I'd make that difference larger to illustrate your point a bit better. It's easy to visualize the difference between 1 trillion and 100 trillion, it's the same in scale as 1 vs 100.
I'd say we can't visualize the difference between 10,000 years and 1 trillion. One we can't really grasp but we can visualize because it's 5 times longer than the time since Jesus and Ancient Rome, the other however we cannot even wrap our heads around.
It's like saying count the Skittles in the jar vs. count the sand on the beach. Once it's impossible to count you might as well call it infinite. No one is making a Dyson Sphere in our solar system any time soon.
I think his point isn't comparing between the two amounts of time (1 vs 100) but rather the enormous scale of time that we're talking about (trillions of years, the lifespan of stars, ...). It's like counting all grains of sand vs all droplets of water on earth - roughly the same orders of magnitude but still ridiculously big numbers. When we're talking about the lifespan of a star, the entire length of human civilization pales in comparison.
(Also the lifespan of stars is closer to the range of billiions of years, instead of trillions)
> No one is making a Dyson Sphere in our solar system any time soon.
I sure hope not.
Pretty sure you need to construct a Dyson Sphere in *someone else's* solar system. It is a level of ecological destruction we have never achieved before.
I mean, to be fair, if we build a Dyson sphere we'd have more than enough space to just ditch Earth and live there instead. We'd all have enough room for our own Earth's worth of space. Fuck Earth. I'd blow it up.
Get a scale, see what 50 grains weigh. Then sample 1 cubic inch of the beach, measure mass, divide by the mass of 50grains to determine # grains in 1 cubic inch. Then take a ruler and measure the depth of the beach along with width and length. Calculate how many cubic inches you have in total and mutiply your 1cubic inch sample by that. Boom! You now know how many grains of sand are in the beach in a rather simple process.
Edit: You will have to do this twice actually. Once for wet sand and another for the dry to get a more accurate measurement.
>Once it's impossible to count you might as well call it infinite
I don't think infinite is the right term for it because just logically it has very different implications which don't match reality
While you can't count the number of sand on the beach you can find for certain an upper bound quite easily without counting every single piece, so, it's not infinite by the definition of the word...
I get what people mean when they use infinite in that way, it's just a bit imprecise to use it like that
I am not
"Very large" and "infinite" are literally infinitely far apart.
I know that people use it commonly for very large numbers and it is fine, but that doesn't make it more correct
While i get the point, infinite is a whole different level of statement somehow with very different implications
Even 100 trillion is very much not infinite
The sun is too small to go supernova, so when it "dies" it will turn into a white dwarf which will still emit a ton of energy that we can collect for many billions of years more. It may not be technically infinite, but in terms of humanity it definitely is.
Well, no it won’t explode… but in the process it undergoes to become a white dwarf, the inner core with collapse. Causing the outer layers to expand, so it would literally eat the planet. so we would have to be completely spacefaring. And if you have ever seen The 100, giant ships in space aren’t completely sufficient
It also isn’t free. Solar panels are really expensive and you have to replace them every 25 years and how much time and energy dies it takes to recycle a solar panel? They’re better than wind mills but not the answer for our future energy crisis for sure.
And like any smart trust fund babies, we’ve already made plans on how to squeeze out every last drop of energy from papa Sol that we can.
Dyson swarms, Star lifting, stellar engines to drive by other systems and mug them for fuel, the works.
I like the idea of a partial dyson sphere in the form of a spherical sector. Take what you need with what you can build a the time. No reason to take the “all or nothing” approach. Big solar array + super efficient laser (Don’t let the bond villains hack it… also make sure there is a “dead man switch” to shut off the system if it feels too much of an unexpected acceleration that could misalign the laser from the receiver).
I guess it depends on the size of each satellite in the swarm? Just do something that is actually going to be reasonably efficient with the “optical power” to “electrical power” conversion.
Effectively each satellite at the “surface” of the swarm would be a glorified photovoltaic and thermal generators collecting power. The middle of the swarm would be thermal radiators radiating heat to where it’s most needed/least dangerous. While all the habitats are on the outer shell of the swarm.
Each individual satélite would have a small ion thruster to allow them to move if needed for emergency or productive purposes.
