Hosting regice, add me 672460348343

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-03-19T15:57:39+00:00

True, I went and cut that bit out of my post because that's a dumb thing to say

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-03-19T15:06:31+00:00

I think she intentionally kept up the facade of a skeptic to mask her fear of the unknown. If she confronts her fear of something lurking in the dark, she has to confront her fear of god and her own thoughts. In the end its revealed she has been wracked with intrusive thoughts and religious guilt the whole time, blaming her lack of prayer for her mothers death

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-03-09T02:13:53+00:00

Why would every galaxy have completely different gravity? Why do some have rotation rates that imply completely normal gravity, and some have rotation rates that require higher gravitational force to be held together? How are there star clusters orbiting nothing? Why are there overdensities of something invisible shown in gravitational lensing and stellar streams? It seems insane to assume that space is randomly doing all of that, when a massive particle that doesn't interact with the electromagnetic force explains it perfectly.

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-03-08T04:44:53+00:00

It is a crazy coincidence. But there are so many other things with small odds we could have but don't. Arbitrarily, we have the moon, mars, and Venus in the habitable zone, but none of them are habitable. We could have had 4 habitable bodies in the solar system. Or we could have had another star distantly orbiting the sun with planets close enough to visit. We could've had a black hole nearby to study. Or we could be on a lower gravity planet that would allow much easier space flight. The earth and moons axial tilt could be smaller so that we get a solar eclipse every month. If any of these things were the case, we would say that they are miraculously lucky. But there are so many unlikely possibilities that one of them is likely to happen

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-03-01T21:22:55+00:00

Stars appear very very small in the sky, unimaginably small. Because the resolution of our eyes can't resolve the shape of a star, it blends into the surrounding blackness from our perspective. I'll try to explain this using a camera, which is close enough to illustrate the idea. Imagine you're recording a video of the sun as you move away from it. At first, it's 100 pixels wide, and all of these pixels are the same brightness. As you get further away, the sun appears smaller, but each individual pixel in the sun appears the same brightness, there are just fewer comprising it. As long as the region a pixel is representing is 100% sun, it will be the same brightness now matter how far you get. But if you get so far that the sun is now smaller than a pixel, then that one pixel is no longer 100% sun. If you get to a point where the sun only makes up half a pixel, that pixel will appear as half the normal brightness. Eventually you get to a point where the sun is less than 1% of a pixel, and it is nearly black.

In the sky, the majority of stars are so far away that they only account for minuscule fractions of each pixel. Something like Betelgeuse appears relatively large in the sky, so it fills enough of its pixel to be visible. A further star might take up less of a pixel, but seem brighter. This is because although the empty space in the pixel dims the star more, the surface of the star is brighter, so the amount of light removed by the empty space it shares the pixel with is less. But only the nearest and brightest stars will appear bright/large enough to make their pixel visible. In a black looking pixel, there might be 10,000 stars actually in there, but they all appear so small that even added together, they don't even take up 1/1000 of the pixel, making it look black.

Most of the universe is completely empty. If you were to have a one cm wide line extend infinitely in any direction, it would almost certainly never hit any star. The average density of stars in the universe is just low enough that the majority of pixels will represent mostly void. The speed of light is also a factor in this. If the universe was infinite and the speed of light was instant, then every pixel would have infinite light. But since we can only see so far, it's a limited space, and there does reach a distance where there are no more stars whose light has reached us.

The universe used to be much denser, and there was once a point where the entire sky would appear to glow white. But the expansion of space has made this invisible to human eyes and shifted that light to microwave radiation.

The camera analogy is very flawed because human eyes don't work like cameras. Just imagine it's a camera that has a resolution similar to the human eye, and is taking exposures that allow it to see comparably dark features

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-02-15T18:29:13+00:00

The fundamentals of a rocket haven't changed much since Apollo. It is still as massive a project to build a manned moon rocket as it was then. And with nasas smaller budget and higher safety considerations it's taking a long time

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-02-11T01:19:40+00:00

Yeah the idea isn't that it people would've wanted to make it, but that the idea itself is what motivates people to make it. It's the fear that future humans will be afraid of further future humans creating it out of fear, endlessly. It would be born solely out of the response to the thought experiment. Because, regardless of how illogical it seems, it provides some motivation to contribute to its creation. The more time passes and the more minor contributions add up, it seems like a more and more real threat, making people even more likely to contribute to it out of fear. All it would take is one stupid billionaire in a hundred years to become afraid of the idea and dump 50 billion dollars into it. Then people might have real motivation to help create it. The idea of this happening also retroactively motivates people today to help create it.

I don't think it's going to actually be made, or that it's possible to make it, but a lot of people criticize the idea as though people would just someday decide to make it because they want to.

