Science n' Shiz Thread

[Specht]

I still think it's not an asteroid/meteor, look at the trajectory, it doesn't seem to be pulled by our gravity, and it doesn't seem to be too far to not be affected by it, the only way to keep it on such trajectory on such speed (if it is in fact as close as it seems to be) would be with a propulsion system of some kind.

[Lord Justin]

It does seem to be propelled somehow which makes me think it's just as likely a runaway rocket as a meteor. Probably more likely, now that I give the video a second look, as meteors always seem to have a much faster trip through the atmosphere. This object doesn't look like it's falling so much as flying, parallel to the ground.

If failed rocket flights can look like this or this and stay visible for minutes on end, with the trail changing shape dramatically in a short time, then it's not much of a stretch to say this China thing is in all likelihood a fubar rocket.

[Katulobotomia]

Isaac Newton the smartest person ever lived.

[Lord Justin]

"...and then he turned 26." I laughed...probably woke up someone in the house with my laughing. Neil may not be as smart as Newton but I would give him the award for funniest scientist who ever lived.

[Katulobotomia]

Originally Posted by Lord Justin

"...and then he turned 26." I laughed...probably woke up someone in the house with my laughing. Neil may not be as smart as Newton but I would give him the award for funniest scientist who ever lived.

Indeed, and the first black person (in my book) that I know of to have such scientific enthusiasm and knowledge....and fame. Kind of weird even, he was born in the Bronx and yet managed to get him self into a position where he is elected to be a candidate for the next man in charge of Nasa. A good example for every children out there.

Isaac Newton on the other hand, if anything what Tyson described him being, would be more amazing to meet than Jesus. A man of his (Isaac) intellect and intuition about the universe. A man that invents the Calculus pretty much just for the heck of it.....and most of us can't even learn it (or is really hard), damn.
If I would meet him face to face, I could literally kneel before him and acknowledge his superiority and surrender my soul. Get his corpse and CLONE HIM!

[Katulobotomia]

A wasp turns a caterpillar into a living egg carrier and a body guard for the wasps eggs.

[Katulobotomia]

Imagine if you were this small and drinking water was like trying to swallow a rubbery beach ball.

Check out the hand that breaks the concrete block....ITS RUBBER!!

[Bunglo]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...overed-record/

[Katulobotomia]

The sun compared to Canis Majoris...


I've always wondered if Canis Majoris is an actual ball of liquid matter or just a massive gas cloud with a solid liquid core? In any way.....that thing is HUUUGE.

I wouldn't want to be anywhere near in the galaxy when that 360 times more heavier than the sun goes supernova...

EDIT: also that R136a1 is 8 700 000 TIMES as bright as the sun. Imagine staring at a star that is almost 9 million times brighter than our own...I bet even Pluto would be a ball of lava at those intensities.

[Lord Justin]

Rigel has a mass of about 17 solar masses. Betelgeuse is about 18 solar masses. Antares is less massive than either of them (15 M☉).

Rigel has a radius 78 times that of the sun. Betelgeuse has a radius 731 times that of the sun.

R136a1 is 15 times more massive than Betelgeuse or Rigel, with about half the radius of Rigel.

VY Canis Majoris is between 1 and 4 times as big as Antares, with almost the same mass.

Just some figures to wrap your mind around.

Originally Posted by Katu

I've always wondered if Canis Majoris is an actual ball of liquid matter or just a massive gas cloud with a solid liquid core? In any way.....that thing is HUUUGE.

Considering VY Canis Majoris is about 15 solar masses ~600-2000 solar radii, that thing is light as a feather in stellar terms. It's probably still extremely dense compared to normal earth matter, but compared to...say...a neutron star...If a neutron star was a piece of lead, VY Canis Majoris would be like a puff of smoke.

Disclaimer: that's just a metaphor with no figures to back it up...but you get the point Red giants are extremely bloated, like a freshly blown balloon

[biggles]

"If Earth's Sun were replaced by VY Canis Majoris, its radius might extend beyond the orbit of Saturn (about 9 AU). Assuming the upper size limit of 2100 solar radii, light would take more than 2.7 hours to travel around the star's circumference, compared to 14.5 seconds for the Sun. It would take 7×1015 Earths to fill the volume of VY Canis Majoris.


