Plasma bubbles 500 times the size of earth, ultra-hot rain - let's face it, the Sun's not a place to hang out nearby The Sun is a weird place, where massive bubbles of plasma, bigger than the size of Earth, are blown out from its surface every ninety minutes and hot rain splashes down in loops. Two independent teams of researchers discovered these oddities when combing through data taken by the now-retired Helios solar probes, a …
People asking those questions probably are not wondering... if you wonder, it suggests you are thinking. ;)
Black helicopters, as it's always a "conspiracy" and not "I don't know what I'm talking about, but cannot admit that, so will make reaching comments blaming everyone else".
Know just how tricky it is. Actually, even the sun, with the advantage of gravity (containment is free), stinks at it; luckily for us, we'd evaporate and it wouldn't long been over with.
Why we think that just using admittedly better fuel but otherwise trying to just impart random motion (thermal) to a plasma in a bottle is going to get us there, I dunno, my own approach involves a bit more subtlety - but still doesn't product fantastic results. I'm doing coherent beam collision stuff - no point putting energy into random degrees of freedom in my opinion....analogy - bullets don't have to be hot to hit one another very hard.
At any rate, the sun only makes 2.8 ergs/second/cc - which is less energy per cc than human metabolism, much less, say, a coal fire.
Ref: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/12/30/are-humans-brighter-then-the-sun/
Or in layman's terms, a human generates about 100W doing nothing. That's about 1 kW per cubic meter. The Sun does about a tenth of that, depending on how big you figure the energy generating part of the core to be. In simpler terms, a compost heap the size of the Sun would generate a lot more energy.
I've wondered about this for a while so I'll ask the commentard collective.
Any satellite or probe will have a hot side and a cold side. Say you had a sterling engine aboard that used this temperature differential to generate electricity. Then use that to power a laser beam pointed out into space. My thinking is that as you are now pumping energy away from the probe it should cool it.
Is that in any way correct? Would any sharks be harmed in this experiment?
The problems INCLUDE the efficiency of the laser and the heat engine. A hot resistor or filament lamp in front of a mirror on the craft, but shaded from the sun will be more efficient at radiating energy than a laser and its electronics. Also dark side has a problem for the heat engine. That needs to radiate heat to stay cool, that's very difficult in a vacuum.
I'm not sure the cooling problems for spaceships has any simple solution.
Indeed it's the only way in a vacuum. Car radiators, fridge & Freezer radiators, household radiators are, to the pedant, misnamed. They are transferring heat by conduction to the atmosphere, aided by either convection of the heated air or a forced airflow.
I was using radiate in the casual "wrong" everyday sense. A "radiator panel" on spacecraft will work very poorly as it can only radiate electromagnetic waves. A laser or Magnetron works better, but a lamp filament is maybe more efficient way to dump electrical energy considering the total system.
Thanks! That's some seriously nerdy link, I'd never heard of Torchships. Nowadays I tend to believe that we're in a simulation so interstellar travel would not work. If the Voyager probe disappears shortly it may be a clue that the simulation has a boundary. In the meantime I still enjoy sci-fi, it's nice to expand your thoughts to galactic levels.
We are not in a simulation. It's all out there. Right to the edge of the observable universe, and possibly a little further than that (actually, as far as I can tell, the observable edge moves with you. ;) ).
As to the type of simulation you assume, think about it this way. When we lived in a village, did we assume it was really a city, and we were in a park in the middle, and the city was just playing a trick on us?
When we lived in a city, did we think it was really a giant continent on an island, and everyone was on boats surrounding us, pretending it was a city?
Now we have got to a globe, and are we thinking "there are people/things on the outside pretending it's a globe/planet/reality".
There might be others out there, but simulating this reality is not the situation. This one is very much real, even if we find out lots of complex things about it.
The simulation idea is in fact an attempt to reinvent the idea of a creator god with a pseudo-scientific justification.
If we're a simulation, what created the the computer running it?
If there is a creator god, what higher level god created it - since it must be more complex than the universe.
I think this one was actually exploded the moment Bell Labs started to take information seriously.
Not really. The simulation idea is the simulation idea. Trying to put baggage on an unrelated history is well, bias.
We invented turing machines just over 100 years ago. These allowed a certain mathematical and mechanical functions to "simulate" other things.
The age old question you mean to relate to is "are we just a writing in a book/is life just a dream" style philosophy.
This is a different point to *who* or *what* made the [theoretical] simulation/dream.
No, the objection to the simulation idea is precisely the same as the objection to the creation-by-a-god idea. If two different things can be refuted by the same argument, then they must have points of similarity.
You are raising a completely different issue, that of analogy. The simulation idea is analogous to the Hindu idea that Brahma is dreaming our world.
But someone so ignorant of the history of ideas that they can neither capitalise Turing nor know when On Computable Numbers was published (1936, not nearly a hundred years ago), and also nor know that "we" (presumably the US public) did not invent Turing machines is, I submit, not qualified to discuss this subject.
Not really. Again. There is functional difference.
There are for instance, observable considerations in QM that give rise to questions (such as Boltzmann brains) that thankfully as far as we can see, have observable solutions (that we are not brains in jars).
However, these are mathematical/physical/scientific observations, and seperate to theory/philosophy/theism.
Downvote me if you wish for pointing out the difference. But there is specifically one. A "is the universe a holographic projection into 3D space" is not asking "is the universe on the back of a turtle".
HAHAHAHAHAHA. Yes, you are right, Turing did not "invent" them. But did help confirm some observations, such as the halting problem etc. I could go back to the Greek automaton if you wish, but that would be off topic. Continue to cover your ears.
If the universe can be described as a holographic projection (and it isn't a suitable space* so as of writing, no) that would not make it a simulation. It would just be a different description, useful if it simplified some calculations, explained the relations between things that currently appear unrelated, or otherwise gave rise to new laws.
*I vaguely recall the idea only works for de Sitter spaces, perhaps someone can clarify.
Right to the edge of the observable universe, and possibly a little further than that
Given that we think the universe is spatially flat and therefore spatially infinite, quite a lot beyond that in fact.
(Before objecting look up current cosmological models, and yes, infinite at the big bang too.)
No, the Vatican has a perfectly competent astronomy department to keep the Pope and Cardinals up to date with the subject. There's an entertaining article by S J Gould about how he went to a Catholic science conference and some Jesuits were asking if it was really true that there were Americans who were Creationists.
No offense to Catholics more just since I don't live on the east coast it sounded at first like a made up university like Eddie Murphy comes up with in Coming to America as his cover story. Good for them to fund research. Guess when the next frontier opens up they don't want to be left behind.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
