Stars Died For You

[FUCK THE POLICE]

First of all, you do not know that we know of all the elements, there may be some yet to be discovered.

We actually predict that there will be more elements. In fact, I've read that people suggesting that there might be another "island of stability" of elements with relatively long half-lives at around element 160-164, which is far beyond what we've already created. However, these heavier elements don't really exist in nature, either because stars just don't getthat large, and even if they did most of there half-lives are so short that they disappear soon after creation.

Second, you don't know for certain, any of this stuff you are saying, it is scientific theory, and relatively new theory at that. One of the most amazing things about science, to me, is how it is often stood on it's ear, with regard to what it thought had been answered but wasn't.

Well, much of what's in the social sciences is garbage, in my opinion. Science does best when it looks for deterministic laws and abstracts from there. When trying to understand complicated systems from the top, you often end up doing very little besides distilling noise.

Anyway, when a theory in the natural sciences is tentative, it will often be labelled as such. People who research superstring theory, for instance, are often very frank about the fact that it hasn't been proven yet. While it would explain much of what we see in the universe quite well, it is very difficult to prove itself. It may actually turn out to be unprovable, in which case all the work on it is little more than intellectual masturbation. On the other hand, the theories behind supernova are so well documented and have so much evidence behind them that it's safe to treat them as basically true.

When Chandrasekhar came up with his limit, sure, you could doubt it, and many people did. Now that we've actually watched white dwarfs explode into supernova after acquiring roughly 1.4 solar masses from their partners, it'd be stupidity to seriously doubt it. When Einstein came up with the theory of general relativity, yes, you could doubt it as well. When we observed light being bent by gravity from the sun in a manner that was inconsistent with Newton's "laws" but perfectly consistent with General Relativity, it became stupidity to deny it. If I am going to reject a theory with so much evidence behind it, logically, I should reject everything else that has less evidence behind it. And that would leave me with very little, wouldn't it?

And finally.... what does all of this debate and discussion have to do with stars exploding and spreading matter all around the universe, which already exists? Yeah, stars explode... they've been doing it since there were stars, but the universe is expanding, so there must have been an initial point where it all began, a point where there was only matter and non mater, and a singular cosmic explosion took place, spreading matter throughout the universe. Energy, friction, heat, time.. yeah... stars explode! The material from the stars is the same material originally 'Big Banged', because matter only changes state, it can't create itself. But now... we still haven't explored the explanations for why all of this started, why the process originally began?

Man has spent it's entire existence exploring that question, and we've yet to find out.

We know that the elements of life are here because of the stars exploding, etc. It's obvious they somehow miraculously managed to form a complete ecosystem, codependent upon itself for existence, on a planet controlled by phases of the moon, a very complex atmosphere which provides perfect conditions conducive for that life to emerge and evolve, and flourish. But WHY?

What do you mean by why? Some things just happen. Is it impossible for things to happen without some great puppetmaster intending it to happen that way or something?

And, if we are just the simple result of a hodgepodge of space debris from exploded stars, why don't we see life teaming on other planets?

1) We haven't directly observed any planets outside of our solar system. 9 isn't a large sample size, and the lack of life on the others might simply be the result of them not being in the "habitable zone" where liquid water can safely form (water has many functions that simply can't be performed by any other chemicals, and while I wouldn't say it's impossible for life to form without it, it's difficult to conceive of how it could). However, every planet that we've ever directly observed in the habitable zone has life on it. Imagine!

2) It's also depend on how likely is to form. With the current sample size of 9, it's impossible to say, with any statistical significance, how likely life is to form on any given planet. We may very well discover it in the next solar system we observe. Even if we observe thousands, it could simply be the case that life is that much less likely to form. Perhaps life is actually so unlikely to form that it only happened on Earth. That doesn't necessarily have any mystical implications, though.

You are acknowledging something's possibility despite the lack of evidence, unless you have traveled back in time to when the star exploded. I don't know of any nicer way to put it, but that IS faith, Mott.

