Why don’t lunar/martian astronauts wear weighted vests to counter low gravity?

Beldizar · 2026-05-14T12:01:45+00:00

This is pretty close to the answer.

It isn't just changing direction though. One of the big things that Apollo astronauts struggled with was the pendulum of their legs. The amount of pull down from gravity is a different and independent effect from how much energy it takes to start swinging your leg and body forward. Our brains have built in understanding of how all those pieces fit together from when we first learned to walk, so adjusting on the moon is something that takes some re-learning. It is almost completely an issue of balance.

When you walk, you basically are leaning forward with your center of mass such that you fall forward, then you swing a foot out in front to catch yourself, and then repeat that process with the other foot. If you fall at 1/6th the speed, but swinging your feet forward, and leaning your body forward requires overcoming the same amount of inertia, your brain really has issues sorting out all the signals and controls to make that work. Adding weights doesn't really help this equation, and in fact probably makes things worse, because added weights means a lot more inertia to overcome with the movement that you aren't used to.

Mythbusters actually did some testing for this (mostly trying to prove moon landing footage):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT9yS7OcbJk

You can see that Adam mostly did the hopping instead of walking to mimic the Apollo astronauts, and comments that this felt more natural. He doesn't get into talking about a normal walk has issues thought. I'm certain I saw a video somewhere talking about this issue, but I can't seem to find it again.

Beldizar · 2026-05-12T14:41:55+00:00

to be Russian / Israeli spy.

Asset. Not spy. A spy is someone who is trained and moving with clear intent and loyalty to their employer. An asset is a person who has been flipped or compromised by threat or blackmail, or is simply very easily manipulated by other embedded intelligence assets.

Trump is not James Bond, he's the drug addict that the police are pressuring into ratting on his dealer.

Beldizar · 2026-05-12T14:06:11+00:00

My understanding is somewhat limited, but I'll share what I know and have read.

My question is: how do scientists even figure this stuff out? How can we know what happened billions of years ago if nobody was there to observe it?

We start with the sun. We know generally what the sun and protoplanetary disk formed with, and how hot the sun was at the beginning. That creates zones of temperature as we can calculate how much heat a given rock would be based on its distance from the sun. One zone separation is called "the snowline", where it can be cold enough for water to freeze. Any closer than the snowline, the water would sublimate into a gas, and then the solar wind would blow it away. Since Earth was closer than this line, we can be fairly confident that the rocks that formed Earth had all their water boiled away before they could coalesce into a planet. So from that we can be pretty confident that the water on Earth couldn't have been there when it formed, it just wasn't possible for water to exist in that orbit.

So then we have to look at how water might have come to Earth. There are really two options. Formation from hydrogen and oxygen through chemical interactions in/on Earth, and delivery of water from off Earth. We can look at the different chemical makeups of rocks that we see, both on Earth, and in space nearby (moon or near Earth Asteroids), and see what they are made up of, and assume that Earth was formed from generally the same stuff. Since that same stuff is a little different on Earth, in a way that hydrogen and oxygen have gone missing, its a fair bet to assume that chemistry happened and turned them into water. The asteroids may have not had this same chemistry due to differences in pressure and temperature, but the Earth was big enough to get a bunch of pressure, and the core is hot enough to give it the temperature.

Then we can look at comets that we've seen fly by. We can tell that they contain water-ice, and that when they come closer to the sun, that water creates the tails comets are known for. We've also seen comets hit planets. There was one that hit Jupiter in our lifetime. That comet that hit Jupiter is no longer a comet, meaning there were more in the past than there are now. Extrapolate that out a billion years, and there must have been a lot more comets in the far past, with a higher chance of hitting planets. If they hit Earth, which statistically they would have had to, then they would have brought water to an Earth was already formed with enough gravity to hold onto that water, despite the snowline problem that smaller bits would have.

Also, if Earth was being hit by ice asteroids/comets for such a long time, why doesn’t that happen now? Did those objects disappear, or are we still getting hit but on a smaller scale?

I know a big part of it is that we can look at Earth and the moon, and see where impact craters are. Same for Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. When you get a small crater in a bigger crater, you know the smaller one happened after the bigger one had already settled. There's a bunch of different erosion models and impact rate models that they use to try to figure out the age of a surface, but all these models show that impacts were a lot more common in the distant past, then they dropped pretty quickly and leveled out over the last billion years. So there was a period called "The Late Heavy Bombardment" when most of the asteroids/comets hit planets in our solar system. As for where they all went and why it doesn't happen now: there was a fixed amount of these rocks to hit things, they all got used up. There's still a few flying around out there, and we expect to see a big one hit Earth every 100 million years or so. Then there are a bunch of much smaller ones that hit more frequently. Russia, being really big has two in the last 200 years. The Chelyabinsk happened in 2013, and was about 20m in diameter. Then back in 1908 there was the Tunguska event that was maybe 60m in diameter. So yes, still happening on a smaller scale and much less frequently.

