Ultimate space simulation software

 
A-L-E-X
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03 Dec 2020 06:20

Thanks I was wondering what the differences were between Space Engine and a planetarium program like Starry Night where you can render it that way (for example I can go back and forth in time to see what what the last North Star was, like Thuban during the time of the Pyramids, or what the star of Bethlehem might have been (a special alignment of planets) or when Vega is going to be the next and brightest North Star.)

http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/softw ... ight%20Pro

Obviously the graphics arent anywhere near as good as SE because it uses Open GL 1.4 and 2 and has much less graphics memory, but it's good as a classroom planetarium that shows what the constellations will look like 100,000 years in the past to 100,000 years in the future and when I visit the exoplanets I see what their solar systems look like, but the surfaces are very bland and you cant see the colors of the atmospheres either.
 
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03 Dec 2020 09:52

I'm loving this site which has short biographies of famous scientists.  I just read this one and it's amazing how great Democritus truly was and far far ahead of his time, formulating similar theories as Bohr and Einstein but thousands of years before them!

https://www.famousscientists.org/democritus/
 
TommyJ
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28 Dec 2020 06:32

Can we build a model of an orbit in the future as NASA did? An orbit completely clogged by satellites after 160 years. The problem of space debris, according to scientists, is acute. So here is my second question, can a space tug like this help solve this problem?
 
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31 Dec 2020 09:43

Hi, I'm searching for something about life on hot planets, venuslike worlds with possible oceans os sulfur at high pressures. One of the worlds i'm creating is called Verena and it has temperature of 400ºC, 25 atm air and has seas of liquid, black sulfur. Life there is based on complex inorganic compounds mixed with carbon. Hydrogen is scarce and instead life use halogens such as fluorine, chlorine and bromine. I'd like to know more about carbon chemistry at such conditions, but can't find material about it. I only know that past some temperature most carbon molecules tend to break down to CO2 or CH4. Maybe this happens at Venus surface, don't know. 

I speculate that life in such hot worlds will tend to be more similar to moving crystals and machines, such as in this picture:
Image

But I found an interesting article about complex silicon molecules that are stable in sulfuric acid, so maybe silicon life is possible in worlds with sulfuric seas, such as Ikpela (with temperature of 200ºC and 10 atm air), another world of that same system as Verena. Both orbit an M0V star. I just lack the material for complex molecules at hotter worlds such as Verena. Any help?
 
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04 Jan 2021 14:49

Wat, the following was posted on another science forum, please give a good critique of this, as there are some believing this because it was posted by a "scientist with a good reputation"

https://nypost.com/2021/01/02/a-harvard ... d-in-2017/
 
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Watsisname
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04 Jan 2021 16:47

Wat, the following was posted on another science forum, please give a good critique of this
Sure, I'll give a critique. The source was the New York Post.
 
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04 Jan 2021 17:20

Wat, the following was posted on another science forum, please give a good critique of this
Sure, I'll give a critique. The source was the New York Post.
HA thats exactly what I said!  Murdoch is a  (the word I want to use would not be allowed in polite company)!
Too many of these stories are making the rounds and the fact that the scientist is trying to plug his book probably had something to do with it.
Someone else posted a video of a blue triangular object (could have been anything really)....I guess the pandemic is causing some kind of mental effect.
 
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FastFourierTransform
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05 Jan 2021 05:24

Someone else posted a video of a blue triangular object (could have been anything really)....I guess the pandemic is causing some kind of mental effect.
That is an easy one:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/blue-u ... aii.11526/
Sure, I'll give a critique. The source was the New York Post.
To make it better, the source of the video is FOX News. I like how the small clips were Loeb actually talks he never says alien, probe, extraterrestrial, intelligence and others (suggesting he wasn't so sure as the journalists).

Anyways, Avi Loeb is known in the bussiness to make wild claims and speculation. He is a scientist indeed, but there is no peer reviewed publication from him where those ideas are expressed as facts. The most optimistic of his papers always states that it is pure speculation and it does it as to justify a possible model in case those speculative ideas were true. As it seems he also likes a lot to appear on camera. But yeah, he's a scientists, but that is unimportant, the important thing is to know what he says and on which grounds. In science we don't really care about credentials (even if they usually are a good indicator of research quality compared to the facebook antivaxx mom). In the end is all a matter of the true arguments and the actual evidence.

Also I would notice that this is not "new news" as the NYP and others are trying to make it appear. The hypothesis that Oumuamua might have been a thin solar sail was proposed by Loeb in a 2018 article. Why this is this been told as news now? Because Loeb has written a book recently. The book is obviusly non-peer reviewed and is not a scientific article at all, it is just him speculating. The majority of quotes in the interview are extracted from the book, not from his 2018 paper.

