Astronomy and space exploration

Since Thunderf00t received a fair bit of criticism over his busted video he did a deep dive on the subject

 

Got round to watching the presentation, I'll summarise:
Life, life, LIFE, we're not saying its life, life LIFE LIFE, we don't even know what produces phosphiene on earth, life, life LIFE, life

 

Eh its almost certainly a decomposition of the phosphane thats already in the atmosphere.

Vastly more likely that happens at a higher rate than they calculated than that life evolved on early Venus, migrated into the stratosphere & is somehow still around post runaway greenhouse 'sheltering' in strong sulphuric acid clouds.

 

Oh also 2020 nearly threw out possibly the worst thing yet the other day: a near Kessler Syndrome event.

An old Russian spy sat & a Chinese booster apparently passed within about 2m of each other, with combined mass of a couple of tons the debris would have caused ~25% increase in chances of orbital collisions.


Speaking of collisions & Thunderf00t, these 2 vids have been really blowing my mind lately


Not the idiocy of the flat earthers or the amazing volume of ranting Thunderf00t is capable of but the demonstration of gas with the bouncy balls

I more or less knew it before but I didn't really grok it so to speak
Previously I more or less visualised gas atoms as having a ~uniform repulsion from each other so a gas would expand/compress trying to equalise the gaps between atoms -> in a theoretical perfectly isolated volume the atoms would find an equilibrium & stop moving other than vibration due to temperature.

But realising that the atoms are bouncing around constantly at such high velocities, off each other & other matter gaining/losing kinetic energy with each collision depending on relative temperature, that the vertical height of the atmosphere is because gas atom trajectories are being affected by gravity at 9.8m/s^2 like any big lump of matter & gas pressure is the force of lots of little kinetic collisions against the solid surface has caused a big mental rework in my understanding of lots of stuff, mainly several phenomena like heating of compressed gas & the speed of smells suddenly makes much more sense

 

Professor Dave did the most comprehensive debunking of the flat earth I have watched


What makes me laugh about flat earthers is they believe Antarctica and the south pole don't exist despite the fact you can go there on holiday, theres even a company that organises a marathon at the south pole

 

Well d´uh! Everyone knows it's fake company, you can't run marathon on the icewall called "south pole" because the guards will kill anyone getting near! You know who you never hear about? Those who booked vacations there, because they're all dead now!

 

They just send those fitness nuts out in a blizzard and have them jog over the edge.

 

The flat-earth model also puts various locations much farther away from each other than a globe would. The conspiracies assert that direct plane flights between such cities are impossible due to limited range. The airline flights between these airports are therefore categorized as being fake entries on the schedule, or the planes are routinely being sent out to fly in a circle and pretend to come back, or the passengers and pilots are in on the plot/don't exist/crashed in ocean on a weekly basis.

 

I still want to see a reality show where Flat Earthers race around the world. They have to pilot everything themselves.

 

"Across the world in 80 movements of the glowing sky light"

 

If you want something to really blow your mind electrons in an atom can switch between orbitals up to 200 billion times per second

 

It's all kicking off on astro-ph:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09761

 

Peer review, peer review, peer review! (To the tune of fight, fight, fight). Anoraks in the playground at dawn. It's the only way to be sure.

 

In other space news, OSIRIS-REx successfully grabbed a sample from the asteroid Benu yesterday. No pics of it doing it's grabby action as of yet though.

 

42 year old data seems to confirm phosphine in Venus atmosphere.