If the Earth were to be represented by a sphere one centimeter in diameter, the Sun would be represented as a sphere with a diameter of 109 centimeters, at a distance of 117 meters. At these scales, VY Canis Majoris would have a diameter of approximately 2.3 kilometers, assuming the upper limit estimate of its radius."

I've read about Canis Majoris a number of times but I get as fascinated every time...what a humongous object!

[Katulobotomia]

Originally Posted by Lord Justin

I am Justin...

Yea...even our sun is going to eventually bloat up and increase in size to a red giant and even swallow earth inside it as it dies....then it's just going to exhale it's outer layer into the space and condense into a dead star and cool down into a solid rock or something....I think it would be the most sad thing ever to witness....our sun dying.

It's actually something I find extremely uncomfortable to realize...that even our sun...the very symbol of all life on earth is eventually going to die out and shut down. Our solar could become unstable and every planet will NEVER see a ray of sunlight ever again. Even the atmosphere on Jupiter and Saturn is going to freeze and rain on it's surface.

Given the enormous amount of stars in even our fairly average Galaxy, there might be a huge amount of civilizations and life that are witnessing their home stars dying breaths as we speak. Civilizations that die with the star, either burn up with their planet or live a few months in COMPLETE blackness and eventually freeze to death and not even a single molecule move. Drifting in space, in total darkness and silence...forever.





Would make a great end of the world movie...


EDIT: also it is theorized that some stars might in right conditions die out in a way that it condenses most of it's carbon in an extremely high pressure and heat forming diamond. The dead star would have a thin outer layer of various elements but the core "star" could be made entire out of diamond...or at least diamonds the size of small moons and such.

[Lord Justin]

Originally Posted by Katulobotomia

t's actually something I find extremely uncomfortable to realize...that even our sun...the very symbol of all life on earth is eventually going to die out and shut down. Our solar could become unstable and every planet will NEVER see a ray of sunlight ever again. Even the atmosphere on Jupiter and Saturn is going to freeze and rain on it's surface.

As always, Sagan puts it better than any of us can hope to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG-Cf...elated#t=7m44s

Originally Posted by Katulobotomia

Given the enormous amount of stars in even our fairly average Galaxy, there might be a huge amount of civilizations and life that are witnessing their home stars dying breaths as we speak. Civilizations that die with the star, either burn up with their planet or live a few months in COMPLETE blackness and eventually freeze to death and not even a single molecule move. Drifting in space, in total darkness and silence...forever.

Would make a great end of the world movie...

I don't think it's likely that any civilization knows its star is burning up and can't do anything about it. I am of the opinion that any species that develops a civilization (not develops intelligence, I mean "civilization" as in city-building and agrarian) rivaling ours won't take more than a few tens of thousands of years to become space travel experts. When you compare those tens of thousands of years to the few million years it would take for a Main Sequence star to develop into a red giant...they either wouldn't know what was hitting them, or would escape to other planets or other stars.

If our Sun was becoming a red giant, nobody would be able to tell except modern astronomers. It'd be sort of like standing on top of a mountain that's eroding away. Clearly in a few million years your mountain home is gonna be gone but no single generation (or series of generations) of mountain men is going to know what's going on. Generation #1000 will simply live on a much smaller mountain than did Generation #15.

And with a star exploding, later generations will simply live on an increasingly hotter world with a increasingly bright sun, which will probably become an evolutionary selection pressure, weeding out organisms who can't stand the heat and radiation. Any intelligent beings that don't have the technology to know what's going on would probably go extinct because their food sources would diminish and the climate would change so much. Any sapient species who figured it out would either have to go deep underground, go off into space, or be shit-out-of-luck.

The last things to live on the surface would probably be the small, hardy things like cockroaches, fungi and bacteria. Once the surface burns up the last things alive would probably be microorganisms on the bottoms of the oceans and deep in the crust.

So...it's one of those things that sounds scary and is a really violent event when looking at the big picture, but when you get down to how a being would experience it, there's not much to tell. The lives of animals are so short that we don't perceive events that take place in geologic time scales.

[Katulobotomia]

Originally Posted by Lord Justin

asdfsdfasdfasdf

EDIT2: I did some Googling on the matter. A massive star can literally go from a stable state to a total collapse without much of a warning in a matter of days. The outer layer gets pushed out at a 10% of the speed of light and the star suddenly begins collapsing about a speed of 70 000km/s, which is 23% the speed of light (O_o)...a star can collapse on it self in a matter of seconds or minutes! Shit....that would be awesome to witness. After the initial collapsing just after the fuel is used up...the next stage on the star dying can take up to a millisecond, at which point the star has formed into a neutron star and/or exploded as a supernova.

I also found that the most common predict is that our sun will live as a red giant for a million years or so...give or take.
(note, pic not in scale)

Our sun is slow and boring (-_-) I WANT BIG INTERSTELLAR EXPLOSIONS AND MILLISECOND TRANSFORMATIONS!!1!!ONE

[Lord Justin]

Yeah the collapse itself to neutronhood can take minutes, I have heard, which is pretty terrifying in itself. But the expansion process, the redgiantization, I'm quite sure, takes at least around a million years.

The outer layer gets pushed out at a 10% of the speed of light and the star suddenly begins collapsing about a speed of 70 000km/s, which is 23% the speed of light

Well I have never heard of that rate of expansion, except in supernova explosions (got sauce?). Never heard of redgiantization occuring that fast.

[Katulobotomia]

Originally Posted by Lord Justin

Yeah the collapse itself to neutronhood can take minutes, I have heard, which is pretty terrifying in itself. But the expansion process, the redgiantization, I'm quite sure, takes at least around a million years.



Well I have never heard of that rate of expansion, except in supernova explosions (got sauce?). Never heard of redgiantization occuring that fast.

No it's not redgiantization as super massive stars don't do that...as far as I know? Do they?

It's a stage in the collapsing of a star or a supernova where the star pushes it's outer surface at a speed of 30 000 km/s. I was merely talking that stars CAN, change from an apparently stable state to a total catastrophic failure, collapse or explode in a shorter time than it takes you to cook a dinner.

Our star (the sun) is too small for anything that catastrophic and fast to ever happen really....and even that is weird, that we have such a perfect star to company us. Would suck living on a system that has a super massive star in the center that suddenly ran out of fuel in the core and without much warning just collapses into a blackhole or explodes as a supernova while you were taking a piss.

" After the core of an aging massive star ceases generating energy from nuclear fusion, it may undergo sudden gravitational collapse into a neutron star or black hole, releasing gravitational potential energy that heats and expels the star's outer layers."

"The core collapses in on itself with velocities reaching 70,000 km/s (0.23c),[62] resulting in a rapid increase in temperature and density. "

EDIT: I calculated that it would take Betelgeuse about 29 minutes to collapse into a blackhole with a speed of 70 000 km/s after it has burned it's fuel up. 29 MINUTES FOR A STAR THIS BIG! Imagine that....watching one of the most massive object in the universe shrink into a dot smaller than a dust particle in your room withing 29 minutes!

[Bunglo]

Does anyone know how we "hear" and "see" our thoughts?

[Katulobotomia]

Fish with three legs

[Baracca Chewbama]

Originally Posted by Bunglo

Does anyone know how we "hear" and "see" our thoughts?

You can see your thoughts?

[Bunglo]

Yes, especially if I'm having these things called "dreams".

[Baracca Chewbama]

huh i guess i never thought about a dream as being a "thought" but whatevs, and no i dont have an answer for how that happens, what do u think?

[Lord Justin]

Originally Posted by Bunglo

Does anyone know how we "hear" and "see" our thoughts?

Not really, and it's basically a philosophical debate at this point rather than a scientific one. No scientist wants to even talk about "consciousness" and "experience" because those things can contradict the empiricism necessary for good science. The philosophers are the ones who talk about consciousness and experience because those are existential and very often spiritual to people.

Or if you meant strictly from a neurological perspective, I believe that the visual centers of the brain can become active and display all kinds of things to "you" even without the eyes seeing much, such as hallucinations. I think dreams are basically a mostly-unconscious hallucination that you can sometimes remember into consciousness.