Also I have to notice that Loeb's 2018 paper says that "We explore the possibility that the excess acceleration results from solar radiation pressure". This does not translate to "We think that solar pressure is responsible for Oumuamua's acceleration", as the believers and the journalist would like, but translates to "The debate around the anomalous acceleration of Oumuamua is not settled, we want to explore what are the physical constraints imposed on the object in case the anomaly could be accounted by solar radiation". You see, the conclusion is not that the solar radiation explains the anomaly in motion, but it is the assumption. Their conclusion is that IF AND ONLY IF solar radiation was the cause, then Oumuamua would be a very very strange object (which most probably means that the assumption is totally wrong, not that aliens are responsible). If people are so interested in the topic why they don't bother to read the actual scientific article? There he also states: "The observations are not sufficiently sensitive to provide a resolvedimage of Oumuamua, and one can only speculate on its possible geometry and nature." He is quite optimistic indeed but he didin't said that he have discovered aliens nor he believe Oumuamua is an alien ship. The worst thing he says is that "a more exotic scenario is that Oumuamuamay be a fully operational probe". Throughout the paper the speculative nature of the research is made clear.

Another importat thing to know is what the scientific community response has been since that two-year old paper. In 2019 a paper showed that Oumuamua's behaviour can be naturally explained by the YORP effect on a dust agreggate of porous nature (which is a kind of object that is predicted by cometary formation models in protoplanetary disks). Another possibility that Loeb didn't care to analyse is that Oumuamua could have quite an ordinary shape if we consider that the surface have different optical properties (that are observed in the Solar System by the way), just like was rigurously explained in a 2020 paper. Another 2020 paper showed that the effect could be due to out-gassing (like a comet) but of molecular hydrogen instead of water, CO and CO2 (which weren't detected), that alone could explain many properties of Oumuamua and some of the anomalous acceleration. Loeb willingfully ignores this in his new book apparently, and goes on to spaculate about aliens, but even worse, the journalists make a very very broad oversimplification of his work to enhance the folklore.
 
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05 Jan 2021 07:18

Sure, it could be an alien probe.  But imagine a lonely large boulder in a field far from mountains or bedrock.  How did it get there?  Good evidence for the existence of giants who could have left it there?  Absolutely, unless you happen to ask a glaciologist.
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06 Jan 2021 02:33

So all this commotion was to build publicity for a book....that's what I thought but still sad to see coming from a scientist.  Despite of his glamorization of a natural object, I still think that this object having been in our solar system was pretty exciting and I wish we had had a chance to send a probe there to intercept it, it could've given us a better view into what the early solar system was like.
 
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10 Apr 2021 20:26

The universe's cosmological structure seems to resemble that of the human brain.

Could the universe then conceivably be a brain for some much higher being?
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FastFourierTransform
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11 Apr 2021 04:34


Could the universe then conceivably be a brain for some much higher being?
That's a cool idea, but the speed of light limit would make any transmission between the computational elements of this brain so slow that not even a single though could be made. Brains need to be compact, that's almost a physical restriction. Also brains can't be closed systems (like the universe is). They need to exchange matter and energy with an "outside". That's also a physical constraint since the laws of thermodynamics have to be obeyed. There's also the problem of how a brain like that arise in the first place? Our brains are the result of evolution by natural selection and needed a crazy amount of time to appear on Earth, how a universe sized brain could be made? What natual process or mechanism would reach this if the universe has weakly interacting structures in any reasonable time-frames?
 
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11 Apr 2021 09:20


Could the universe then conceivably be a brain for some much higher being?
That's a cool idea, but the speed of light limit would make any transmission between the computational elements of this brain so slow that not even a single though could be made. Brains need to be compact, that's almost a physical restriction. Also brains can't be closed systems (like the universe is). They need to exchange matter and energy with an "outside". That's also a physical constraint since the laws of thermodynamics have to be obeyed. There's also the problem of how a brain like that arise in the first place? Our brains are the result of evolution by natural selection and needed a crazy amount of time to appear on Earth, how a universe sized brain could be made? What natual process or mechanism would reach this if the universe has weakly interacting structures in any reasonable time-frames?
More likely that the universe exists inside a black hole inside a larger superverse, as Poplawski conjectures.  It elegantly unites relativity and quantum mechanics.  I also like Smolin's cosmic natural selection theorem.
 
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Watsisname
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11 Apr 2021 19:01

The universe's cosmological structure seems to resemble that of the human brain.
FFT does a nice job explaining the problems of the cosmic web structure acting as a brain, so I like to focus on the idea of them appearing similar. Sometimes very different processes leads to structures that resemble one another, but otherwise bear no relation in behavior or function. Spiral galaxies may remind a lot of whirlpools, for instance. But whirlpools involve water being sucked down toward a drain. So are galaxies slowly draining down into their centers? Thankfully, no. :) (One might ask if their central black holes could act like the drain, and they do, but only for the material that is extremely close to them within an accretion disk. The rest of the galaxy is in orbital motion without any dissipative force and thus isn't being "sucked in".)

The cosmic web looks similar to the structure of neurons, which is an interesting case where the gravitational collapse of a fluid happens to produce similar structure as that which optimizes the connections within a brain. But as FFT says there is no meaningful signal processing happening along these filaments of the cosmic web that could be construed as thoughts. Light is very slow, and a more serious problem is unlike in brains, changes in one supercluster don't significantly influence other superclusters, especially ones very far away. Brains involve rapid and organized communication and feedback between distant parts of itself, and these features are lacking in the universe.
 
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PlutonianEmpire
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11 Apr 2021 22:38

Very interesting Answers! TY!
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