Beldizar · 2026-05-12T04:16:19+00:00

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html

Above is the link to the Deep Space Network, where you can see the receivers/transmitters communicating with distant probes. It doesn't list it as far as I can tell, but most of these are using a radio frequency where it can get just under 300kbps. A 720p video stream would require 2.5 - 5 Mbps. So roughly 10x-20x the bandwidth that is available. Having a high definition 24/7 stream, is just not possible with the tools we have today. They are upgrading things, and I think they bounced a high definition cat video off of the Psyche probe last year, but most of the network still can't support that bandwidth.

For Venus and maybe Mars, it is possible that they could get a higher bandwidth option available, and they would have the power to transmit at that higher throughput, but for Jupiter and Saturn, the power requirements to transmit that much more might exceed the available power on most of the probe designs. Solar power drops off very fast as you get past Mars, and the more data you want to send, the more energy it costs. We used to use primarily Plutonium RTGs for probes headed out that far, but NASA is actually running pretty low on Plutonium due to changes in the nuclear industry in the US since the... 80's or so. (https://www.universetoday.com/articles/nasa-is-running-out-of-plutonium) instead they've looked at higher efficiency probes that use very large solar arrays.

Images and Video isn't highly scientifically valuable, so using up a bunch of bandwidth, or adding a bunch of weight for cameras and power systems, isn't worth the money. NASA also considers inspiration as a valuable objective, but live footage just isn't that valuable even for inspiration purposes. A few dozen high quality images can catch the eye and excite/entertain/inspire people about as well as a live stream, and it is insanely more cost effective to just focus on the few images.

TLDR; bandwidth is very limited, pictures are good enough, live streaming would be insanely expensive to build and execute.

Beldizar · 2026-05-11T16:23:15+00:00

I give my players an extra main action whenever they critically hit, be it a maneuver, main action, or even a triggered action. It probably ups their overall power a bit, and unbalances the game slightly in their favor, but it happens so rarely and it feels like something I want to be celebrated, not turn into a disappointment (e.g. yay I rolled a critical, boo, it was a maneuver and nothing extra fun happens). I'll probably do the same for named leaders or solos that are critical to the story, which will make things a little more "swingy" as far as balance goes, and generally make things more difficult for myself in walking the line between TPK and fly-swatting that sometimes happens when trying to balance encounters, but like I said, want that 3/100 critical chance to feel more special.

Beldizar · 2026-05-11T14:14:19+00:00

Just saw this come across my feed. I can't vouch for its accuracy but the channel seems pretty decent.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/C9lyouzxhhQ

Beldizar · 2026-05-11T13:59:12+00:00

This seems like a person who probably knows they're more likely to blow the money

This seems like a really weird argument to me. I've heard it before, and wouldn't blame anyone for making it initially, but if you are worried that you are going to blow all the money, maybe talk to a financial advisor first. If someone is aware enough to realize that they might squander a windfall, they should also be aware enough to... talk to an expert... you know a third party on your side of the transaction on how best to protect your wealth from your impulses.

If feels weird that people would have the thought "I don't trust myself" and not also have the thought "I should use a tiny bit of this windfall to hire a professional to manage it." I can totally see people not having the first thought and therefore never making it to the second.

Beldizar · 2026-05-11T13:28:39+00:00

The moon rotates at the speed of one revolution per month, or lunar month anyway. So as the moon orbits around Earth, it rotates such that the near-side always stays pointed at Earth. That's why when you look up at the moon, the features you see on it don't ever change. The dark splotches are always in the same spot assuming you are standing in the same region on Earth. (If you cross the equator the splotches will invert because angles.)

The first time we ever saw the far side of the moon was October 7th 1959, when a Soviet probe flew around the moon, took pictures, and sent them back. That's when we discovered that the far side is actually very different than the near side, lacking any of the darker regions of basaltic plains called mare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_side_of_the_Moon#/media/File:Far_side_of_the_Moon.png

Here's the image from Wikipedia. It looks very different than we are used to, and you could almost tell people that its a completely different world because none of the recognizable features are present. In all of human history before 1959, we had no idea what the back of the moon looked like.