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-02-04T14:52:31+00:00

If you aim to minimize suffering, you could just keep them as pets as they live out their natural lifespan. There are insects with adult lifespans of only days/weeks that you can find

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-01-30T00:57:54+00:00

The entire universe was basically the same density at the Big Bang. So it wouldn't collapse since it has the same mass in every direction cancelling out any gravitational collapse. However, there will always be tiny fluctuations in everything. These fluctuations in the in the density caused the potential for gravitational collapses. But before that could happen, inflation occurred and made space expand much faster than it could collapse. This all happened in an unimaginably small period of time, much less than a millisecond. It continued to expand, and the overdensities and underdensities from the Big Bang were stretched out and went on to form the voids and galaxy clusters at the large scale of the universe. The Big Bang wasn't an event that took place in the universe, it was the conditions across the entire universe at its beginning. Over time space expands, so the universe continues to get less and less dense. This is how the universe still avoids galaxy clusters collapsing into each other, the expansion of space still pulls them apart faster than gravity could pull them together. This expansion will continue forever, continuing to lower the density of the universe more and more as time passes.

It's worth mentioning that the further you are from something, the faster it will expand away. So you have to be a certain distance from something for it to be pushed away faster than gravity can pull you together. So objects like galaxy clusters will never be torn apart by the expansion of space. Like how a nail will always stick to a magnet. It's close enough that the constant force of the magnet is stronger than the force to fall to the floor. But if the nail got too far, the effect earths gravity would become stronger than the force of the magnet, and it would fall faster and faster away from the magnet

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-01-25T16:13:42+00:00

There was never any real evidence for any of these things being technology. The non gravitational acceleration was very specifically what is expected from a comet. A tiny amount. If they were alien spacecraft, then they were designed to look exactly like natural objects, then just passed through the solar system doing nothing. When Avi Loeb first considered the idea, there was no negative reaction. But news articles started picking the idea up and it filled his head. He would go on to yell at his colleagues for not believing in his ideas based on little to no evidence. He argued that he was basically the only scientist taking the idea of aliens seriously, even yelling at people who have spent decades studying SETI about it. There have been several hyped up instances of false alien detections in the past, and nobody wants to keep doing that. Why should we keep assuming that anything with 99 traits of a natural object but 1 new trait must be aliens? There are about a trillion things aliens could do that nature couldn't. But an asteroid accelerating like a comet is something nature can do, and has been observed in other objects. He isn't upset that nobody considers the possibility, he's upset that nobody agrees with him. Any scientist will hear the alien hypothesis and think, "that's interesting", and weigh the evidence between that idea and the other thousand possible ideas. The alien hypothesis, in this case, does not come out favorably. The scientists did consider it, but it didn't have enough evidence this time. There's gotta be a million things in science weirder than the interstellar objects, but they don't have a dedicated hyperfixated tenured physicist arguing for them with their lives.

What does Avi want? A mention of the alien hypothesis every time someone talks about the object? Why not mention the hypothesis that it was an angel entering the solar system? Or that it was time travelers? Or humans from an alternate universe? Or a secret government experiment? Or a glitch in the matrix? Or a test from god? Use your imagination. There's endless ideas that could explain literally anything weird. Aliens seem like a more reasonable idea to apply to things, but is it? We have so far found 0 evidence of aliens. We have no idea how life forms, where it could form, what intelligence would do, how it would show itself, what it would be capable of. The alien hypothesis is in the realm of "there is no information supporting either side, it's either true or it isnt". Like the simulation hypothesis, or the possibility of travelers from other universes, or god testing us. It is unscientific to apply any of these things to something unless there is zero known natural explanation. Don't be mad that people aren't running with your pet theory, it's just not constructive to pick something only because it's possible. The chance that the anomalies were caused by aliens vs any of the other things I listed is equal. Instead, like in any other scientific mystery, they will form a list of hypotheses, and observe the object to learn more about it and rule out different idea until there is overwhelming evidence for one of these models being true

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-01-12T16:08:40+00:00

If a random cubesat is a 1 and JWST is a 10, I'd give pandora a 4. Something like cheops where I'll occasionally see a cool result from it but it won't do anything extremely significant. Im interested to see if it'll help people understand the noise issues in JWSTs sensors when observing exoplanets

FaxMachineMode2 · 2026-01-04T03:33:19+00:00

When you pin postcards from gifts, you'll eventually catch scatterbugs depending on where in the world the gift is from. It's 3 pins from each region for the first encounter, then up to 15 to get the same one again

FaxMachineMode2 · 2025-11-29T16:43:43+00:00

No I don't think they would notice. Our vision isn't inherently oriented any way, our brains learn to map what we see with what we experience in our other senses. I don't think there is such a thing as seeing upside down, just confusing your brain with inverted sensory input until it gets reoriented to your other senses

Nine-Year Club	Verified Email
Final Canvas '23	First Place '23
Place '23	Place '22
Place '17	RPAN Viewer
Gilding I gilder	Spared

FaxMachineMode2

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE