It is/isn't the Singularity while we are going and not going into WW III, while Rama is maybe zooming by, while Modern Rome does the whole fall of the Republic nonsense, or maybe doesn't! While the H5N1 thing is still churning away reassorting in pigs!
Narrative superposition is exhausting.
But also sometimes monitoring the world is useful. I'm very glad I was paying attention in February 2020, for instance!
I don't understand. How did you write this comment?
> I'm a totally blind software developer.
One small thing we can all calm down about. =)
Welcome! I certainly hope this universe is better than your original one
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ESA%E2%80%99s_Mars_a...
If it was 100 AUs at closest approach, we would never have seen it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud is still theoretical, even)
The chances of yesterday's Powerball numbers being 04 24 49 60 65 01 was about 1:300M.
You're doing the thing. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.sv...
It's close because we saw it. We saw it because it's close.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/ESA_s_...
This thing traveled light years to get here. Possibly over billions of years. 30 million kilometers from Mars and 300 million and 3 billion kilometers from Mars would all be close approaches. Any approach can be claimed to be close; that's the magic trick at play here.
I don't think you're responding to my claim, which is that the close passes to Mars and Jupiter seem very unlikely. Of all random trajectories through the solar system at the distance of this body, what fraction of them pass equally close to major planets? I'd even be willing to limit it to trajectories close to the ecliptic plane, because we may be scanning that plane more.
4.5AUs is as close as 0.2AUs from an interstellar standpoint. Both are equally likely, just as every Powerball number is equally likely. Any object of this nature we can spot is going to be quite close with our current detection technology.
Again, your argument is effectively like arguing that 04 24 49 60 65 01 cannot possibly be yesterday's winning Powerball numbers, because it's a 1:300M chance. The game must be rigged!
Now, if the next couple interstellar objects we detect also do a similarly close pass on Jupiter and Mars, there'll be something worth wondering about.
(Similarly, if tomorrow's Powerball numbers are 04 24 49 60 65 02, I'll have questions!)
Seeing how everything is going, though, I strongly feel like we peaked as a species and that, while we'll continue up for a (short) while, the downgrade is just inevitable.
I agree with you, but I have been experimenting with image processing using the data available from this satellite (as a hobbyist). Honestly, while it's impressive that we gather data from a piece of technology that's floating in space, the resolution of this is nothing to write home about. If I take anything away from my brief amount of experience with this, it's that we still have a long way to go in terms of the quality of our imaging of our surrounding space.
I haven't fully finished my processing yet and still need to tune the wavelength and account for some drift, but this is basically the state-of-the-art: https://tcdent-pub.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/3i_atlas_10302...
to us, the sun appears to be the size of, let's say, a quarter held at arm's length. this is at 93M miles (1AU, or ~8 light minutes) distance. if we moved the sun 100 miles away from earth, it would take up the entire sky. now in the other direction, if we doubled the distance, to 2AU, it would appear to us as half its normal size and 1/4 as bright (irradiance follows inverse square law). at 3AU the sun would be 1/9 as bright and 3x smaller than a quarter. at 100AU, we're talking about brightness of 1/100^2 (one ten-thousandth) the sun's apparent brightness. with me so far?
Sirius A: the brightest star we can see; 25x more luminous than the sun; 2x the size of the sun; 8.6 light YEARS distance (544,000AU) from earth.
if we moved the sun to the same distance as Sirius A, it would appear 296 BILLION times dimmer and 544,000 times smaller. yet Sirius A is easily visible - the brightest star in our sky - despite being only 25x more luminous and 2x larger.
do you see the discrepancy? 25x more luminous doesn't compensate for a 296-billion-fold brightness loss. The numbers we are given don't make sense, not even close. (and this is without considering diffusion, which would make the discrepancy even worse.) i'm not proposing an explanation or a modification to the model, i just think the data don't make sense.
These are all numbers you just provided, with no source for them.
But even using your numbers, 300 billion is 3x10^11. The Sun provides about 10^5 lux, while starlight overall provides about 10^-4 lux[1], which is a difference of 10^9, meaning the difference between "all the starlight on a dark night" and "just the starlight from Sirius" would be around 10^2, which... seems about right?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28illumin...
We can spot a single photon in the right conditions. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12172
In the case of your thought experiment, the critical factor is that our eyes are able to observe and adjust to a very wide range of brightness in different conditions. Sirius A really is billions of times dimmer than the sun to our eyes (hard to find a good reference for that, but this mentions it: https://ecampus.matc.edu/mihalj/astronomy/test5/stellar_magn...).
https://www.ign.com/articles/physicist-brian-cox-thanks-yout...
ceejayoz•3h ago
"Does it employ a power source that is hotter than the Sun?"
Sigh.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•3h ago
dylan604•3h ago
ares623•3h ago
dylan604•3h ago
gojomo•2h ago
dekhn•1h ago
ceejayoz•3h ago
dekhn•3h ago
TheBlight•2h ago
dylan604•3h ago
I miss the days when tabloid fodder stayed in the tabloids.
gaoshan•3h ago
ceejayoz•3h ago
He'll have the same to say about the next one.
conradev•2h ago
ceejayoz•2h ago
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1I/%CA%BBOumuamua
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS
2/3 of them Loeb has made wild claims about.
gojomo•1h ago
Does everyone at any prestigious institution have some duty to remain conventionally mundane in all their musings?
Is there any reason to think such hypotheticals are, on net, more harmful than helpful?
Isn't tenure (like Loeb's) designed to encourage a fearlessness around topics & speech?
CamperBob2•3h ago
ceejayoz•3h ago
all2•2h ago
ceejayoz•2h ago
Even with cryovolcanoes, the power source is not on the comet; it's the sun.
CamperBob2•1h ago
kulahan•2h ago
m4r1k•2h ago
What most stand out is the sheer amount of closed mind people in the accademia, Avi is not afraid of making suggestions of what it might be and even saying “if it turns out of being a rock, so be it”.
ceejayoz•2h ago
> even saying “if it turns out of being a rock, so be it”
I don't doubt it! He'll get another chance the next time we spot another one.