We've observed the stars exploding. We know what elements are in them from spectography (to put it very briefly, this has to do with the fact that elements tend to emit and absorb certain frequencies of light, which allows you to determine the elemental makeup of a star/superonova by looking at the spectrum of light it emits). There is a lot here that would give me reason to put my faith in it. If I'm going to reject it, and hold everything else to those such extreme standards of evidence, I don't see how I'm left with anything more than solipsism.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

It did exist before. From my understanding, the atoms that make up everything existed in the singularity prior to the big bang. They've merely been rearranged.

The big bang doesn't actually describe why all of that stuff happened to be there at the beginning. It just describes what happened shortly after the universe began. There really isn't a satisfying theory out there for why the matter appeared there. Can't we just be satisfied with an honest "we don't know"?

 

[Mott the Hoople]

First of all, you do not know that we know of all the elements, there may be some yet to be discovered. Second, you don't know for certain, any of this stuff you are saying, it is scientific theory, and relatively new theory at that. One of the most amazing things about science, to me, is how it is often stood on it's ear, with regard to what it thought had been answered but wasn't. And finally.... what does all of this debate and discussion have to do with stars exploding and spreading matter all around the universe, which already exists? Yeah, stars explode... they've been doing it since there were stars, but the universe is expanding, so there must have been an initial point where it all began, a point where there was only matter and non mater, and a singular cosmic explosion took place, spreading matter throughout the universe. Energy, friction, heat, time.. yeah... stars explode! The material from the stars is the same material originally 'Big Banged', because matter only changes state, it can't create itself. But now... we still haven't explored the explanations for why all of this started, why the process originally began?

We know that the elements of life are here because of the stars exploding, etc. It's obvious they somehow miraculously managed to form a complete ecosystem, codependent upon itself for existence, on a planet controlled by phases of the moon, a very complex atmosphere which provides perfect conditions conducive for that life to emerge and evolve, and flourish. But WHY? And, if we are just the simple result of a hodgepodge of space debris from exploded stars, why don't we see life teaming on other planets?




You are acknowledging something's possibility despite the lack of evidence, unless you have traveled back in time to when the star exploded. I don't know of any nicer way to put it, but that IS faith, Mott.

??.....Uhh....OK.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

You said before, the stars fused helium and produced iron, and that was how iron came to exist. If something came to exist, it must not have existed before... simple logic. But you've not really explained how stars produced something that previously didn't exist, and I am still waiting.

There's an error being committed here. It didn't "come into existence" from nothing. It all used to be hydrogen. Fusion is the process of fusing two elements together to form a heavier element. All of our current fusion technology on Earth merely deals with fusing hydrogen into helium, since that's the easiest way to accomplish fusion, and yields the largest return on investment. However, you can fuse heavier elements into still heavier elements. Stars are big enough that they can actually run off of incredibly heavy elements, for instance, fusing carbon. However, it's practically impossible to continue the process once you get to iron, which is the reason that we have a great deal of carbon, iron, silicon, oxygen, etc... in our crust, but very little of this other stuff that fusion isn't able to produce.

Elements heavier than iron are created by Nucleosynthesis, which consists of a series of other naturally occurring stellar processes, besides fusion, which are able to form lighter elements into heavier ones. Many of the elements at the bottom of the table of elements actually don't even occur in nature in any lasting form at all. We discovered them by blasting together particles in lab experiments until atoms fused into a small amount of it that we were able to detect. Some of these elements have half lives so short that they basically just barely blink into existence before decaying into lighter elements and radioactive particles; Element 117, for instance, has a half-life of 78 milliseconds.

And yes, we can synthesize lighter elements as well. You can, for instance, turn mercury into gold, although it's way more expensive than simply digging gold out of the ground. If we can do stuff like this on Earth, is it really so hard to imagine that stars, which have incredibly more energetic processes going on inside of them, can as well?

 

[Rationalist]

We know that the elements of life are here because of the stars exploding, etc. It's obvious they somehow miraculously managed to form a complete ecosystem, codependent upon itself for existence, on a planet controlled by phases of the moon, a very complex atmosphere which provides perfect conditions conducive for that life to emerge and evolve, and flourish. But WHY? And, if we are just the simple result of a hodgepodge of space debris from exploded stars, why don't we see life teaming on other planets?