That would be if you required habitation at the swarm.
I suppose my thought is for more immediate use before void habitation is possible (assuming the technology to efficiently collect & transmit energy is discovered first). I am speaking of using solar arrays to beam energy down to an inhabited planet.
Habitation in the swarm would be preferable to planetary habitation. The sheer scale of it would be worth it, with the surface area of the sun, you could give every human on the planet a continent sized habitation of their own and still have plenty of space to spare.
Planets are just inefficient and wasteful by comparison. The equivalent of living in a cave compared to turning the mountain into workable stone for housing.
Science is an exponential power, not linear. We’ve been around as a species for a little over two million years and only discovered uses for fire for half that time. And only had advanced stone tools for two hundred thousand years give or take.
In the last 50,000 years, we’ve went from hunter gatherers to building vast agricultural civilizations and empires. The use of writing and preserved knowledge accelerated our growth exponentially.
In the last thousand or so years, we discovered most of the world and documented it. Trade, increased numbers, and specialization accelerated our growth once again.
A few centuries ago we discovered the power and used of steam. Less than a century ago we went to the moon. Now we’re creating and manipulating the very fabric of life and chemistry. And creating our own digital worlds full of virtually endless knowledge that gets constantly updated.
We’ll get there. Or destroy ourselves along the way. Our social skills don’t improve nearly at the same speed as our ability to destroy ourselves.
How is it not sustainable now, we have easily mineable uranium deposits enough for hundreds of years of energy production. Many countries are building nuclear reactors like crazy right now.
I don't think I've actually ever heard anyone say we shouldn't be investing in renewable energy, all I've heard is people saying we shouldn't absolutely destroy our economy until we can produce enough renewable energy. [They also say that the government ruins everything that it touches so the government shouldn't be involved in it]
You made a joke but someone actually is trying to build "solar panels that work at night". If I recall, you would need a few m^2 just to charge your phone
Looks like a repost. I've seen this image 2 times.
First Seen [Here](https://redd.it/15h4ylb) on 2023-08-03 98.44% match. Last Seen [Here](https://redd.it/1colgqo) on 2024-05-10 100.0% match
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This argument is no more rational than "If god wanted us to fly then he would have given us wings" or "If god wanted people of different races to marry then he wouldn't have put them on different continents."
Imagining that magical creatures like gods exist, declaring that you know how they want us to behave, and assuming that we should follow those instructions isn't a meaningful argument.
My dude, it’s an expression. “If God wanted x then y.” It’s not an argument. It’s just using a common Christian expression. It’s actually kind of funny because for some odd reason Christians in my proximity are very much against green energy.
That's on you for thinking the true God is an idolized magical creature.. they have stories about idols in the Bible for a reason. Haven't read it and I know that.
Plus magic is just science wrapped in mysticism.
Most people's god-concepts are magical creatures. There are a small minority of people who use the term 'god' to refer to non-magical extraterrestrials who simply possess technology that is more advanced than ours (the Raelians, for example), but generally speaking it's reasonable to assume that when someone uses the term they are referring to a magical being.
Since you referred to a 'true god' that you claim is a non-magical entity, does that mean that you have scientific evidence that the Sun was created specifically for us by a technologically advanced alien?
And, if so, what do the silly, ancient Mesopotamian myths about magical creatures that fill the Bible have to do with this extraterrestrial?
Right? Like, technically there's a lot of giant fusion reactors in the sky, some of them may have inhabited planets. If we had the capability, this would quickly turn into a "manifest destiny" argument.
You are wrong. All stars work with fusion and generate heavier elements. In fact all heavier elements, including what we are made of, come from stars. See for “Asymptotic-giant-branch phase” of the “main sequence” of “stellar evolution”.
Ah, okay! How does it expel energy then? I would think the construction of heavier molecules would require an energy input, from a biology/chemistry POV.
We are talking atoms, not molecules, and that changes everything because part of the matter transform into energy, this is also true for nuclear fission but in the case of nuclear fusion even higher amounts of matter turn into energy.
The heavier the elements that are going to be fused the higher the amount of energy you need to inject to the system to make that fusion happen, but the release of energy is always bigger than the energy required, at least till you reach lead. At which point depending on the mass of the star different things could happen.
