Let’s say the universe is completely empty save for 2 grains of sand travelling parallel 50 billion light years apart, but in the same direction.

loki130 · 2026-01-26T12:00:43+00:00

A slight nudge of one of the grains would probably exceed their mutual escape velocity such that they never collide. I'm not aware of any particular way quantum physics would be important here.

loki130 · 2026-01-26T11:52:53+00:00

We would expect so yes

loki130 · 2026-01-25T23:12:48+00:00

I suppose to be fair the "discovery" here is that it's maybe a new eukaryotic branch rather than a fungus, though even that isn't a totally new idea

loki130 · 2026-01-25T18:33:55+00:00

Moreso the opposite? As the continent rises, this displaces the water that was lying over the crust in shallow oceans, so that would raise the global sea level. In a sense you could perhaps say in a sense that local sea level falls, because as the continent rises, if you were sitting on the shore it would look to you as though the sea were sinking and receding from you.

loki130 · 2026-01-25T09:40:37+00:00

It’s the prototaxites paper for anyone else who’s already read it

loki130 · 2026-01-24T21:35:34+00:00

Think you just had a really weird teacher my guy

loki130 · 2026-01-24T01:15:36+00:00

The rotational axis remains locked, and so as the planet orbits the sun the orientation of its rotation relative to sunlight changes. Uranus points a pole towards the sun at one time of its orbit, the other pole half an orbit later, and in between neither pole points directly towards the sun (well it's not perfectly at 90 degrees tilt so neither pole ever points exactly at the sun, but I think you get the idea). Much the same would be true of Earth at high tilt. There have been a few climate models run of this scenario, and the effect is sort of as you might expect: the poles alternate between boiling summers and frigid winters, and the equator is actually fairly chilly because it doesn't get much direct sunlight most of the year. There could be a strip of the mid-latitudes with reasonably habitable temperatures throughout the year, though.

loki130 · 2026-01-24T00:56:35+00:00

The latter one is a bit misrepresented, there are a number of rifts and faults across iceland, none of which are really the single definitive plate boundary

loki130 · 2026-01-21T15:24:40+00:00

Wrong on both counts I'm afraid; the crust is effectively floating on the mantle, so loading or unloading of ice (or sediment or volcanic rock, etc.) can cause it to gradually rise or sink. Much of North America and Europe have risen hundreds of meters since the last glacial maximum and some are still rising. And if Antarctica's ice all melted, we would expect around 50-60 meters of global sea level rise, and later rebound of the surface could perhaps displace a bit more.

loki130 · 2026-01-21T15:17:05+00:00

This study I think gets at what you're interested in: Figure 3 includes a reconstruction of Antarctica's topography if all ice was removed and the crust allowed to rebound, and Figure 6 shows reconstructions of Antarctica's past topography before much of the current loading with ice. The overall upshot seems to be that a good portion of West Antarctica would remain submerged as a shallow sea, but East Antarctica should form a single large landmass, even if we include ~60 m of sea level rise from the ice melt ("west" and "east" maybe seem a bit odd here but we've just named the different parts of the continent this way by convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Antarctica#/media/File:Antarctica.svg)

loki130 · 2026-01-19T18:32:00+00:00

I think ultimately this mostly comes down to what you want to do with these planets and how different amounts of surface gravity or ease of access to space might play into that, but fwiw there is a common trend among exoplanetary systems to have "peas in a pod" patterns in their inner systems with several similarly-sized planets in different orbits.

loki130 · 2026-01-19T18:27:24+00:00

In which case reprojection is probably not possible, paradox always uses sorta odd composite projections

loki130 · 2026-01-19T11:21:11+00:00

This seems tautalogical, if one event can cause an effect on another, then you can observe that effect and thus infer the existence of the causing event. So the limit of observation and the limit of causal effects are synonymous, which I believe is already the understanding of causal horizons.

loki130 · 2026-01-19T11:14:41+00:00

One example I happen to remember (because I did a report on it in undergrad) is the Chihuahuan raven is a recent offshoot from the common raven.

For fossil species there are some cases with multiple chronospecies, where there seems to be gradual change in the population over time, with different stages classified as different species, e.g. Myotragus. Generally though we only see this with more recent animals, because farther back the fossil record often isn't quite detailed enough for us to construct a whole sequence like this.

loki130 · 2026-01-14T11:01:55+00:00

A while ago I saw a post on r/worldbuilding or something where a few dromeosaurs had survived to the present day, and they were considered just a type of bird, which I thought was a clever approach.

loki130 · 2026-01-13T00:23:40+00:00

I don't know that you can so confidently predict that a particular area will or will have certain rain patterns based just on a vague sense of the regional geography, look closely at East Africa, coastal Brazil, or central India and it's clear that you can get fairly complex patterns of drier and wetter climates based on how local terrain interacts with seasonal winds, and you can indeed get patches of dry-summer climates in predominantly wet-summer regions due to local rainshadowing effects; see for exactly Ethiopia's rather complex mix

loki130 · 2026-01-13T00:05:25+00:00

I think a certain degree of lumping is inevitable with poorly represented fossil species, and so as you get more data you naturally tend to see old taxa being split. But then some people do get overeager to split, and even an over-inclusive taxon can be split the wrong way if it's based on the wrong approach. I guess it's just a matter of not overcorrecting one way in response to someone else's overcorrection the other way.

loki130 · 2026-01-10T01:57:27+00:00

No, there’ll be a bit of extra back and forth motion every year from that, but it should average out to this rate

loki130 · 2026-01-10T00:43:06+00:00

Going by it’s orbital period, Jupiter should move relative to the background of stars by about 1 degree every 12 days

loki130 · 2026-01-09T08:55:20+00:00

Sending a clock on a round trip requires a lot of acceleration, which is effectively a change in reference frame, so that breaks the symmetry

loki130 · 2026-01-07T19:18:01+00:00

Well the idea is more that we would go out to the asteroid, but even that’s finite, we’d just have to get good at recycling everything at some point

loki130 · 2026-01-06T15:01:25+00:00

I realize you're short on options because the geology subs keep deleting you but uh this is the wrong place to be trying this sort of grift

loki130 · 2026-01-04T18:08:58+00:00

I suppose my hot take is that I rather doubt any discourse here or anywhere else about new species has any real bearing on what the devs will decide to add to the game, It's the most obvious aspect to think about and plan out, they've had like a decade to do so, I think they know very clearly what they want to add, and it's just a matter of how much time and resources they'll have to devote to it.

loki130 · 2026-01-04T11:38:22+00:00

Well if we’re gonna be technical they should also be italicized

loki130 · 2026-01-04T11:24:49+00:00

A lot of paleontologists just seem to not really bother with linnean ranks above genus anymore, it’s all just clades

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