As far as science is concerned, there is no answer to your question. Life has no meaning. And the reason we have not observed life on other planets is because we have not observed extrasolar planets in any significant detail. Astronomers have used various methods to detect them, but we probably won't be able to search for life on them until we're able to send probes that will reach them within a reasonable amount of time. That is unlikely to occur within our lifetimes.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

Uhm... that's exactly what faith is.

You were using it in the religious sense, in which faith is just belief without evidence, and he was as well. Don't be an idiot. Of course, if you use the literal definition that faith is merely confidence or trust, then evidence for something is simply one thing that contributes to faith. But the word definitely has connotations of lack of evidence, due to the fact that religious people had no evidence for their beliefs, and bizarrely began to take pride in this fact.

 

[Dixie - In Memoriam]

As far as science is concerned, there is no answer to your question. Life has no meaning. And the reason we have not observed life on other planets is because we have not observed extrasolar planets in any significant detail. Astronomers have used various methods to detect them, but we probably won't be able to search for life on them until we're able to send probes that will reach them within a reasonable amount of time. That is unlikely to occur within our lifetimes.

You misunderstood the question. The same materials which form life are elsewhere, they are part of our universe. Some signs of some kind of life should be present on the moon, on Mars, on other planets within our own solar system... other planets should have formed atmospheres like ours and had an abundance of water. That isn't proving to be the case. Every day, we are finding that what we have here on our planet is very special and unusual. If a star blew up and we just came about as a result, why isn't there life everywhere around us? One of the moons of Jupiter has water and sources of heat from Jupiter, and could possibly sustain life... why isn't it there? It seems that if this human experience is all the result of random elements just coalescing from an explosion of a star, we'd see evidence of life all over. We don't.

When we get into the specific details of life on this planet, we discover that many of the very processes of reproduction, are influenced by cyclical phases of the moon, and it's effect on the earth... the amount of sunlight and darkness... the wobble in our planet's rotation, probably as a result of the moon colliding with the planet when it was formed... this creates 'seasons' on the planet, and enables all kinds of various life forms to exist, which otherwise, couldn't. Without these life forms, other life forms couldn't or wouldn't exist... Our planet has one big giant co-dependent system of life.

Now, I guess, if you want to just believe this all happened simply as a random matter of chance, that all the wonders and miracles of life around us, are the result of happenstance and nothing more.... that's fine... but I think it requires much more faith to believe that, than anything a religious person might believe. Sorry.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

And you've asked about 50% of it.

Anyways, since you're from the south and clearly incapable of any sort of intellectual discussion that is deeper than pastry, I'll try and keep it simple.

As Brent had mentioned and I suggested, the cause of the big bang was all matter from the universe (a previous one) condensing to the point where it could condense no more and thus expanded outwards creating this universe. The theory that we're speaking of then states that the universe will continue to expand until a certain point (which hasn't yet been reached). At this point the universe will invariably contract (equal and opposite reaction), and continue t do until it reaches the point it did about 14 billion years ago. Where it can't get any smaller and expands outword. Thus its entirely possible for there to have been stars, planets, life, and even brain dead southerners with child-like math skills, before the 'creation' of our universe as we know it.

Actually, we're pretty certain at this point that the universe is going to expand forever rather than collapsing at some point. In the 90's, our model was that gravity and the inertia from the big bang were fighting against each other. The universe would expand forever if the inertia from the big bang was strong enough, and it would collapse back into itself if gravity were stronger.

However, readings in the earlier parts of the decades (it would take me forever to explain what these readings consisted of, so just trust me here) indicated not only that inertia from the big bang was strong enough to overcome gravity, but that there were additional forces out there that were actually accelerating expansion beyond that. Scientists named this "Dark Energy", and much like was the case with "Dark Matter", this basically means "there's something there we hadn't predicted and we have know clue what it is". It's one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology right now.