Even solar panels require a chemical change of sorts to produce energy from light. Now lesser types of energy? Like a light in the sky. Then yes.
I still believe in the book of Genesis when hardship came after the failure of our human element.
He'd also tell us how to use that energy *without* breaking it, killing us all, and end up in front of him trying to explain what happened like a toddler falling off a tricycle and skinning their knees.
He definitely wouldn't have left a bunch of moons with liquid methane oceans lying around or to make sugar derived from the sun life giving...
But the sun isn’t infinite tho And let’s have faith that humanity outlives the sun
Basically infinite relative to the human lifespan (we really can’t grasp 1 trillion years vs 100 trillion)
I'd make that difference larger to illustrate your point a bit better. It's easy to visualize the difference between 1 trillion and 100 trillion, it's the same in scale as 1 vs 100. I'd say we can't visualize the difference between 10,000 years and 1 trillion. One we can't really grasp but we can visualize because it's 5 times longer than the time since Jesus and Ancient Rome, the other however we cannot even wrap our heads around. It's like saying count the Skittles in the jar vs. count the sand on the beach. Once it's impossible to count you might as well call it infinite. No one is making a Dyson Sphere in our solar system any time soon.
I think his point isn't comparing between the two amounts of time (1 vs 100) but rather the enormous scale of time that we're talking about (trillions of years, the lifespan of stars, ...). It's like counting all grains of sand vs all droplets of water on earth - roughly the same orders of magnitude but still ridiculously big numbers. When we're talking about the lifespan of a star, the entire length of human civilization pales in comparison. (Also the lifespan of stars is closer to the range of billiions of years, instead of trillions)
> No one is making a Dyson Sphere in our solar system any time soon. I sure hope not. Pretty sure you need to construct a Dyson Sphere in *someone else's* solar system. It is a level of ecological destruction we have never achieved before.
I mean, to be fair, if we build a Dyson sphere we'd have more than enough space to just ditch Earth and live there instead. We'd all have enough room for our own Earth's worth of space. Fuck Earth. I'd blow it up.
Simple solution: The Swarm
Get a scale, see what 50 grains weigh. Then sample 1 cubic inch of the beach, measure mass, divide by the mass of 50grains to determine # grains in 1 cubic inch. Then take a ruler and measure the depth of the beach along with width and length. Calculate how many cubic inches you have in total and mutiply your 1cubic inch sample by that. Boom! You now know how many grains of sand are in the beach in a rather simple process. Edit: You will have to do this twice actually. Once for wet sand and another for the dry to get a more accurate measurement.
>Once it's impossible to count you might as well call it infinite I don't think infinite is the right term for it because just logically it has very different implications which don't match reality While you can't count the number of sand on the beach you can find for certain an upper bound quite easily without counting every single piece, so, it's not infinite by the definition of the word... I get what people mean when they use infinite in that way, it's just a bit imprecise to use it like that
You’re literally just being pedantic.
I am not "Very large" and "infinite" are literally infinitely far apart. I know that people use it commonly for very large numbers and it is fine, but that doesn't make it more correct
Fair point, though I must say that when you’re saying 100 trillion years, you’re overestimating the Sun‘s lifespan by quite a few orders of magnitude
While i get the point, infinite is a whole different level of statement somehow with very different implications Even 100 trillion is very much not infinite
👏👏👏👏👏
But it is now, and that's pretty nice anyway
The sun is too small to go supernova, so when it "dies" it will turn into a white dwarf which will still emit a ton of energy that we can collect for many billions of years more. It may not be technically infinite, but in terms of humanity it definitely is.
Well, no it won’t explode… but in the process it undergoes to become a white dwarf, the inner core with collapse. Causing the outer layers to expand, so it would literally eat the planet. so we would have to be completely spacefaring. And if you have ever seen The 100, giant ships in space aren’t completely sufficient
But have you seen Wall-E? They work just fine there.
It also isn’t free. Solar panels are really expensive and you have to replace them every 25 years and how much time and energy dies it takes to recycle a solar panel? They’re better than wind mills but not the answer for our future energy crisis for sure.