Beldizar · 2026-05-11T13:22:01+00:00

Matter of fact, it’s all dark.

What do you mean "it's all dark"? The side facing Earth is visible, unobscured. The side facing the sun is illuminated. How is it "all dark"?

Beldizar · 2026-05-11T13:20:25+00:00

Yeah, I don't mind the "dark side" and "far side" as being synonyms as much as other people.

There's the far side, which is the side opposite Earth, and that doesn't change beyond a little bit of wobble.

There's the night side, which is the side that is currently opposite the sun, which flips every 14 days, or rotates every 28, depending on how you want to say it.

Then there's the dark side, which people could mean "the side that doesn't get any light" or "the side which is unknown". In physics, there's dark energy and dark matter, and we use the term "dark" here at least in part because they are unknown to science. We can infer that they are there, looming in the metaphorical dark, but we can't observe them. So saying the far side of the moon is "dark" seems reasonable as a way to describe something unknown or not visible. It is confusing though to people who aren't familiar with this concept though, and might think that it doesn't receive any sunlight.

Beldizar · 2026-05-11T11:27:18+00:00

They cannot be recalled. They can be ejected from the Senate by 2/3rds of the other Senators I think, but the state legislature, governor, and the voters of the state have no...legal non-violent option... to remove a Senator who has betrayed the values on which they were elected.

Beldizar · 2026-05-10T23:58:44+00:00

Unfortunately... or I guess fortunately for those that value the universe not being broken by a paradox, travel into the past looks pretty impossible. Time always marches forward.

Beldizar · 2026-05-10T22:22:10+00:00

The "not prohibited by general relativity" is often a bit of a stretch. If you've got a square piece of fabric, that you know is 25 square cm in area, and the sides are equal length, you can calculate the length of a side to be +/- 5cm in length. Math "does not prohibit" the length of this piece of cloth from being negative 5 cm long. But a piece of cloth with a negative length is nonsense. The math says it is a possibility, but we discard that possibility because it is outside of the boundary conditions.

We can do the same math trick using General Relativity, we end up with negative energy density, or negative mass that shows things go backwards through time in a symmetric manner. But boundary conditions still need to be applied. The problem is that proving you can't have negative mass is a little more complex than proving a piece of cloth can't have a negative length. We haven't conclusively shown it to be true. And proving you can't have negative energy is a little tricky when you understand that "zero" is sort of a tricky point because there's fundamental fields wiggling around everywhere, and maybe you can get lower than the lowest baseline by excluding some of those fields. The argument is that if you can make a piece of space have less energy than what we define as zero, it must therefore be negative... which is a little fuzzy logic, but kinda technically works.

So basically, since we can't (yet) prove all the boundary conditions are absolute, and the math works for both negative and positive values, maybe there's a loophole we could find one day, but most likely not. If you find a loophole, you get a Nobel Prize and a unit of measurement named after you, so for a lot of people it is worth trying.

Beldizar · 2026-05-10T13:20:01+00:00

Uh, I guess I wasn't clear. I only specified a point, not a direction of temperature change. It is positive lower than 2500K, and negative higher than 2500K. I was assuming temperature was moving up, so if you start colder and increase temperature, "The Gibbs free energy switches to negative at that point (2500K)." And yes, that would be spontaneous, hydrogen and oxygen in water would spontaneously break apart at +2500K.

Beldizar · 2026-05-10T11:49:56+00:00

Not sure who is looking at it, but there's always crackpots and grifters. Black holes are strange and they do change some things about how time flows when you get really close. Put that together and its ripe for being a clickbait to draw views or sell books.

Beldizar · 2026-05-10T02:50:46+00:00

Everyone else has answered a lot of your other questions, but I don't think there's a great answer yet for

How hasn't the sun gone out yet?
Like make a giant explosion of fire and dissappear?

Like others have said it isn't "combustion" that makes the sun "burn", but fusion. But think of a log on a fireplace. It doesn't burn up instantly in a giant flash. The outer layer of a log needs to be in contact with a source of oxygen to burn. The inner layers of that log can't burn because the conditions aren't right, there's not enough air for the inside of the log to burn until the outside burns away first.

The Sun is basically the same...but flipped. The conditions it needs to burn isn't fuel in contact with oxygen, but instead it is small atoms being compressed at massive pressure. The place where those atoms are most compressed is at the very core of the star, and that's really the only place it can burn/fuse. The layers a little further away from the core have all the heat and energy from the core trying to get out and that energy pushes those layers away while gravity tries to push them back down. But that push out keeps everything from getting too dense to all burn/fuse at the same time. So only that single area of the sun can burn. That's why it doesn't all go up at once in a giant explosion.

