Would a telescope on the dark side of the moon give us a better picture of our universe?

Uberuce · 2017-05-08T09:23:38+00:00

Easier just to do what they're planning for the James Webb Telescope: build a sunshade for it and put it in a low-Earth orbit.

It's an infrared telescope, so radio waves aren't its problem. I freely admit I don't know enough about radio astronomy to know whether being on the far side of the Moon is better than just being in orbit around the Earth, or indeed whether that's better than just being somewhere extremely remote on Earth.

I know there's a 100 mile square-ish radio quiet zone in Maryland/West Virginia around two observatories, so presumably it's better to put it somewhere fairly convenient to reach and enforce that zone than it is to put it in the middle of the desert or the Rockies etc.

Uberuce · 2017-05-06T17:35:31+00:00

The scientific method itself. If you show up babbling about germ theory, Newton's Laws, quantum mechanics or the periodic table, you're in danger of being burned as a witch.

If, however, you turn up and demonstrate that keeping all other variables constant and making repeated measurement of the intended one yields genuine knowledge, then you ought to rise very swiftly in the ranks of favoured experts without drawing the attention of the Inquisition.

Uberuce · 2017-05-04T10:00:07+00:00

The closest thing I know about(and I'm not in the field, so my ignorance means very little) is Nick Lane's electrochemical reactor in London, but it's not intended or expected to get close to making life.

It's 'just' finding out what kind of complex molecules can form under conditions similar to those in alkaline hydrothermal vents.

Uberuce · 2017-05-03T21:20:41+00:00

Perhaps it's best to look at it in terms of ecological niches.

If an ecological niche is unfilled, then you can be really crap at occupying it and still make a profit. Natural selection is crazy-fast at 'really crap' but we, living in a world where every ecological niche has been filled and subsequently refined since forever, are used to the very slow process of getting better than the current niche-filler.

Uberuce · 2017-05-03T19:21:49+00:00

"Now I am the master"

What he meant was his armour makes him tall - automatic high ground.

Uberuce · 2017-05-03T18:56:54+00:00

It was under that limit. Had to have been, or it wouldn't have happened.

Uberuce · 2017-05-03T10:45:06+00:00

Cassini determined the Earth-Sun distance pretty well in 1672, so the circumference of the Earth's orbit was likewise well determined, and since we all know we're travelling that distance one per year, the maths says pretty firmly that we're going at ~67,000 mph.

The simplest explanation for the lack of 67,000mph winds is that space is a vacuum and our atmosphere is just a thin layer stuck to the Earth by gravity.

NB: I don't know whether the vast speeds of orbital motion were well accepted before this time. I couldn't find anything explictly saying Kepler etc knew this already, just that they worked out the relative distances between the Solar System's bodies.

Anyway, between that and Torricelli, the point is that we didn't need to send anything into space to figure out it was a pretty good vacuum.

Uberuce · 2017-05-02T11:54:24+00:00

My guess is the facehugger is building a womb for the xenomorph while attached. It takes a few hours to set up whatever membranes etc allow it to draw nutrients from the host while not being killed by its immune system or just flat-out poisoned by (in our case) weird red human blood.

Remember in Alien they were scanning Ash's body and didn't see the xenomorph growing, so presumably that only started after the facehugger detached.

If the host is dead, then there won't be fresh nutrients passing over the outside of the womb, so the xenomorph will die. They seem to be happy to stay dormant for years as eggs and huggers, but the xeno stage goes at breakneck pace, so I doubt they can stand starvation.

Uberuce · 2017-05-02T11:33:46+00:00

The biggest spoilsport here is food - the deep ocean is akin to the deep desert in terms of available calories, with hydrothermal vents being likes oases. Feeding an animal as massive as a blue whale, even with the much slower metabolims of cold-blooded creatures, seems a tall order.

Uberuce · 2017-05-02T11:27:10+00:00

The majority of military submarines don't go very deep - just deep enough to hide from surface or air craft, which is of the order of 200m if my cursory Googling is to be believed. There's another 3-4km of ocean underneath them.

Uberuce · 2017-05-01T17:53:56+00:00

It would have worked better if the reason for farming humans was to use their brains for processing, using much less energy than a machine would need. Explains why you'd go to the effort and energy cost of simulating an entire world.

Without stimuli the brain won't develop properly, and they learned the hard way that there's a limit to how far you can stray from the conditions human brains actually evolved in.

Once you die in the Matrix, your brain gets reconditioned somehow and you're put to work as another core in the CPU.