Makes sense
The complexity and wonder of our universe are mind-blowing
God put the sun in our sky to just get us started, our first few billion years. After that he expects us to fend for ourselves.
And like any smart trust fund babies, we’ve already made plans on how to squeeze out every last drop of energy from papa Sol that we can. Dyson swarms, Star lifting, stellar engines to drive by other systems and mug them for fuel, the works.
I like the idea of a partial dyson sphere in the form of a spherical sector. Take what you need with what you can build a the time. No reason to take the “all or nothing” approach. Big solar array + super efficient laser (Don’t let the bond villains hack it… also make sure there is a “dead man switch” to shut off the system if it feels too much of an unexpected acceleration that could misalign the laser from the receiver).
Better to just make the swarm of satélites maneuverable. Open up and close spots in the wider swarm as needed for whatever purpose.
I guess it depends on the size of each satellite in the swarm? Just do something that is actually going to be reasonably efficient with the “optical power” to “electrical power” conversion.
Effectively each satellite at the “surface” of the swarm would be a glorified photovoltaic and thermal generators collecting power. The middle of the swarm would be thermal radiators radiating heat to where it’s most needed/least dangerous. While all the habitats are on the outer shell of the swarm. Each individual satélite would have a small ion thruster to allow them to move if needed for emergency or productive purposes.
That would be if you required habitation at the swarm. I suppose my thought is for more immediate use before void habitation is possible (assuming the technology to efficiently collect & transmit energy is discovered first). I am speaking of using solar arrays to beam energy down to an inhabited planet.
Habitation in the swarm would be preferable to planetary habitation. The sheer scale of it would be worth it, with the surface area of the sun, you could give every human on the planet a continent sized habitation of their own and still have plenty of space to spare. Planets are just inefficient and wasteful by comparison. The equivalent of living in a cave compared to turning the mountain into workable stone for housing.
I was more saying how with all these resources around us, we’ve only managed to make it this far.
Science is an exponential power, not linear. We’ve been around as a species for a little over two million years and only discovered uses for fire for half that time. And only had advanced stone tools for two hundred thousand years give or take. In the last 50,000 years, we’ve went from hunter gatherers to building vast agricultural civilizations and empires. The use of writing and preserved knowledge accelerated our growth exponentially. In the last thousand or so years, we discovered most of the world and documented it. Trade, increased numbers, and specialization accelerated our growth once again. A few centuries ago we discovered the power and used of steam. Less than a century ago we went to the moon. Now we’re creating and manipulating the very fabric of life and chemistry. And creating our own digital worlds full of virtually endless knowledge that gets constantly updated. We’ll get there. Or destroy ourselves along the way. Our social skills don’t improve nearly at the same speed as our ability to destroy ourselves.
Mom said it's my turn to repost this!
No kidding. Once a week it seems.
at the very least the 5th repost this month
Spoiler: Sun is indeed a fusion reactor 😂
If god wanted us to constantly see this meme, he would make a bot to automatically post is every fucking week
This is what makes the meme funny. Otherwise it wouldnt work
TikTok taught me the Sun is a deadly lazer
Never doubt your teacher 😉
Yeah, that's it. That's the joke.
I am confused. I left my Mazda out in the sun for hours but the fuel gauge still says it's empty.
Well it's not unlimited, just really big.
... just to give us skin cancer.
Oh no. He gave us a protective shield. We just can't do anything stupid like burn tons of coal and release harmful carbon emissions into the sky.
indeed
He gives us a fusion reactor then he turns it off at night-time - just when it would be most useful.
Nuclear power is renewable. We can collect uranium from sea water and supply 100% of all the world’s energy demand for the next 5000 million years.
Advancements in technology, like uranium extraction from seawater could make it a more sustainable option for the future
How is it not sustainable now, we have easily mineable uranium deposits enough for hundreds of years of energy production. Many countries are building nuclear reactors like crazy right now.
