Oh. So it's the cthulu theory.

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Astronomer here! The funny thing I’ve discussed with my colleagues is you don’t really find many astronomers scared about the universe and things in it. Which makes sense- it’s probably somewhat self-selecting that you don’t go into a profession where you have to think regularly about things that scare you.

That said, I do have one colleague who once confessed to us that he freaked out for awhile after a lecture on the multiverse- what scared him was he spent all this time learning physics for our universe and thinking we know some things to be constant… but that would all be wrong and worthless in an infinite number of universes if there’s a multiverse! Personally, I thought that was endearing- this universe doesn’t phase him, but the concept of other ones was too much. :)

Mind, doesn’t mean I am not afraid of things- I have a serious fear of dying, because I love living and exploring the universe and hate to think that will end. It’s also the only problem I can think of where I can’t work towards a solution, so that is likely part of it.

The fact that we can see into the depths of the past by observing ancient light. What is this witchcraft?

I have always considered the jets of matter that are accelerated from the poles of supermassive black holes to be pretty damn scary. Particles in those streams approach the speed of light and stretch for many thousands of light years, they must absolutely decimate anything that is unlucky enough to be in their path

Lots and lots of metal workers, welders, and other types of fabricators. The folks that build and maintain a lot of the infrastructure at the launch sites. Many are now retiring, and I don’t think those jobs require college degrees let alone math skills.

But there is a finite amount of smallness before things get to be as small as it is possible to be. I watched a documentary on infinity and it did I’m whether infinity is large or small, but I also watched a documentary on the theory that we are all just existing inside a simulation and that claimed that we have discovered the finite amount of smallness that makes up everything, essentially our “pixels” and that it just simply doesn’t get any smaller then that. So the conclusion I have drawn is that things get much infinitely bigger than they can get finitely smaller.

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and the craziest part is how massive you are to not only your cells, but the proteins within them and the amino acids which make them up and the atoms which make them up and the subatomic particles which comprise those. The scale of matter is terrifying.

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Humankind.

Worst part is, they're on the same dust ball we're on

I dunno man there are some things that are pretty frikkin small…

Well, there are much worse ways to go!

“Piss or ice cube” is a fun game to play with your puppy… until you start getting further from the fridge. It’s similar to “stick or poo”.

This is the one for me. And what scares me is that I can never find a general consensus on how bad it would affect us. I’ve heard people confidently say we would be fucked back to the pre-electricity days for years until we rebuilt the entire electric grid. And I’ve heard people confidently say “we would be without power for like a week.”

And the fact that I can’t find any concrete consensus on the matter makes me think we aren’t prepared enough for the next Carrington event. It’ll happen again, that’s a certainty. But we don’t know when.

EDIT: Well, bad news. I looked up the most recent consensus on the matter. If it happened today it would most likely lead to a years long power outage costing trillions of dollars to repair and all satellites would be toast and we would be in the Stone Age for a few years or more. Well, I wish I don’t look into that for the first time in awhile lol. Now my irrational (but justified) fear of one happening is back online.

Also, the National Academy of Sciences said that the odds of having another Carrington Event happen before 2029 is 1.9 percent….so, a one in 50 chance. But that’s just for the next 6 years…not a fan of those odds. Would be better if they said 1/1000 chance.

Astronomer here! The GRB one is a bit misleading- dozens and dozens of them are pointed at us each year, they’re just so far away that it doesn’t matter. If they weren’t pointed at us we would never see them.

As for how close one has to be for it to matter, it has to be a few thousand light years or so (I think 6-8,000). We know this area very well when it comes to the census of big enough stars about to go supernova, and there just aren’t really any that pose a threat of exploding soon. The one potential exception, Eta Carinae, has its poles not pointed at Earth, and a GRB is a very beamed object just a few degrees wide, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

For further context, a galaxy our size has a GRB maybe once every million years or so, and even THEN it has to be close enough/ perfectly aligned. They’re just not that common!

>There is a way to know, we exist.

That is not proof that it has happened again, or happened before. I'm a firm believer that life does exist on other planets somewhere in the universe, but without knowing exactly what is required for life to form, the likelihood of abiogenesis, the likelihood that life would form.

Using Drake's equation you could get results as low as 1 advanced civilization per 1 quadrillion galaxies, implying we are likely alone, to as high as millions of civilizations in the Milky Way alone.

Just because something has happened does not mean it's likely to ever happen again. If I won the lottery, it would not prove that I was likely to do so again let alone that I definitively would.

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>there are millions of species on a single planet

As life on Earth evolved from common beginnings, this does not prove likelihood of intelligence arising (or even life arising.) If anything, it demonstrates how rare the evolution of highly intelligent life is. It took millions of tries for evolution to produce a single highly intelligent lifeform capable of communicating over vast distances and transiting off it's host planet.

Good point, they wouldnt have gone to all that trouble with makeup if they were here for dirty work

I think it would be even scarier. One with makeup is probably here to help us.

Astronomer here! The universe isn’t expanding into anything. I think the reason a lot of people have trouble with this is a lot of analogies rely on a smaller 3D object expanding (like raisin bread in an oven that is baking, and the galaxies are like raisins in the loaf going away from each other- true but gives the wrong impression as a whole).

Instead, I think it’s easier to grasp if you imagine a number line: 1, 2, 3, …, infinity. Now let’s double the numbers in it: 2, 4, 6, …, infinity. You have made the values in your number line twice as big, but it still has the same number of numbers! That is what the expansion of the universe is like- not expanding into anything, just the thing itself is growing.

Hope that helps!

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di-hydrogen "very neutral compound" monoxide go brr

I dropped out in the 10th grade. I'm an engineer. It all depends on how bad you want it.

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