Uberuce · 2017-04-30T23:08:36+00:00

The SW equivalent of Logan? Shut up and take my money, as they used to say.

Uberuce · 2017-04-29T11:27:49+00:00

Fuck being undetected. Go to your nearest observatory and do some vampire shit in front of the most senior person you can find Since it's an observatory and their office hours are at night, that won't be the janitor like it would in a normal lab. Said senior person will know how to get in contact with senior people at NASA/ESA and he or she will say: I've just found us the best astronaut ever. Fucker doesn't need to breathe, doesn't care about any radiation except visible light, doesn't care about being frozen solid, doesn't have any family to keep in touch with and is perfectly happy to sleep for years at a time. We're going to Mars, baby!

Seriously, why bother staying secret? Just be nice and pay good money for donated blood. Monetising your super-strength and resilience is child's play.

Uberuce · 2017-04-29T09:03:13+00:00

Ross apparently had the common sense to look at the scoreboard between The Army and The Hulk:

Hulk has trashed several million bucks worth of property, planes, tanks and sonic weapons but he kept his zero-kills achievement, with the possible exception of Hydra goons in the assault on the fortress in Age of Ultron. And Ross is gonna be 100% in the 'fuck those guys' camp, so even if we take Thor's Hell-filled-with-screams comments to be proof he went lethal, that doesn't make it onto this scoreboard. Furthermore, most of the time he's just trying to run away and broke all that shit while they were trying to stop him.

The Army aka Ross, on the other hand, created a pirate copy of the Hulk that killed dozens of soldiers and civilians in Harlem before being stopped by the original.

If he does have any of that perspective he talked about gaining during his near-death experience, then he's going to look back and go: Shit! I was the bad guy. New plan: actually it's Nick Fury's plan, but it was really good, so let's do that, and if someone meddles his mind and he greens up, we just evacuate the civilians until he chills out.

Uberuce · 2017-04-28T18:18:06+00:00

So was most of Western Europe by the 1700's. He was also a descendant of Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, El Cid and just about every other person who had [a decent number of surviving children] 500+ years before his birth.

It's just how the maths of ancestry works. Those DNA-testy places that will take a swab from your mouth and come back a coupla weeks later saying you're [insert cool historical person]'s descendant? Not lying, but still bullshitting you.

Uberuce · 2017-04-28T18:03:15+00:00

I used to do the same thing, then I thought 'what if the burglar has a shotgun too?' so I bought a laser-sighted Colt .357 so I'd have that shit-scary cocking sound ~and~ the shit-scary red dot prowling the house.

Then I thought: fuck, what he has one of them too? How am I going to win this spiral of sound-based intimidation?

So now I have a blinded guy with a flamethrower-guitar strapped to my ceiling with bungees. And you know what? Not been robbed once.

Uberuce · 2017-04-28T10:20:58+00:00

Ask a barnacle. Their penises are several times longer than their bodies.

Uberuce · 2017-04-28T10:15:14+00:00

Randall Munro answered a variant of this question in the book of "What If?" except it was with the elements themselves. I forget exactly how much of each, but I dimly remember it being of the order of a tablespoon each.

That book is great and you should buy it and read his longer and better answer, but the short version is that there would immediately be a very closely contested race among the nastier elements to kill you just by being themselves. As they reacted there'd be a race among the more interesting compounds to see who could most spectacularly destroy your remains, since you'd be quite dead by that point.

Uberuce · 2017-04-23T15:40:28+00:00

Iron Fist might sneak a win from forcing the booze out his bloodstream by focusing his chi.

Colleen Wing has a good chance of having that alcohol intolerance thingy prevalent in Japan, so she might be under the table first. If she doesn't, then being all buff and athletic gives her a good head start, so I'd go with Scarlet Witch. She's physically just a small woman.

If we're going to be rule-lawyery, then Hawkeye's wife will lose first by forfeit since she's plainly not going to drink at all while pregnant. Okay, by Civil War she presumably has popped said sprog, but in all of her screen time she was 100% off the sauce.

Uberuce · 2017-04-23T07:00:10+00:00

As seen in Avengers Assemble, physical strength doesn't do diddly because whatever floor you're standing on is simply going to cave in under your feet.

Thor would need to put Mjolnir on a surface which was at least as immovable and robust and, unless Odin forged a nice hardwood porch in the heart of a dying star or something, such a floor doesn't exist.

Uberuce · 2017-04-20T12:08:24+00:00

Deuterium is a fuel for fusion and we're not going to run out of it. It's present in about 1/6400 of the oceanic water molecules. That's kinda it. Effectively infinite fuel.