The eternal expansion of the universe really isn't a more positive outcome, though. If anything, the Big Crunch is like a naive and optimistic fairy tale compared to the Lovecraftian horror of eternal expansion. If there were a big crunch, it would likely just lead to another big bang, and we'd see interesting universe after interesting universe coming into existence and being reborn. Things are quite different in the case of eternal expansion. Due to the first law of thermodynamics, the amount of mass and energy in the universe is going to stay the same, and due to the second, this matter is going to have a tendency to disperse itself relatively evenly in this ever increasing space. Eventually this is going to lead to a point where most of the universe is going to consist of singular atoms separated from other singular atoms by distances larger than what we see between galaxies today, and it's only going to get worse from there. Practically all interesting phenomena will cease, and the universe will just be a cold, dark place. It will fade away, rather than burn out.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

No, it isn't. Faith is believing in something for which there is no direct evidence. An agnostic may accept the possibility that a god exists, but that doesn't mean he has faith.

That said, I am not hostile to faith in any way. I am a Christian.

I'm not hostile to religion like I used to be. New Atheism has turned into a fanatical ideology. Sorry if I left any comments here that were overly demeaning to your faith; it's a bit of a reflex...

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

Okay, let's talk about your theory. Is there any indication of what "force" causes the universe to reverse course? If I drop a ball, it will always fall to the ground, and I can't predict that some day the ball will do the opposite and float off into the sky, this defies the principles of physics as we know them... now, the principles of physics as we know them, could change.... that's a possibility, but within the parameters of what we currently understand, it is not possible for the ball to do anything other than react to gravity. The same can be said of our universe, it is expanding, something set the universe in motion many billions of years ago, and I am sorry, but it will take more than a light bulb going off over your stupid head, to change that.

Yeah, about that... as I explained in my previous post, that force is actually gravity.

Now you can say, sure the universe is expanding for now, but one day it will stop expanding and begin to contract... but this would mean the universe expansion is constantly slowing down, and this doesn't seem to be the case. It would also mean that some great gravitational force has to exist at the center of the universe, the point of contraction. We've not found evidence of this either.

The gravity comes from all of the mass in the universe, not a central ball of gravity in the center.

So basically, you have a theory which doesn't even comport with our understandings of the principles of physics, and that is your faith-based belief on the universe. You guys should have choir robes and hymnals by now!

It is not our theory. We did not create it, we do not even have a full understanding of the math behind it, only a layman's explanation of the implications of the math told to us by someone who does understand. If you have a problem with the theory, and believe that it violates physics, please, go and inform the field of physics about its error. I am certain that they will greatly value your contributions to the discipline. We are not the appropriate people to consult on this issue.

 

[/MSG/]

Actually, we're pretty certain at this point that the universe is going to expand forever rather than collapsing at some point. In the 90's, our model was that gravity and the inertia from the big bang were fighting against each other. The universe would expand forever if the inertia from the big bang was strong enough, and it would collapse back into itself if gravity were stronger.

However, readings in the earlier parts of the decades (it would take me forever to explain what these readings consisted of, so just trust me here) indicated not only that inertia from the big bang was strong enough to overcome gravity, but that there were additional forces out there that were actually accelerating expansion beyond that. Scientists named this "Dark Energy", and much like was the case with "Dark Matter", this basically means "there's something there we hadn't predicted and we have know clue what it is". It's one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology right now.

The eternal expansion of the universe really isn't a more positive outcome, though. If anything, the Big Crunch is like a naive and optimistic fairy tale compared to the Lovecraftian horror of eternal expansion. If there were a big crunch, it would likely just lead to another big bang, and we'd see interesting universe after interesting universe coming into existence and being reborn. Things are quite different in the case of eternal expansion. Due to the first law of thermodynamics, the amount of mass and energy in the universe is going to stay the same, and due to the second, this matter is going to have a tendency to disperse itself relatively evenly in this ever increasing space. Eventually this is going to lead to a point where most of the universe is going to consist of singular atoms separated from other singular atoms by distances larger than what we see between galaxies today, and it's only going to get worse from there. Practically all interesting phenomena will cease, and the universe will just be a cold, dark place. It will fade away, rather than burn out.

