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Huge Star Quake Rocks Milky Way
SJrX writes "The BBC is reporting that scientists have detected "the biggest explosion observed by humans within [the past 400 years]". The explosion luckily occured about 50,000 light years away form us, on the far side of the Milky Way, as the article goes on to say that had the explosion been within 10 light years of us, it "would possibly have triggered a mass extinction.""
Apparently there's no Magnetars anywhere near Earth, and I'm wondering, since this star was 'the other side of the galactic center', could such things possibly be closer to the center than we thought? Would this explain what we currently think is the gravity of a central black hole?
Oh, and check out the New Scientist article.
Come on, give me a break. I've seen some of the science being done on this flare. There are enough cool things without being needlessly sensational, and invoking the Wipe-Out-All-Civilization radius definitely counts as sensational. After all, isn't the nearest magnetar something like 5 kiloparsecs away?
Microsoft delenda est!
Well, there *was* a minor quake that triggered a tsunami around that time...cue Twilight Zone music...
would this have been visible to the unaided eye if all the energy had been released in the visible spectrum?
Agreed...it quoted one researcher as saying that the distance to the magnetar could have been as low as 30,000 light years. And it said the magnetic field generated by this star could wipe a credit card that
was 160,000 kilometers away.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Given our rather limited data on the matter, what makes you think the Drake equation is anything more than a structured guess?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
With what little understanding we have of Universe, I seriously wonder if this ties in any way to the Tsunami. Remember, it happened only hours before this was "recorded", depending on where you were on this planet.
;)
Either that or God was just drinking too much of the haterade.
Sure, the Drake equation is but a structured guess, but it is a handy way of organizing the important terms and quantifying each and how certain they are. I got to have dinner with Frank Drake a few years ago at Lick Observatory, which was pretty cool.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
You didn't get it. The beacons would not be exploding stars, the beacons would warn ships not to go near an unstable star.
I remember reading about the variable star Eta Carinae, which has varied greatly in brightness over the years. It varies because it's a huge, unstable star that has already blown off a big gas nebula. It's expected to go supernova eventually. One scientist claims that it's close enough to bathe the earth in so much gamma radiation that the nitrogen in the upper atmosphere turns into NOx, and the sky becomes opaque. Like in the Matrix.
Google for pix of thy Doom.
I never understood why they coulnd't just use scientific notation... a lot of articles do this. I mean, is "10^40 Watts" just not impressive enough? Did they really take the time to figure out what 10^40 watts was in "10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts?"
Who doesn't like free music?
Since no one seemed to catch this :
POPULATION OF UNIVERSE : None.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in it. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
Courtesy of the late Douglas Adamas
Only 8 away from being prime (569919 - 569927) And mom told me I'm unique!!! Sheesh
...this would have on the Earth at close range, courtesy a really smart guy who posted on POE News.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
How did it affect the astronauts/cosmonauts on the ISS?
Try eMusic. DRM free, legal, MP3 downloads.
Here are some things we do know:
But let's step back a bit, and look at the processes that life goes through as a whole. A long, long time ago, there were no multi-cellular life forms on earth. At first, just organic compounds. Then something appeared (maybe some kind of virus?). Eventually, single cell organism appeared. Things stayed like this for an awfully long time. Then, multi-cellular organisms appeared. These multi-cellular organisms gave rise to something we call consciousness. One version of these creatures - humans - developed quite sophisticated consciousnesses. These units of consciousness, together gave rise to very interesting 'things' such as language, memes, and other insubstantial, but very real 'things'.
See the pattern? What we see here is a continuous pattern of units coming together and creating units out of their aggregate which possess qualities fundamentally transcendant than those of their parts. Particles > Atoms > Molecules > Compounds > Cells > Organisms > Consciousness > Memes and so on.
I would buy the argument that life is very common in the Universe, and even the Milky Way. The vastness of it all seems to make it so probable. But what if our current point in evolution is only a brief transitional state, in the grand scheme of things? We have only been radio communicators for about one hundred years or so. That is a super super tiny blip in time. A lot of us seem to assume that the future will be like some sort of Star Trek reality or something, where technological advancement is the primary area of change. But what if what we are going through is more of a spiritual evolution - one that we have only just begun, and one that will ultimately transcend our own existence as we know it?
For all we know, we could be surrounded by alien consciousness all the time, and not even know it, much the same way a bacteria has very limited awareness of the presence of humans, let alone any concept of what one is.
How many piano tuners are there in Chicago? This is an example Fermi used to use. Yes, maybe you could go out and measure this, using the "job" field in tax returns, the yellow pages, etc., but you can also get an idea of the number by figuring out how many people live in Chicago. How many of those people on average have pianos? How often do they need tuning? How fast can they be tuned? You have a pretty good idea (or he did anyway) of the answers to those individual questions, you can put an estimate on the number without actually making a direct measurement. Some problems in science can be tackled this way, and it's a type of reasoning scientists ought to be able to use well.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
I am not so sure about that. The avarage distance to other civilisations is proportional to how rare life is. Unless our observation technology improves vastly, I don't think we'll detect anything. Look at it this way, can we detect earth over many lightyears just by searching for human activities with our current technology? I don't think so. Another thing is, since I don't believe in hyperdrives and other scifi tech, if there is extra-terran life then their technology and radio emission won't be much different than ours.
One thing we need to consider is the following: One plnate has to be the first to develop intelligent life!
What if it has taken 13 billion years for intelligent life to evolve and we are the first to do so?