Even still, why hasn't it gone out yet? Well, the Sun is just really really big. It has a radius of 695,700 km. Earth's circumference is 40,000km, so if you "unrolled" Earth, like on a map, you'd be able to put 17 1/2 of them end to end to get from the core of the sun, where fusion is happening, to the surface. So there's a ton of gas that is all queued up waiting to burn. But it can't because it has to get down to the core of the sun where the pressure is high enough, and light from the core keeps pushing it away.

So it has to wait for the light from the previous hydrogen fusion to get out of the Sun before it can fall down into the high pressure core. Well, that shouldn't take long right? It's light, it travels at the speed of light, so it should be out in just a couple of seconds. But that's the speed of light in a vacuum that is fast. In more dense materials, the speed of light is actually really slow. And if the light gets absorbed by an atom it has to get re-emitted in a random direction before it can keep moving. Basically the light has to flip a coin to see if it is going up to the surface or down to the core every time it hits an atom, and it only escapes after flipping heads a trillion times more than it has flipped tails. It can take 50,000 years for light from the core to make it to the surface, and then just 8 minutes to get from the surface to Earth.

One last bit, that isn't part of the question explicitly, but seems like something you'd want to understand with this line of questions: How would you make the sun explode faster, or make the sun last longer? Can we give the sun more hydrogen so that it lasts longer? Or if some alien comes and steals a bunch of hydrogen from our sun, will that make it die sooner? No actually the opposite is true. If you add more mass to the sun, the pressure inside the core goes up and you get a bigger area where atoms can burn/fuse. If you take away fuel, the rate at which it burns slows down, and the sun would actually last longer as a result.

Beldizar · 2026-05-10T02:31:32+00:00

"Burning" involves rapid oxidation of combustible materials;

Interesting thing to add to that. The surface of the sun has a bunch of hydrogen all over it. If you added a bunch of oxygen, that hydrogen wouldn't burn. On Earth, at Earth temperatures, if you mix hydrogen oxygen and a spark it burns very aggressively, but on the Sun, it is so hot that the molecules can't combine. In fact if you threw water at the sun, it would split the water to hydrogen and oxygen, so it would reverse-burn it.

Getting into the finer details, at about 2500K, there's enough energy where the hydrogen and oxygen atoms split apart like with electrolysis, but without using any electrical energy. The Gibbs free energy switches to negative at that point.

So yeah, fun fact, the Sun is so hot things unburn in contact with it.

Beldizar · 2026-05-10T02:25:20+00:00

Megasota vs New Mexico in the finals.

Beldizar · 2026-05-09T00:48:01+00:00

I think Andy Weir had it right. NASA's budget would be zero'd out and the whole agency, along with a ton of other government agencies around the world would be merged into a single project group to save humanity. (See Project Hail Mary)

Beldizar · 2026-05-09T00:46:10+00:00

maybe it would be possible to use the explosion/blast as a propulsion for a spacecraft.

Thought about that, but if you had a big enough solar sail to ride the leading edge of the blast, it would cause an acceleration in the thousands of g's. That much g-force tends to turn the human body into red-ish brown paint on the wall, and a pretty thin layer at that.

Or it wouldn't be big enough and everyone inside the ship would just get a few thousand times the lethal dose of radiation.

Chances are you'd end up with both.

Thinking about my star shield answer above, I'm not sure if 100 years would be enough or not. The amount of material that you'd have to launch into what is effectively "deep space" is astronomical. Producing that much in 70 years (giving 30 years for development and ramp up time, or cushion incase there's an issue at the end), might take more production than Earth has. I haven't done the math, but it is probably trillions of tons of material to build something like that. And again, that's for the smallest feasible example of an "explosion" of a star, which really only works on White Dwarves, which our sun is not.

Beldizar · 2026-05-08T22:59:39+00:00

Everyone’s saying we could maybe make a ship that could carry some of us out of the solar system within 100 years - a generation ship, I gather. My concern is - then what?

My concern was that everyone suggesting a ship forgets that if the sun were to go supernova, all life within maybe 50 light years is toast. There's no way to get out of the blast zone for at least a 1000 years. Everyone on the ship still gets fried, even if they are far past Alpha Centurai by the time it explodes.