I like that theory better, solely because it does sound Lovecraftian.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

As far as science is concerned, there is no answer to your question. Life has no meaning.

What does it mean to say that life has no meaning? I guess you could say that, without God, no intelligent being intended anything for you. But I don't see why that should be a depressing notion. Something is certainly intended by someone for a slave, while the only thing intended for a free person is that which he intends for himself. Nihilism like this is just an error committed by those moving from Christianity to atheism; Christians assert that all meaning is in heaven, and that the Earth is worthless. Atheists coming from that tradition often reject God but keep the notion that the present reality is worthless. Thusly, they haven't really entirely rejected the religion.

In most Eastern traditions, by contrast, there was never really much of a focus on God or the Gods at all. Belief in any one God or Gods wasn't really necessary to be a Confucian, Daoist, or Buddhist. The founders of these religions themselves neither asserted nor denied their existence, and certainly never recommended any one God or set of Gods. Any Gods that such people believe in are mostly those adapted from local beliefs, which, like most pagan Gods, typically consist of little other than explanations for natural phenonmena. Other parts of the religion take much more precedence. And the people in these civilizations were just fine. They never had any problems with "the meaning of life" like we see in western civilizations.

I completely and totally disagree with this notion that God is something fundamental to human nature. That is western centric notion. Really, when you look at the dominant position of God in western religion, it seems to be an aberrance compared to most other cultures. Religions may have something to say, but I think the places in which they differ are probably the least essential parts, the unfortunate tag alongs to universal truths that survived for a reason and served a purpose. Much like any ideology, the weakest points paradoxically seem rise to the most importance in the eyes of believers. I suppose this is because the weakest points are the ones you spend the most time defending, and you thus become overly attached to them.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

You misunderstood the question. The same materials which form life are elsewhere, they are part of our universe.

Sand is a major component of concrete. Sand is mostly composed of silicon. Silicon is a major part of the integrated circuits in most computers. Therefore, I guess, concrete should be able to do mathematical calculations, right?

The mere presence of the materials isn't enough. They have to be combined in the right way. Having the same materials in no way ensures that you'll get the same result.

Some signs of some kind of life should be present on the moon, on Mars, on other planets within our own solar system... other planets should have formed atmospheres like ours and had an abundance of water.

Most of the others planet and moons are either too hot, so water burns away, or too cold, so it freezes. Only planets in a narrow band around a star, which the Earth inhabits, called "the habitable zone" can have the correct temperatures required for liquid water to form. Even that depends on surface pressure. Mars, ceres, and the moon are too small to possibly form atmospheres of any density, so any liquid water would eventually evaporate and fly off into space anyway. Venus can form an atmosphere, but it suffered from a runaway greenhouse effect, leaving the planet with too much surface pressure.

That isn't proving to be the case. Every day, we are finding that what we have here on our planet is very special and unusual. If a star blew up and we just came about as a result, why isn't there life everywhere around us?

Conditions on Earth just happen to be perfect for life, and life exists? That's not very surprising. If life was going to form here, are we supposed to be surprised by the fact that it was us? I would really be more impressed if conditions were shitty for life and we were here anyway.

One of the moons of Jupiter has water and sources of heat from Jupiter, and could possibly sustain life... why isn't it there?

Europa is theorized to have water under it's surface due to tidal energy from Jupiter, yes. But we haven't ever actually proven that it's there. And since we've never sent any probe there, how on Earth can you infer that it has no life? Even should it have liquid water, it's still not at all an ideal climate for life. There's no direct access to the sun, for one thing, and if you've ever noticed, practically all of the energy your body receives is from light. The only kind of life that could really be expected to exist there would be microbes surrounding geothermic vents. I seriously doubt there'd be enough energy to sustain multi-celled organisms, especially not mobile animals. Earth spent three of years to develop multi-cellular life, and we're awash in energy.

It seems that if this human experience is all the result of random elements just coalescing from an explosion of a star, we'd see evidence of life all over. We don't.