But I don't really know, that's just a guess

[Bunglo]

Originally Posted by Lord Justin

Or if you meant strictly from a neurological perspective...

Yes, I was questioning the mechanical workings that allow such things as opposed to philosophizing what consciousness is or how it's even possible (that's where things start to get scary.)

My main question is, the eyes being the hardware that detects the light and converts it to something the brain can map/stitch together into something we can visualize, same goes for the ears but with sound waves, how does the brain still have this capability without my eyes/ears actually detecting the light/sound waves they need for seeing/hearing?

Does the brain have the capability of creating or possibly "storing" (such as your memory) these light/wave patterns and as you will them, the brain goes through the same steps to display these stored patterns to our mind as it does when our eyes and ears are actually detecting these patterns in reality?

I can't help but start to dive straight into philosophy on these types of subjects though... Now I'm pondering how the hell the immaterial mind can control physical entities and vice-versa.

It's amazing how little we actually know about anything...

As for what dreams are (simi-on-topic), I personally think that in many cases, you don't actually stop thinking when you're asleep. Kind of like your consciousness that you use every day becomes the subconscious when you sleep and your subconsciousness becomes the conscious that allows you to continue to think about reality while letting your physical self rest the needed amount (I know the body never truly sleeps, trillions upon trillions of cells are keeping you alive 24/7). Granted, we'd all have to agree upon what subconscious even means...

[Lord Justin]

Originally Posted by Bunglo

Yes, I was questioning the mechanical workings that allow such things as opposed to philosophizing what consciousness is or how it's even possible (that's where things start to get scary.)

My main question is, the eyes being the hardware that detects the light and converts it to something the brain can map/stitch together into something we can visualize, same goes for the ears but with sound waves, how does the brain still have this capability without my eyes/ears actually detecting the light/sound waves they need for seeing/hearing?

Your brain can show sensory activity without senses being physically stimulated, I believe. When you are lying down thinking about making a physical motion (such as swinging a bat), the parts of your brain that control muscle movement become 'activated' (increased bloodflow), even though you're not really moving. The same goes for senses...there can be misallocated and "phantom" sensory phenomena without any external stimulus.

Does the brain have the capability of creating or possibly "storing" (such as your memory) these light/wave patterns and as you will them, the brain goes through the same steps to display these stored patterns to our mind as it does when our eyes and ears are actually detecting these patterns in reality?

I believe so. I think that, to the visual centers of the brain, seeing an object is basically the same as clearly picturing an object. But this is another thing I'm not too sure on, it just makes sense based on what I know.

I can't help but start to dive straight into philosophy on these types of subjects though... Now I'm pondering how the hell the immaterial mind can control physical entities and vice-versa.

The philosophical dilemma of consciousness is extremely compelling. But what science can tell us with good confidence is that there's nothing "immaterial" about the mind any more than a computer program is an "immaterial" element of a computer disk. Its complexities are encoded information, but it's encoded in cells, chemicals and electrical signals. The mind is the built-in software of the body, and interacts with the physical world in much the same way robots do.

But the mind can't control physical objects, only the body can (well unless you have brainwave-reading technology), just as software can't move objects, but a robot can.

We're just a bunch of meatbags with a meaty command center in the top. We have a computer in us, but instead of silicon and gold, it's made of slime and meat.

As for what dreams are (semi-on-topic), I personally think that in many cases, you don't actually stop thinking when you're asleep.

Depends what you mean. The brain doesn't become any less active when we go to sleep, but we do almost always lose consciousness. We're still "thinking" in some sense, just that the ego is usually turned off.

Kind of like your consciousness that you use every day becomes the subconscious when you sleep and your subconsciousness becomes the conscious that allows you to continue to think about reality while letting your physical self rest the needed amount (I know the body never truly sleeps, trillions upon trillions of cells are keeping you alive 24/7). Granted, we'd all have to agree upon what subconscious even means...

Well, to do that, we have to define consciousness. I think a good definition for conscious would be "aware of one's own existence, thoughts, and surroundings." Which would make consciousness the state of being aware of those things, and subconsciousness being a state of mind where those things don't exist much.