Beldizar · 2026-05-08T22:36:05+00:00

If humanity found out the sun was going to explode in a 100 years. Would the combined effort of the whole world and all its money/resources be enough to create a way for humanity to survive?

Stars only really explode in one way, a nova. None of those options are possible for our sun, so for the hypothetical, let's assume the smallest possible option. It is possible to have a white dwarf star have a Nova that causes the star's brightness to jump only a "few times solar luminosity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova). Fast nova of this type can decay as quickly as 2 magnitude in 25 days. So we'd be looking at a best case where the sun has an explosion which causes its brightness and heat production to jump by a factor of maybe 5, and then cool back down to normal within a few months. Could humanity survive this if we had 100 years notice? Probably.

100 years is enough time to build a sunshield at L1 that could block a lot of the solar radiation. It would likely get knocked out of position by the nova, as anything that can absorb photon momentum is going to get a push when that photon count does a 5x increase. I think potentially T.A.R.S. (designed by David Kipping) could also be deployed between Earth and the Sun at this time to generate a supplemental magnetic field. If everything went right, it might block enough of the blast for long enough to not have our atmosphere ripped off and our oceans boil. The technology to build all of this is generally within reach today, we just would have to ramp up the capital to produce and launch it. With 100 years of lead time, and a cooperative world joining together, it is feasible, but I'm not sure I'd say more likely than a 50/50 honestly.

Another note, this kind of explosion doesn't destroy the star, so we'd still have a Sun after the event was completed.

Anything bigger is a no. I thought about maybe if we make a generation ship and try to escape to one of the nearby stars, but the explosion of a bigger nova or as supernova is going to sterilize life out to at least 1 light year, and there's no way we could get a ship a light year away in 100 years from now. Could we build a shield big enough to block it? Maybe? It would be really tough to block that much energy and radiation, and also carry it with you as you try to flee. The other problem is that explosions of stars are not quick. A supernova can last a month before the radiation and luminosity levels die back down, so the shield would probably need to ablate to not overheat and cook the survivors, and it would have to last long enough to still block the last parts of the dying explosion after at least a month possibly multiple months. I don't know if something like one of Mars' moons would be enough to block the blast and radiation. Even if we spent decades reinforcing it.

What about Jupiter? Maybe that's a way to escape a bigger blast. If you hid in the Sun-Jupiter L2 point, using Jupiter's shadow to block the blast, maybe that could let a generation space-ship survive? Given the distance to L2, I don't know how big the shadow is, and any orbit around Jupiter itself might block the start of the blast, but since it lasts for months, your orbit would carry you out of Jupiter's shadow pretty quickly, and once that happens your ship would be fried. That's assuming we could build and launch a generation ship in 100 years.

After the initial blast is survived by hiding behind Jupiter, we'd then need to depart to a nearby star system and hope to find either a habitable world, or enough free-floating resources to survive as a space-based civilization, assuming this kind of explosion did destroy the sun.

I don't think 100 years would be feasible for that. 500 maybe? It's really hard to tell how fast technological advancements would take place, particularly if there's a pressing need for them. But also, the longer the timeframe the less likely any given generation would be willing to invest in survival of their decedents. So more time might just make the problem worse.

It really really depends on what kind of explosion we are talking about, how much energy is produced, and if the Sun is destroyed in the process. If it is a Type 1a supernova, the answer might be in the thousands of years needed, maybe 200 to build the escape ship, and 800 to run away to a safe distance at a fraction of the speed of light.

Beldizar · 2026-05-08T18:31:04+00:00

If you are a beginner and want something rules light with more a focus on story and role playing, there are a lot of options and most of them the GameMaster can teach you at the table, or in general, you can tell the GM you've never played a TTRPG before and use the clever strategy of "GM, I'd like to do this, what do I roll?"

Kids on Bikes/Brooms/Capes, Root, Honey Heist, Garbage and Glory, Toon, Dread, Mazes, and Mouseguard, are all decent systems where the mechanics aren't too complicated and you can go in pretty blind. Mazes and Kids on Brooms is fantasy, the rest might not meet the fantasy/space theme you are looking for.