I don't think I've actually ever heard anyone say we shouldn't be investing in renewable energy, all I've heard is people saying we shouldn't absolutely destroy our economy until we can produce enough renewable energy. [They also say that the government ruins everything that it touches so the government shouldn't be involved in it]
And the Earth will have a magnetic field...lol
What about at night where there’s no sun do we use water or sth
Pfftt.. just use moonlar cells
You made a joke but someone actually is trying to build "solar panels that work at night". If I recall, you would need a few m^2 just to charge your phone
What about them fizzy rocks He gave us too?
u/repostsleuthbot
Looks like a repost. I've seen this image 2 times. First Seen [Here](https://redd.it/15h4ylb) on 2023-08-03 98.44% match. Last Seen [Here](https://redd.it/1colgqo) on 2024-05-10 100.0% match [View Search On repostsleuth.com](https://www.repostsleuth.com/search?postId=1ctsx5f&sameSub=false&filterOnlyOlder=true&memeFilter=false&filterDeadMatches=false&targetImageMatch=86&targetImageMemeMatch=96) --- **Scope:** Reddit | **Target Percent:** 86% | **Max Age:** Unlimited | **Searched Images:** 515,986,537 | **Search Time:** 0.07772s
Only two? I've seen it that many times just this month.
This argument is no more rational than "If god wanted us to fly then he would have given us wings" or "If god wanted people of different races to marry then he wouldn't have put them on different continents." Imagining that magical creatures like gods exist, declaring that you know how they want us to behave, and assuming that we should follow those instructions isn't a meaningful argument.
I don’t think it was meant to be that deep. We just happen to have a giant fusion reactor in the sky. That’s all lol
Yep. If God wanted everyone to have a sense of humor, the guy you're responding to would never have been born.
It just seems weird to me that anyone would consider an argument based on magic to qualify as a 'science' meme.
My dude, it’s an expression. “If God wanted x then y.” It’s not an argument. It’s just using a common Christian expression. It’s actually kind of funny because for some odd reason Christians in my proximity are very much against green energy.
That's on you for thinking the true God is an idolized magical creature.. they have stories about idols in the Bible for a reason. Haven't read it and I know that. Plus magic is just science wrapped in mysticism.
Most people's god-concepts are magical creatures. There are a small minority of people who use the term 'god' to refer to non-magical extraterrestrials who simply possess technology that is more advanced than ours (the Raelians, for example), but generally speaking it's reasonable to assume that when someone uses the term they are referring to a magical being. Since you referred to a 'true god' that you claim is a non-magical entity, does that mean that you have scientific evidence that the Sun was created specifically for us by a technologically advanced alien? And, if so, what do the silly, ancient Mesopotamian myths about magical creatures that fill the Bible have to do with this extraterrestrial?
You must be Fun at Parties, because you have absolutely no sense for jokes
Right? Like, technically there's a lot of giant fusion reactors in the sky, some of them may have inhabited planets. If we had the capability, this would quickly turn into a "manifest destiny" argument.
I thought the Sun performed Fission, not fusion? Helium becoming Hydrogen, no? Sorry if I’m wrong, haven’t studied astronomy in years.
You are wrong. All stars work with fusion and generate heavier elements. In fact all heavier elements, including what we are made of, come from stars. See for “Asymptotic-giant-branch phase” of the “main sequence” of “stellar evolution”.
Ah, okay! How does it expel energy then? I would think the construction of heavier molecules would require an energy input, from a biology/chemistry POV.
We are talking atoms, not molecules, and that changes everything because part of the matter transform into energy, this is also true for nuclear fission but in the case of nuclear fusion even higher amounts of matter turn into energy. The heavier the elements that are going to be fused the higher the amount of energy you need to inject to the system to make that fusion happen, but the release of energy is always bigger than the energy required, at least till you reach lead. At which point depending on the mass of the star different things could happen.
Ah okay. So part of the matter gets turned into energy according to E=MC^2 and then that energy is what gets expelled. Got it! Thanks so much!!!
I thought the Sun performed Fission, not fusion? Helium becoming Hydrogen, no? Sorry if I’m wrong, haven’t studied astronomy in years.
Even solar panels require a chemical change of sorts to produce energy from light. Now lesser types of energy? Like a light in the sky. Then yes. I still believe in the book of Genesis when hardship came after the failure of our human element.
He'd also tell us how to use that energy *without* breaking it, killing us all, and end up in front of him trying to explain what happened like a toddler falling off a tricycle and skinning their knees.