People are definitely conscious in lucid dreams, because they (usually) become aware of something off-kilter or unexplained that reminds them of their existence so they realize they are dreaming.

The ability to have the experience of thinking "I am here," "how did I get here," "what am I doing," or anything like that (ego) is what separates us from most living things, and what separates a conscious person from an unconscious one. Thinking about oneself and one's surroundings, past, and future is consciousness.

But part of the very definition of consciousness is indeed, being awake. So subconsciousness (or unconsciousness) by its very definition can mean "sleep;" a state distinct from consciousness.

[Bunglo]

Originally Posted by Lord Justin

The philosophical dilemma of consciousness is extremely compelling. But what science can tell us with good confidence is that there's nothing "immaterial" about the mind any more than a computer program is an "immaterial" element of a computer disk. Its complexities are encoded information, but it's encoded in cells, chemicals and electrical signals. The mind is the built-in software of the body, and interacts with the physical world in much the same way robots do.

But the mind can't control physical objects, only the body can (well unless you have brainwave-reading technology), just as software can't move objects, but a robot can.

We're just a bunch of meatbags with a meaty command center in the top. We have a computer in us, but instead of silicon and gold, it's made of slime and meat.

I sincerely hope you don't think we're meat bags made up of slime and meat. You and I both know we're much more complicated than that

My question to you is, if the mind is simply a product of physical interactions like the ones you've listed above, how are there different minds?

Also, when you want your arm to move, are you using your mind to tell your brain to activate the necessary signals or does the brain just send them without the need to tell it to do so?

Originally Posted by Lord Justin

Depends what you mean. The brain doesn't become any less active when we go to sleep, but we do almost always lose consciousness. We're still "thinking" in some sense, just that the ego is usually turned off.

I meant in terms of say while you're trying to go to bed, you're thinking about stuff, sooner or later, you fall asleep. In many instances, I will have a dream that deals with the same things I was thinking about before I fell asleep or things that I thought about throughout the day.

Because of this, I'm wondering if instead of your conscious thoughts instantly ceasing because you're asleep, they continue as if you were still awake thinking about them.

[Katulobotomia]

BEHOLD! KATU DESCENDS ON THE THREAD!

Lucid dreaming (I used to have these A LOT): Happens when the cerebral cortex starts too early and the person is aware even while his brain activity is in REM state. At this state the person cannot escape the dream and is completely unaware of anything happening in the real world. The person is still subject to all reflex type mechanisms such as waking up completely if someone touches him or makes a loud noise. A person in this state can usually take complete control of his dreams and what he experiences and sees in them.

When I had my lucid dreamings, it 99,9% of time started the same. I was in complete darkness. I didn't really see my body, but I was like.....hanging in an empty void without a body. There was no up or down, left or right at first...but very soon as I realized I must be asleep again and this is one of those weird dreams.....I kind of snapped out of it......as if I was dropped into a plane and into a body image of sort. I could orientate and feel my body in the dream as if I had a real body in there. There was a ground and a horizon and I had a direction in which I could look and I saw things in perspective now.
At this point I usually knew that this was one of those dreams and I could make anything up in it....everything I thought would come into reality and I could imagine a whole city or the entire world in it and it would come into reality almost as vivid as if I was seeing it with my real eyes. There was no boundaries and the dreams in this state rarely weren't in my complete control.

The funny thing is...that I could actually wake up from it whenever I wanted to. I had to concentrate and pretty much literally crush the world around me with my mind until I was back in that empty void and keep going....it almost literally felt like a set of status lights would come on, one by one, and I could feel my real left arm now.....then the right arm....then I could start to feel my body's weight and my breathing....then the fabric of the cloth I was sleeping on....then smell....one by one, I kind of started to snap out of my head and start getting all of my sensory input into my awareness and usually the very last to snap out was my sight.....it felt as if I was funnelled through a vortex and I could open my eyes and it would pretty much seem as if I had "dropped into" my body. :P

I imagine this lucid state would be the default state in which the mind would be if the brain would be cut completely off of the body and all of it's input. I could not literally feel ANYTHING in the dream....first times I was actually kind of scared that if I had died or if something really bad had happened and my mind had lost my body forever and I could not ever come back.