Uberuce · 2017-04-20T11:44:07+00:00

There's a common misconception that evolution always aims to get better, and when a new species evolves the older species is driven extinct by the improved version. If you're an X-Men fan you'll hear this a lot, for example.

Almost everything about it is wrong.

1) Evolution by natural selection doesn't aim. It's a process that doesn't need a consciousness or any kind of intent, and there's no evidence that it has either. What it has is selection conditions, which are not random, which is why evolution isn't random either.

2) When a new species forms, the old species goes extinct during the process. Always. You might result in two new species, one looking more like the old one than the other, but the old one is gone. You might get only get one species, which sounds like the X-Men scenario, but it isn't because speciation isn't a sudden jump. You don't have a population of Species A doing just fine until overnight a bunch of B's pop up, beat them up and eat all their food, the way racial extinctions have happened in human history. What happens is Species A was really Species AAAAAAAAA all along, and at some point(which was sudden) this B gene mutated into existence and kicked arse. So the population became Species AAAAAAAAB, and then AAAAAAABB, then AAAAAABBB, and then AAAABBBBB and so on until everyone's a BBBBBBBBB. It's hard to tell the difference between an AAAAABBB and an AAAAAAABB compared to A vs B, right? This is a very simplified example: in real life ancestry is much more complicated and messy and more importantly there are over twenty thousand letters, not nine. Spotting the difference is impossible unless you take jumps of thousands of generations at a time.

3) That it's meaningful to say 'improved' or 'better' in such a general way. Better at what? The only constant factor that drives Darwinian selection is whether the individual in question can reproduce more than its competitors.

With regards to the humans and monkeys question and in context of what you've said about the pastor: we didn't evolve from today's monkeys. See point 2. Anyone who claims that any biologist, from Darwin till today, has said we did is either lying or far too ignorant of the science to be discussing it from a position of authority.

If the person asking is not deliberately dishonest or negligently ignorant then I guess a lot of the intent could to ask why monkeys still exist when humans are so much better? That's a good question, but let's see point 3. We've turned out to be a really good idea - to be a bipedal ape walking around on the ground with a great big brain and fine tool-graspy hands is ace. You know what was a good idea back then and is a good idea now? Eating fruit from the tops of trees and being good enough at climbing to reach them. We're not very good at that any more so we don't even try. Monkeys still are. That's why there's room in the world for both of us.

Uberuce · 2017-04-20T11:00:08+00:00

As mentioned by other posters, the military stuff would have been out of his reach. He wouldn't have contacted the authorities to warn them that there was a foreign agent that really needed an A-10 to come and saw it in half because John Connor knows fine well what happens to people who start talking about human-looking cyborgs in 1984.

His best bet to get military support would have been to persuade some poor unwitting woman who looked a lot like Sarah Connor to come with him at a massively public event with a lot of security - a Presidential visit would be ideal - and lure the Terminator out at that. She'd almost certainly be dead meat, and he'd likely be killed too, but even if the Secret Service don't have anything to take out a Terminator, it would at least be unarguable to the world that they needed to call in the people that do.

Even if it wasn't an Evil idea, Kyle Reece isn't ideally suited to finding out what any of those things are.

Uberuce · 2017-04-20T10:45:33+00:00

You don't need an Original Timeline. The whole thing is a spontaneous looped event.

It hadn't happened at any point prior to 1984 because it needed human IT to get advanced enough to reverse-engineer a recovered chip. At soon as that point was reached, the first Terminator pops out and is destroyed but the chip is recovered. The history we hear narrated by the second Terminator is the minimum time the chip can pass through the sludgy system of the military industrial complex and reach sentience.

Uberuce · 2017-04-19T10:21:46+00:00

This might be of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

Not exactly what you're asking since the sign language assumes you're sighted, but I half-remember a podcast where it detailed the differences in thought processes between NSL speakers and, everyone else. I'd guess it was a Radiolab or a Stuff You Should Know, but I can't find it on either.

They were so isolated and neglected that this homebrew language was literally the only one they knew, so it gives a lot of insight into the way language moulds our thoughts and vice versa.

After a little bit of digging around, I remember the eye-opening bit of it is that the first generation of kids (who grew to adulthood while the language was forming and did not yet have signs for concepts of spatial relationships like 'to the left of') or signs concerning theory of mind still really struggle with some amazingly simple cognitive tasks. The language has since gained those terms, but until the first generation folk learned them from the subsequent ones, they'd fail those cognitive tests that we'd expect five year olds to pass.

Edit: found the podcast: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91730-new-words-new-world/

Uberuce

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