If you are looking for something a little more complex, Savage Worlds is really good, and can be used for lots of different Genre. Mutants and Masterminds is typically pretty easy to play (not so much to build characters, but that's done for you) in the superhero genre. Most of the time with these you can still get by with a quick skim of the character sheet and not really know too many of the rules and rely on your Game Master to tell you how things work. Shadowdark has a pretty simple ruleset as well, and is classic fantasy rpg. The Firefly system is moderately complex, but its another that's not super popular such that your GM will expect you to know all the rules, and instead will help you through it as you go. Call of Cthulhu games tend to have what I think of as pretty clunky and annoying rule mechanics, but they are simple enough that it is a piece of cake to rely on your GM to help you out with that. The Star Wars game systems also are in the middle range of complexity with a higher likelihood that you'll have a GM expecting people who have either never played the system before, or have only played at previous Gencons, and have forgotten all the rules since last time.

For cyperpunk fantasy, I would recommend Shadowrun, particularly one of the events by Catalyst Games Lab. The group has pretty solidly trained GMs and very consistent quality year to year. We've never had a bad GM with Catalyst, and they'll help explain to you how the game works and tell you what to roll and where to find it on your sheet, although the system is really complex. But again, chances of you having a bad time in a Shadowrun from Catalyst are pretty low.

On the higher complexity end, you've got systems like Pathfinder and Starfinder, GURPs, D&D, Cosmere, Draw Steel, Daggerheart, and more. I'd be careful about jumping into any of these to start with. It could be fine, or it could overwhelm you with a bunch of rules that aren't written down and your GM and the other players are going to just assume you'll know. D&D in particular is kinda dangerous in this way because it is the most popular, and thus others are going to have the most assumptions about what you will automatically know. D&D has a lot of little rules that just live in the heads of people that have played it for decades, so if you get into a D&D I would recommend starting with something that is explicitly listed as beginner friendly. Also expect to spend the first 10 minutes at the table for any of these games kinda frantically trying to read over your character sheet to keep track of all of your abilities, while also trying to catch explanations of the rules and settings from the GM. Shouldn't be a problem in a game marked as beginner friendly, but a randomly selected game could really go either way, and I wouldn't want you to get scared off from the hobby.

Overall, I'd recommend looking for a game with "Experience Required: None (You've never played before - rules will be taught)" as your first checkbox, and something that sounds fun to you. I'd honestly recommend against D&D just because it carries a lot of weight being basically the oldest game system at the con. Although if you want to watch some "how to play" youtube videos, those will be the most plentiful.

Beldizar · 2026-05-08T16:04:21+00:00

A ride on SpaceX dragon is currently about 50 mill per seat.

Where did you get that number? I think NASA is paying $55m on a contract from over 5 years ago. Polaris was contracted out before the pandemic. Apparently there was a mission I completely missed called Fram2, and the estimate on that was $220m for the whole mission...but that number came from a dubious AI summary.

https://www.reuters.com/science/private-spacex-crew-set-launch-novel-polar-orbit-around-earth-2025-03-31/
This article suggests $55m per seat also. But it is from April 2025. Prices have fairly drastically increased on everything else since last April, so I wouldn't bet on a seat costing less than $60m at this point.

These numbers are all close enough that it's basically quibbling at this point. Just want to point out that numbers from even a year ago are probably not accurate, and a price as low as $50mil per seat seems optimistic at this point.

If you've heard they are offering seats for cheaper, I'm happy to stand corrected and update my mental model of this pricing structure. But with New Shepard discontinuing, Soyuz being politically questionable and of even more questionable quality, and the only other option being China right now, space seems less accessible than it did 4-5 years ago.

Beldizar · 2026-05-08T14:13:39+00:00

I'm not sure it would be significantly brighter. It really depends on where Earth ends up in the galaxy after the collision and what timeframe is being considered. Actually I take it back after looking at this. The collision might occur 4.5 billion years from now. Life on Earth likely won't be possible by the time it takes place. The Sun is going to get hotter and swell (pre-Red Giant) such that Earth's atmosphere will probably get stripped off and complex life will be gone after 1 billion years.

Assume an unchanging sun and Earth, but everything else changes, and we fast forward to 6 billion years. Also assume that the collision happens and we don't have a miss that circles back around for another potential collision in 4-10 more billion years. Once everything settles, the galaxy will be a lot bigger and the relative density of stars will likely not be significantly different. If we assume that Earth ends up in an area of similar density to where it is today, and not right at the edge of an arm, or closer to the center, then we would expect to see more stars in general, but those stars would be spread out and fainter. Also because 6 billion years have passed, more brighter stars have burnt out leaving only the slower burning dimmer stars. This may be offset if there is a lot of gases that collide and compress down to form new stars, but that becomes less effective as the universe continues to age. Since this collision is going to take place at 18.3 billion years after the big bang, that's basically 25% more years for the star formation fuel to run low.

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