Fun facts!

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if a year were represented by a meter:

  • a decade would be the length of a small house or large apartment
  • the average human lifetime would be about the length of a city block
  • the time since the dinosaurs (~65 million years) would be merely ~65,000 km, several times the diameter of this planet
  • the estimated time since this planet formed (~4.5 billion years) would be ~4.5 million km, still nowhere near any of the other planets
  • and the time to the year 1E100 (a 1 with 100 zeroes after it, the estimated start of the Dark Era) would be ~1E84 light years*

* (much bigger than the diameter of the observable universe which is ~93 billion light years)
 
Edwin Booth (older brother of John Wilks Booth) unknowingly saved the life of Robert Lincoln (Abe Lincoln's son) when the later found himself sandwiched between a crowd and moving train at a busy train station.
 
If time were sped up so that the entire history of the universe so far (~13.8 billion years) was just one second long, time would be ~4.35*10^17 times faster. At that sped-up rate, the time to the year 10^100 (a googol years) would still be ~2.3*10^82 years long.

BTW around a googol years from now is when the Dark Era is hypothesized to begin, after the last supermassive black holes evaporate.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
BTW around a googol years from now is when the Dark Era is hypothesized to begin, after the last supermassive black holes evaporate.
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I've seen different numbers for this, but supposedly it starts 10^10^100 years from now and lasts 10^100 years. Some sources say after the Dark Era is the Photon Era when there is nothing but isolated low energy particles that almost never encounter each other.

Also this assumes that there isn't some change in the nature of space-time in the lack of anything like gravitational fields or particle interactions. I've always thought it was possible (and I think some speculate as to this) that at some point in this scenario an empty universe triggers another Big Bang.

So I really consider all the wildly varying numbers people give on this pretty speculative.
 
AnOminous said:
supposedly it starts 10^10^100 years from now and lasts 10^100 years
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A googolplex years from now and then "only" a googol? Makes more sense the other way around. And the Dark Era is also the Photon Era, as it is a time with no black holes.

From what I heard, it's 10^100 years is the start of the Dark Era if proton decay is a thing. ~10^10^76 if proton decay isn't a thing (with all matter turning to iron by about 10^1500 years and then very slowly decaying to black holes via "quantum tunneling"). There could also be Big Bang in ~10^10^10^56 years via "quantum fluctuations".
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
There could also be Big Bang in ~10^10^10^56 years via "quantum fluctuations".
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I was mostly saying that theoretical physicists diverge so wildly on the actual numbers (and indeed those I cited do not make much sense) that I can't really take them seriously at all. I mean obviously "a really really really fucking long time" is obvious but I doubt anyone knows that right now. It's pure speculation when we don't even know what dark matter is (or even if it really exists and although it not existing is now the fringe position it is not a lunatic fringe opinion).

I'm not sure if conservation applies on some kind of weird multiversal level or if it breaks down when the universe is empty enough, but if you had an entire universe of matter and an entire universe of antimatter spontaneously generate and then split off into separate universes, this would have a net zero result. I think the current prevailing hypothesis is that, for whatever reason, if the Big Bang was the result of matter-antimatter annihilation with matter somehow "winning," perhaps because there was more to start with. So one universe would end up mostly with what we call matter, and antimatter would be the matter of the other universe.

Okay I've got way too far into "fun sperging" rather than facts, but I honestly don't think even theoretical physicists know for certain how or why a Big Bang would occur, although they probably have better speculations than my retarded ass and certainly know the math better.
 
AnOminous said:
I was mostly saying that theoretical physicists diverge so wildly on the actual numbers (and indeed those I cited do not make much sense) that I can't really take them seriously at all. I mean obviously "a really really really fucking long time" is obvious but I doubt anyone knows that right now. It's pure speculation when we don't even know what dark matter is (or even if it really exists and although it not existing is now the fringe position it is not a lunatic fringe opinion).

I'm not sure if conservation applies on some kind of weird multiversal level or if it breaks down when the universe is empty enough, but if you had an entire universe of matter and an entire universe of antimatter spontaneously generate and then split off into separate universes, this would have a net zero result. I think the current prevailing hypothesis is that, for whatever reason, if the Big Bang was the result of matter-antimatter annihilation with matter somehow "winning," perhaps because there was more to start with. So one universe would end up mostly with what we call matter, and antimatter would be the matter of the other universe.

Okay I've got way too far into "fun sperging" rather than facts, but I honestly don't think even theoretical physicists know for certain how or why a Big Bang would occur, although they probably have better speculations than my retarded ass and certainly know the math better.
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I place these 'theories' in the realm of science-ism (religion).
Projecting this far into time ,when we have barely deciphered some fundamental particles, is as scientific as most graphic novels.
 