You've shown from this post that you clearly have no idea how this works. Earth may not be a representative sample of what other planets should be - that doesn't mean that God did it. Our solar system may not be a representative sample of other solar systems we may come across - that doesn't mean God did it. Our solar system isn't nearly big enough to say anything about the average composition of solar systems in the galaxy. In scientific polling, you need to have at least 200 respondents to claim a 10% margin of error - we'd probably need to examine at least that many solar systems in their entirety to say anything meaningful about the makeup of the average solar system in this galaxy.

Even if there were no life in those 200 solar systems, that only means that life probably doesn't exist in 95% or so of the solar systems in our galaxy - which wouldn't be unexpected at all. The only exoplanets that we've discovered currently are large gas giants and a few massive rocky ones, since large planets are the easiest to detect, and we know little besides the fact that they exist. So, you are literally drawing this conclusion from failing to find life on two different planets in a single solar system. This is statistical nonsense. Who knows whether or not, should we even ever see another planet in the habitable zone with the correct surface pressure, it would definitely have life? Maybe life is a rare occurence even on planets exactly like ours.

It's like if I tried to do a presidential poll. The first person I polled was myself, and I happened to be a Cynthia McKinney supporter. From this, I immediately assume that everyone else in America is voting for Cynthia McKinney. Then I talk to nine other people, and they all say either Obama or McCain. Then I pull out my binoculars and look over at the Republican convention across the street, and everyone there supports McCain! Rather than simply coming to the conclusion that I'm an outlier, I assert that Allah exists, and made me special. Then I turn away from the Green party convention I was about to enter, get on my knees, and pray to Him.

When we get into the specific details of life on this planet, we discover that many of the very processes of reproduction, are influenced by cyclical phases of the moon, and it's effect on the earth...

The fact that the human menstrual cycle and the phases of the moon happen to be similar in duration is entirely coincidental. The only other animal who's menstrual cycle has a similar pattern is the Platypus.

the amount of sunlight and darkness... the wobble in our planet's rotation, probably as a result of the moon colliding with the planet when it was formed... this creates 'seasons' on the planet, and enables all kinds of various life forms to exist, which otherwise, couldn't. Without these life forms, other life forms couldn't or wouldn't exist... Our planet has one big giant co-dependent system of life.

Now, I guess, if you want to just believe this all happened simply as a random matter of chance, that all the wonders and miracles of life around us, are the result of happenstance and nothing more.... that's fine...but I think it requires much more faith to believe that, than anything a religious person might believe. Sorry..

I will, for the moment, ignore that fact that we don't have a sample size large enough to say anything meaningful about the composition of the average solar system.

You don't seem to understand what the word "random" means. It does not mean average. If you randomly draw something and it happens to be an outlier, that's not a miracle. This is an incredibly common human error. I am reminded of a story I heard on Radiolab. There was a researcher who had one person flip a coin 100 times, and write down the results. Then she had two students sit down together and make up 100 coin flips in what they believed was a random fashion. Then she looked at the results of the the two, and almost immediately picked out the real coin flips. How could she tell? Because the real flips had 7 heads in a row. Of course, it's incredibly unlikely that you'd get 7 heads in a row should you simply sit down and flip a coin 7 times. And that's why the humans who were making up coin flips didn't put such any such streaks - clearly they'd be giving themselves away if they wrote down anything so unlikely! However, while it's unlikely that you'd get such a result during your first 7 coin flips, it's not at all unlikely that 7 coin flips in a row should occur at some point during 100 flips. The occurrence of such events is, in fact, one thing that makes true randomness stand out. When the people making up coin flips gave themselves away by avoiding any streaks and giving too average of a result, it wasn't a problem with randomness, it was a problem with them.

And that's why the universe looks like it does, Dix. And also why you think it should look like something else. Because the universe is the universe, and it does what the universe does. You, on the other hand, are stupid, and think it should do something else. But the universe doesn't care. It's not constrained by your limited imagination. When you are unable to understand how such a thing could be, the problem is your stupidity, not the universes variety and complexity.

