Posted on 07/28/2016 7:54:07 AM PDT by LibWhacker
If there is one every hundred years (on average) in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, that’s a million every hundred million years, easily enough to suppress evolution and keep organisms at the single-cell level.
What does gravity have to do with it? The gravity hasn’t changed (much... there is some conversion of matter to energy, but at this distance, it’s probably like a moth passing a-Centauri.
>>>I think the problem with that assumption is that because it takes light 649 years to travel from Betelgeuse to Earth, we are actually seeing that star as it was 649 years ago. For all we know, it could have already gone supernova and we wouldn’t know it until the light (and radiation) reached us, which could happen anytime<<<
Geez, now I’m depressed. We might as well off ourselves or Elect Hillary.
It might have gone supernova 648 years ago.
You win.
The simple biochemistry of the notion that life is inevitable is absurd. The truth is that for all the (false) claims of “scientists discover life in a bottle!” we still can only explain spontaneous production of a few of the wrong nucleotides, and some idea how a lipid layer could be formed. It’s like saying you know how fully-functioning, self-replicating robots formed because you found some traces of metal ore.
We haven’t even found a single planet anything like Earth. I was reading about a supposed “super-Earth” in the “habitable zone.” The estimated temperature on this planet was 70 degrees below zero, so if there ever was any water, it would be locked tight in ice. And it was bathed in infra-red. They explained why it may not be bombarded with deadly radiation at regular intervals, but the point is that there was almost no available visible-spectrum light for photosynthesis.
And here’s the kicker no-one talks about:
We are in the exact center and the exact oldest part of the universe. Yes, it’s a quirk of relativity that we’d have to be. But the point is that when we look 3.6 billion light years away, we’re seeing a universe that is EVEN NOW billions of years YOUNGER.
I don’t mean that’s because it took light 3.6 billion years to get here. I mean that as an effect of temporal distortion of high-speed travel, there’s been less time for stuff to happen.
Years ago, I calculated the Drake equation and estimated less than 10^1 (in other words, less than ten) worlds with intelligent life in the universe. I had badly underestimated the number of planets in a typical galaxy, but I also badly overestimated the likely habitability of life on a given planet.
It's throwing out radiation like crazy. Why shouldn't we be able to detect that radiation? It's not the size of the source that matters.
I know they can "see" the ball of gas it's emitting, but when they specifically mention the size, it does matter.
It’s been many years now since I took my last astronomy class, so it escapes me how they do it, but astronomers don’t have to directly image an object to tell (in every instance) how large it is. Very ingenious indirect methods exist that allow them to make that determination for certain objects.
Correction: I wasn’t using the Drake equation as Drake wrote it. The original Drake equation calculated intelligent life in the galaxy. What I did added terms for the number of galaxies in the universe, a number billions of times greater than the actual Drake equation.
“If there is one every hundred years (on average) in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, that’s a million every hundred million years, easily enough to suppress evolution and keep organisms at the single-cell level.”
Nah, because the average supernova would not emit enough radiation to “sterilize” an entire galaxy. I’m not sure even the largest ones imaginable could put out that much radiation, because galaxies are very large and electromagnetic radiation disperses by the inverse square law like any other radiation, so the density of the radiation drops drastically with distance from the source.
We of course have prima facie evidence of this, because we’re sitting her alive and communicating right now. So no galaxy-wide deadly supernova events could have possibly happened in the span of human history, or in the span of history of life on earth for that matter.
Even though they have to “look” through a ball of energy that is “radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns?”
"We" won't see anything unless it has already happened and that...about 600 years ago.
And, I thought Betelgeuse was in its death throes much the same as our Sun will be at the end. A white/yellow average sun that has expanded to a red giant. I'm not certain what the history of BG is.
Exactly. No one's claiming a single supernova sterilizes the entire galaxy. But a million of them could make a huge dent in life in the galaxy. And every hundred million years, another million of them have another go at it.
You are correct. However not all Radiation is light.
In a Supernova a number of nuclear reactions occur that emit things like neutrons, protons and alpha particles. These types of radiation do not travel through a vacuum at the speed of light.
Also Supernova do not happen all at once. It is a process that happens over a period of time (days).
“Exactly. No one’s claiming a single supernova sterilizes the entire galaxy”
Then what is the point of saying one happens every hundred years? It doesn’t matter how often they happen if they only affect a limited area of local space around them. There will still be thousands and thousands of star systems completely unaffected every time there is a supernova.
Plus, the same “prima facie” evidence applies even if you try to make the argument that the aggregate effect of multiple supernovas over millions of years could sterilize a galaxy. We’re still here, so we know that didn’t happen, in the entire history of life on earth.
“There is NO WAY they can see a 10-mile object from “billions of light years” away.”
Sure there is, if the object is radiating massive amounts of photons or something else we can detect. The size of the object itself is actually insignificant compared to the amount of radiation it is putting out, since it’s the radiation we detect directly.
There’s your fix to the Federal Debt and entitlement programs.
Aren’t gravitational waves involved in all these super luminous events? I can’t think of one where they are not at least suspected of being involved.
They're lunatics!☺
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