Orange Rhymer said:
I place these 'theories' in the realm of science-ism (religion).
Projecting this far into time ,when we have barely deciphered some fundamental particles, is as scientific as most graphic novels.
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We're pretty sure the Big Bang happened and when it happened and even have a pretty solid timeline of what happened from nanosecond to nanosecond immediately afterwards, but at a complete loss as to why or how it happened. The guesses we have (which may be correct) don't even rise to the level of hypothesis much less theory. Frankly "God did it" is as plausible as any of them.

"String theory" is another thing like that, although slightly fun fact: the belief science was "wrong" about this is really from the media's misrepresentation of it as a scientific consensus. It never was. Even its proponents have been quick to admit it has little to no experimental verification. This is in contract to things like the Standard Model, which had holes but where you could say "if this theory is correct you should find the Higgs Boson if you do this" and then they did. String theory has been more or less a dead loss as to predictive capacity.

It could be that like the Higgs Boson, we just don't have the technology to do the experiments it would take, but it could just be dead wrong.
 
To print the Kiwi Farms logo in CMYK, there'd need to be a solid yellow silhouette of the logo, a cyan gradient silhouette (with the cyan at about half or so thickness at the bottom and almost none at the top) in the same place, and also tiny black dot for the eye.
 
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Rockets burn fuel at a much higher rate than jets because they have to fight gravity, accelerate to at least orbital velocity, and overcome atmospheric drag. Jets are kept aloft by wings, aren't trying to get to ~8+ kilometers per second, and atmospheric drag is less of an issue. So that's why rocket fuel lasts only minutes to get to orbit, and jet fuel lasts hours. So-called "soft science fiction" commonly portrays spacecraft working like aircraft -- and seem to vastly underestimate how far apart worlds are.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Rockets burn fuel at a much higher rate than jets because they have to fight gravity, accelerate to at least orbital velocity, and overcome atmospheric drag. Jets are kept aloft by wings, aren't trying to get to ~8+ kilometers per second, and atmospheric drag is less of an issue. So that's why rocket fuel lasts only minutes to get to orbit, and jet fuel lasts hours. So-called "soft science fiction" commonly portrays spacecraft working like aircraft -- and seem to vastly underestimate how far apart worlds are.
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This is a thing I bring up a lot when I volunteer with the local high school and community college's model rocketry clubs. But my favorite caveat to it is that we actually have known how to make that fiction a reality since the early 60s, because atomic powered rocketry and ram jets (like the XB-70) solves the problem, but everyone's too soft to just nut up and start building the fucking things.
 
TiggerNits said:
This is a thing I bring up a lot when I volunteer with the local high school and community college's model rocketry clubs. But my favorite caveat to it is that we actually have known how to make that fiction a reality since the early 60s, because atomic powered rocketry and ram jets (like the XB-70) solves the problem, but everyone's too soft to just nut up and start building the fucking things.
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Atomic rockets are a disaster waiting to happen, ramjets are good but they don't work unless you are going really fast already, at the very least supersonic, so current prototypes all rely on a rocket booster to reach the speed. Another key issue is creating an airframe capable of withstanding the heating, the Space Shuttle needed constant maintenance of its carbon tiles and they only covered the underside, an SSTO would need them all over its fuselage and withstand two heating cycles per launch.
 
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N Space said:
Atomic rockets are a disaster waiting to happen, ramjets are good but they don't work unless you are going really fast already, at the very least supersonic, so current prototypes all rely on a rocket booster to reach the speed. Another key issue is creating an airframe capable of withstanding the heating, the Space Shuttle needed constant maintenance of its carbon tiles and they only covered the underside, an SSTO would need them all over its fuselage and withstand two heating cycles per launch.
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Fun-Fact: This is a bitch-made opinion
 
Everyone probably knows this...

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a reference to a female deodorant. A deodorant aimed at teen girls.
The lead singer of Bikini Kill (friends with Kurt), wrote "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit" on his apartment wall.
It was a small troll, after a drinking session where Kurt passed out.
but:
One could infer this reference indicated his predilections towards an age group...
 
Orange Rhymer said:
Everyone probably knows this...

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a reference to a female deodorant. A deodorant aimed at teen girls.
The lead singer of Bikini Kill (friends with Kurt), wrote "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit" on his apartment wall.
It was a small troll, after a drinking session where Kurt passed out.
but:
One could infer this reference indicated his predilections towards an age group...
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That doesn't really compute. His most notable partner was Courtney Love, almost three years older than he was. If anything, he strikes me as someone with a really fragile gender identity and it's entirely possible if he hadn't taken shotgun mouthwash he would have trooned out. (Which isn't of course in and of itself incompatible with unfortunate predilections, although I just am not seeing it in his case.)
 
Kathleen Hanna has spoken about Smells Like Teen Spirit and she said it comes from her and Tobi Vail, Kurt's girlfriend at the time, finding Teen Spirit deodorant in a store and thinking the name sounded ridiculous. Kurt later said that he thought "teen spirit" meant something revolutionary and anarchist.
 
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