 

[/MSG/]

Sand is a major component of concrete. Sand is mostly composed of silicon. Silicon is a major part of the integrated circuits in most computers. Therefore, I guess, concrete should be able to do mathematical calculations, right?

I want to add a separate thank for this statement. It would explain Dixies math skills.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

If I hold a lottery with odds of 100,000,000 to 1, 100,000,000 people participate, and, amazingly, one person happens to win, am I supposed to assume that's a miracle? There were 100,000,000 to 1 odds, after all! Clearly, no one was supposed to win!

 

[Minister of Truth]

I was watching The Universe program on Death Stars the other day, and one cool thing I learned is that younger/newer stars tend to be made up of different elements than the older stars dating back to the early universe (such as the first half-billion years after the Big Bang). One of the benefits to this change is that the newer stars do not tend to go supernova in the manner talked about in the program's topic (death stars).

Also, this program mentioned that a death star supernova (which is an extremely bright event, so we can easily observe them) turned out to be the oldest and most distant physical event ever observed in the history of mankind. A sattelite picked up imagery of a star that had exploded roughly 647 Million years after the Big Bang.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

Uhhgg, the first two days after I receive my Vyvanse script I just can't shut my goddamn mouth. I don't even want to look at my comments on this thread. Do not mix Vyvanse with reddit/JPP. That should be on the warning label.

"I'll just go to JPP for a small while and leave a few short comments..."

NO YOU WON'T

 

[/MSG/]

Uhhgg, the first two days after I receive my Vyvanse script I just can't shut my goddamn mouth. I don't even want to look at my comments on this thread. Do not mix Vyvanse with reddit/JPP. That should be on the warning label.

"I'll just go to JPP for a small while and leave a few short comments..."

NO YOU WON'T

I love these discussions about the universe.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

I was watching The Universe program on Death Stars the other day, and one cool thing I learned is that younger/newer stars tend to be made up of different elements than the older stars dating back to the early universe (such as the first half-billion years after the Big Bang). One of the benefits to this change is that the newer stars do not tend to go supernova in the manner talked about in the program's topic (death stars).

If you want to learn a lot about Astronomy, I'd recommend pirating the Understanding the Universe lectures by Alex Filippenko. Of course, you could buy them, but they cost $800 (no joke) straight from TTC. It seems to have been made for more general audiences than a real Astronomy course would have, since when he even mentions math at all he always prefaces it by telling us that we don't have to know this. Also, of course, there isn't any homework. But the teacher is great, and it's a good resource if you just want to learn about all of the wondrous things in astronomy without having to do all of the nitty gritty work that's really only useful to those who seriously want to advance the field.

I'd also kind of recommend getting the first edition, even though it's about a decade out of date. The second edition seems to have been horrendously padded, spending the first 10 or so lectures about incredibly boring things like sundogs and eclipses that have nothing to do with space. I never finished it. It's also only available in video, so you have to specifically go out of your way to watch it. Audiobooks and audio lectures, on the other hand, are easy to finish because you can listen to them while you're driving or doing something else boring. The only real problem is that a lot of cool things have been discovered in the past 10 years - for instance, they had only just even figured out about the phenomena that would eventually be labelled "Dark Energy" a few months before the course was recorded (and, interestingly enough, the professor was actually part of the team that discovered it).

I first listened to the course about 2 years ago. Coincidentally, that's when I started posting on JPP that I was going to drop everything and get a degree in Astronomy. Alas, my dreams were soon crushed by poor grades at MSU, and I decided to settle on the imminently more practical Computer Science degree, along with self-loathing and thoughts of suicide. Since then, out of pure spite, I've adopted a hateful attitude towards Astronomers, and hope they all die.

Also, this program mentioned that a death star supernova (which is an extremely bright event, so we can easily observe them) turned out to be the oldest and most distant physical event ever observed in the history of mankind. A sattelite picked up imagery of a star that had exploded roughly 647 Million years after the Big Bang.

Yeah, Supernova can often outshine entire galaxies. I think Qasars are usually brighter, but it may have taken a while for them to start forming.

 

[FUCK THE POLICE]

There I go again. Uhhg.