It is very hard to describe what it feels like to have absolutely no feeling of your body, orientation, hunger, temperature, the position of your body or ANYTHING.

Philosophically speaking: if I was to be left in that state, where my mind has absolutely no input from the outside world, I would literally be in a completely different dimension outside any physical world. The mind would sit in a completely different metaphysical reality, and only through the senses can the mind reach out and touch the physical world, where the structure(the brain) in which the mind sits upon, is.
You could imagine that the brain is it's own actual reality, and the senses we have are "tentacles" that we use to brush and swipe around it to reach out to different realities (the physical, particle filled and deterministic, world). We can never really enter or reach the physical world, only interpret and imagine, what it must be like, through what we can sense by our body.


One time when I was high, I had this amazing idea. That the brain is just an extremely complex and highly evolved "device" that filters out a noise from another dimension and forms coherent and precise "tunes" from it, that are formed into consciousness. The better the "device" the more aware and intelligent you are. The "awareness"-dimension would sit in a state of random, incoherent chaotic white-noise, up until a physical structure from the physical universe is complex enough to filter out and balance the chaotic "awareness"-dimension.
When a person is mentally unstable his brain is somewhat faulty and produces tunes and resonances that are out of balance and not precise enough to form a stable and coherent "pattern" out of the "awareness"-dimension, and thus the mentally challenged person might not be sane or just brain dead.
All emotions and experiences like love, anger, color, music, happiness, sadness and so forth..... are tunes, melodies, harmonies, patterns of this "awareness" universe and cannot ever be translated into the physical world. There can be an underlining physical structure, chemical process or a measurable entity for them that you can study in a laboratory, but the experience of the emotion happens in this "awareness"-universe.

I just think it is an awesome idea

[TheSavior111]

Dude did you just write the script of Inception 2 i mean that awesome but does it need a really concentrated mind and shier focus to achieve this state and can even anyone achieve it?

[Katulobotomia]

Originally Posted by TheSavior111

Dude did you just write the script of Inception 2 i mean that awesome but does it need a really concentrated mind and shier focus to achieve this state and can even anyone achieve it?

Well Lucid Dreaming is a sort of "malfunctioning" and something that should not happen. I think everyone should be physically able to experience them, but if your 100% healthy you won't experience them, as they should not happen in a fully functioning normal sleep.

It's like sleep-paralysis. A state in which a person wakes up from a dream but the body is still completely paralysed and you cannot move ANYTHING in your body. You might even spend minutes or hours in this paralysed state up until someone touches you or speaks to you and your body snaps out of the paralysis.

I've heard that some people have indeed "learned" to enter Lucid dreaming by some form of exercise just before they fall asleep, but for me it was completely involuntary and random. I could sleep a week with seeing only regular dreams and BOOM suddenly one night....I would go to bed and next thing I know.....I am hovering in an empty dark void without a body. :/

I can imagine someone would say it(the lucid dreaming) as "out of the body experience" as it pretty much literally is just that.....and entering your body feels like "dropping in" back into your body.

EDIT: now that I actually think about it....when I had just dropped into my body from Lucid dreaming, I could actually "hear" the silence of the room I was sleeping in.....as if the lack of noise was actually something I could hear....hard to explain......also that the blackness of the void I was when I was dreaming, wasn't really...."black"....it was nothing, not even black, nothing...

[Bunglo]

Originally Posted by Katulobotomia

Well Lucid Dreaming is a sort of "malfunctioning" and something that should not happen. I think everyone should be physically able to experience them, but if your 100% healthy you won't experience them, as they should not happen in a fully functioning normal sleep.

I'm not sure where you're getting the "malfunctioning" information from. As far as I'm aware, no one actually knows why we dream, lucid or not.

[Specht]

I hate when my lucid dreams come with some nasty hallucinations, specially scary ones, last one was so scary that I tried so hard to move myself, that I actually managed to move one leg, but it was a shaky small movement, like a guy who had lost movements of his legs but was trying to relearn to walk.