What if life flares up and dies out again within a few million years?
What if this galaxy only contains a few planets with intelligent life and far apart, but other galaxies contains life in abundance. The distances makes it very difficult to communicate.
What if the universe is full of life but because of distances it is not possible or extremly difficult to communicate?
It is a very interesting area, but unfortunatly we can do little more than speculate. And yes, SETI is just a speculation, a speculation based on how WE think another life-form would communicate. Alas, I will never live to find out if there is life on other planets.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
For most things, life needs a few critical elements, gravity being one (otherwise water may not hang around for life to be created - no amino acids). With gravity then comes the problem of escaping you original home (well down the track of course) - that genuinely requires a tool/assitance of some form. While I dont doubt what you suggest is not a wonderful concept (or new, very Childhoods endish..) .. mankind through tools has begun its move to a new frontier. Transitional?, that is possible, but this is a _critical_ transisitonal state. One which brings the ability to possibly escape 'planet wide destruction scenarios' and to 'spread' our race throughout space - the worry here is we just move to another planet to rape and pillage.
:-)
With our 'advancement' there are some big problems we have created that suggest our 'spiritual side' is extremely flawed. Being an entirely tool based society we no longer rely on our evolutionary/spiritual abilities to get through the day, let alone through life - everything humans do, is through the use of some tool. Even religion and spirituality. Pushing us further away from ever being able to understand/know/feel the true nature of ourselves
Think carefully about it next time you sit in a church, read a bible, or post on slashdot. As a race, we have irrecoverably doomed ourselves from knowing our true self's. In fact to rid oneself of all posessions, wasnt far wrong from JC..
Also it is quite hilarious to read how people put humans up on the pedestal of intelligence on earth - making and using tools doesnt make anyone smarter/better. We are happy to even eat some of the most intelligent lifeforms on this planet - octupus, and squid for instance. Yet we think it barbaric/distasteful to eat dolphins - intellegence may as well just be a beauty contest.
My personal guess is that mankind has to be able to just be kind to one another before anything good can come from this race. Its almost ludicrous to consider ourselves even vaguely intelligent while the western world is happy to rape and pillage the poorer nations, and then also go destroy their countries and homelands in the name of 'good' ?? (Iraq isnt the example here.. there are soooooo many more).. go figure.. humanity needs to be more than rhetoric, vengence, hatred, religious fervour, and snazzy tools...
Until we have a society based on community rather than economy, I think mankind is probably in for more of the same... so spiritualy or with tools, I dont expect us to go anywhere in the near future at all, let alone see anyone who wants anything to do with us swamp rats..
It isn't.
It's believed that self-replicating molecules appeared. It's believed that self-replicating molecules that synthesized lipids were better replicators than those that didn't. It's believed that mitochondria - which aren't much more than bits of RNA with a wrapper around it - were once independent lifeforms, predating cells by a wide margin. Single-celled organisms that use mitochondria as fuel source are a pretty natural extension -- just a big lipid layer around a benign environment for self-replicating molecules.
> Microbiology has shown that a "simple" cell is more complicated by far than anything ever designed by humans.
It's also a lot more complicated than anything taught at the high school (or even undergraduate) biology classes.
> Why is it so hard to admit that the order and information content of the "natural" world is the product of a mind just as the products of our modern technological world are conceived in the minds of their creators? All of science would still be just as fascinating and useful if that BELIEF were accepted as the cause for the origin of the order, design and laws that scientists seek to explore.
Because most people (such as proponents of ID) find something they can't explain, bow down before it as evidence of God's genius, and then stop investigating. After all, if something's "irreducably" complex, why bother investigating it any further?
Meanwhile, us scientists (whether we believe in God or not -- and I, as a scientist and a Christian, see no contradiction between evolution and my faith) will continue on doing science.
Here endeth the science lesson and beginneth the metaphysics/theology.
Have you ever considered that a God smart enough to create a universe 13.8 billion years ago out of a few physical constants, just might be smart enough to create a universe in which intelligent life spontaneously evolved (on Earth, and perhaps on billions of other worlds) to recognize His existence?
Have you ever further condidered that a God smart enough to pull off a stunt like that is probably a hell of a lot smarter than one who had to manually kludge in lifeforms, regardless of whether he whipped the thing up a mere 6000 years ago, or even if he created the universe, and has spent most of the past 3 billion years constantly hacking in things like cells, multicellular organisms, eyes, lungs, exploding beetles, and the human cerebral cortex and what-not every few hundred million years?
I know which one I'd consider the more glorious. Why do you cram your God into such a small box?
The Sun has enormous entropy, which is increasing all the time, and the energy it transmits to us powers chemical and other physical processes which locally decrease entropy on Earth.
Of course there is. That's the whole point of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.
Pardon my French, but give me a fucking break. Have you taken a chemistry course, EVER? Chemical processes that decrease entropy in the system abound all over the place. They require an input of energy into the system, and the radiation of waste heat out of the system. That's exactly what the Sun provides on Earth: tons and tons of energy to drive processes that can lower entropy here.
Good grief. If entropy couldn't be decreased in one part of the universe, refrigerators wouldn't exist.
Aren't you embarrassed to spout off that ignorantly? I mean really, you shouldn't even be allowed to use the word "entropy".
There is an entire science of self-organization, not to mention thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory, devoted to explaining how information is provably produced through random natural processes. Religion may be YOUR postulated source, but it is already known that natural system can produce information on their own.