluto might have subsurface oceans, as well.

Really, there's likely water all over the place, so the "habitable zone" which we like to define really only works if you're looking for Earth-like life. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we can expand our horizons a little.

[Immortal Platypus]

1 hour ago, The Bookwyrm said:

Titan, the moon of Saturn, has a methane cycle. So it could have methane based life. I personally think ammonia based life would be more probable as ammonia has the polar structure that makes water such a good solvent...

The other interesting thing about titan is that it has a bunch of solid water-ice. Once the sun expands into a red giant, the habitable zone will actually extend out to Saturn, and thus Titan. All the water will melt, and the methane will evaporate, making Titan a water world not unlike Earth, where water-based life could evolve.

Downside is it doesn't have that much time to evolve before the sun dies altogether. Can't really get enough energy from a white dwarf.

it might have been titan. Actually, I think it was, but I'm not sure. That is one thing they talked about, how the methane wasn't polar so was less likely to support life

[alder24]

9 minutes ago, The Bookwyrm said:

No, but many other moons might. Most notably Europa of Jupiter and Enceladus of Saturn, where those subsurface oceans are basically confirmed.

In fact, Enceladus has giant geyser plumes of water spewing from it's south pole. The Cassini spacecraft flew through that plume at least once, and detected organic molecules. So it's a rich ocean with lots of good chemicals, and the possibility of hydrothermal vents, which we know support ecosystems unreliant on any star on Earth. So life in these subsurface oceans is highly possible, in theory.

Other worlds like Pluto might have subsurface oceans, as well.

Really, there's likely water all over the place, so the "habitable zone" which we like to define really only works if you're looking for Earth-like life. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we can expand our horizons a little.

From: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/titan/in-depth/ - "The Cassini spacecraft’s numerous gravity measurements of Titan revealed that the moon is hiding an underground ocean of liquid water (likely mixed with salts and ammonia). The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe also measured radio signals during its descent to the surface, in 2005, that strongly suggested the presence of an ocean 35 to 50 miles (55 to 80 kilometers) below the icy ground."

It might be that Titan is hosting 2 unique and different environments so that different kinds of life can arise simultaneously.

Like you said, water is abundant in the Solar System, especially in the outer layer. With the heating provided by the tidal forces, it's very likely that the conditions for life to arise are met on many of the moons in our neighborhood. And if that's true, if life in our Solar System is so common that it exists on multiple planets and moons, then how common must it be in the Universe? Every star system out there could host life (this makes me think about the implication of that for intelligent, advanced civilization - if life is so common that everywhere they go, there is life, why would they value it at all? They might just go to a new star system, find a suitable planet and not care at all for an ape-like species that calls this piece of rock their home - after all there are millions of planets like that so one less makes no difference).

But the problem with the "habitable zone" is that we have little to no means of detecting exomoons right now. I don’t think we’ve ever confirmed one, and there are only a handful of candidates. To make it even more problematic, we have no way of looking if they can have life in their subsurface oceans. For now, the only way for us to determine if life on those exomoons can exist is to look at moons in our Solar System.

[Lord Gregorio he/him]

I just thought of something, maybe it's been mentioned here, but how can one be disproportionately excited about space because your excitement will never be big enough. Space is basically eternal nothingness as we understand it.

[alder24]

12 hours ago, Lord Gregorio said:

I just thought of something, maybe it's been mentioned here, but how can one be disproportionately excited about space because your excitement will never be big enough. Space is basically eternal nothingness as we understand it.

Although space is an eternal nothingness, it is filled with everything.

[Lord Gregorio he/him]

12 hours ago, alder24 said:

Although space is an eternal nothingness, it is filled with everything.

Indeed. And everything fills it, or...something. Oh wait, that's the same thing as what you just said. Oh well.

Edited April 29, 2023 by Lord Gregorio

[Channelknight Fadran]

so...

are we gonna talk about the congressional UAP hearing or nah?