Recent content by contrarian

But it is only "real" to the observer. If you are traveling at the speed the observer is watching, you do not see either time dilation or length contraction, and since you are the real object, that is what matters, not what the observer sees. "The item itself does not contract in its own...

I should have related it to the interpretations you seem to be making. You noted that : It is literally the first creature which could be the last common ancestor of all animals I currently intuitively believe to be conscious. Again, sentience and consciousness are not equivalent. To...

That is a very broad definition of a conscious organism. At any rate, it is not accepted by many biologists that consciousness and sentience are equivalent. They are not. But please continue with your hashing is out with jhixon. (Intuition (aka gut feeling) is not a profound approach to science.)

Do I understand correctly that you are suggesting that Ikaria wariootia is LUCAS?

It could not have. It must have arisen from a slightly less complex species, as the one before that arose, until you get back to the most primitive proto-bilaterian species just prior to the appearance of some form of consciousness. Some who have studied this believe we are talking about an...

This mass gain is due to its acceleration and is relativistic, I am reading. How do you know it shrinks and gets smaller? Entropically that makes sense, since the increase in mass represents an increase in energy - order within the proton, one supposes.

Here are some more thoughts about this issue. How many other things in the cosmos aren't supposed to be there, or aren't supposed to happen that way, but they are there and they do happen that way? The earliest observable galaxy is now estimated at 290 mys after the BB, and it almost certainly...

I believe he made a mistake in the text to his OP, meaning to write a "big planet is orbiting a small star", as noted in the title. And it probably relates to this : https://www.space.com/astronomy/exoplanets/a-tiny-star-gave-birth-to-a-giant-exoplanet-but-no-one-knows-how

And this is also why we see such conclusions about why something "should not exist", or something like this or that "should not happen", when they do exist or happen. Such comments need to include a disclaimer, like "theoretically this planet should not exist." There seems to be more of these...

The CCCP did beat NASA to the moon with Luna-9*, a robotic craft than soft-landed on 3 February 1966. Curiously, that did not seem to get as much attention as Sputnik, but it sure got the attention of NASA. They retaliated by landing the first humans on the moon, beating the CCCP in that...

It depends on your gravitational field strength, at the very least.

We also had the best rocket scientists, captured after WWII (Wernher von Braun, et al.). The primary reason the Soviets beat us into space was because we were working on ICBMs during the 1950s to annihilate them.

Just for clarity, escape velocity is not the same as going into orbit. Orbital velocity requires about 17,500 mph for LEO. Escape velocity is the speed required to get beyond the pull of earth's gravity, and is about 25,000 mph ...

The expansion of the universe is also supported by the high abundance of light elements. That they vastly outnumber larger elements indicates a starting point for all elements. https://w.astro.berkeley.edu/~mwhite/darkmatter/bbn.html

Absolute brightness, which can vary depending on gas and dust in the host galaxy, can impact the distance measurement due to attenuation of the SN light. Similar issues for line-of-sight attenuation may also be involved. Clearly distance measurements are not a simple determination based solely...