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Space.. it's big!

Jumping forth.. myself and my daughter love to sit down every so often and watch space videos on YouTube. We especially love the SpaceX videos and NASA ISS videos.

Have any of you watched the duel landings of the SpaceX Heavy Rockets? I first saw this clip on a Netflix special and just could not believe what I was watching.. truly ground breaking:


My daughter also loves watching the fails, the bigger the bang the better.. :D


What Elon Musk is achieved here is amazing, I try to explain how much of a leap forward this is compared to the old WW2 tech NASA had been using for years, but it is hard when your talking to a 6 yo. :p
 
Hadron said:
Quite literally true. We perceive only a fraction of our environment (a limited range of chemicals we can smell or taste, a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum we can see through very imperfect optical instruments, etc), and from this we build a model of the world. What we see, hear, touch etc isn't reality, but a model derived from the partial, limited sensory information we have available, interpreted by our brains.
Click to expand...

We're constantly hampered by the technological limits of our time. I'd reckon for as long as we've been asking questions there have been ones that have been unanswerable at the current time, yet later generations take the answer for granted.

In that sense the best time for an academic to exist is always tomorrow.
 
I'm not a flat earth believer by any means, but I don't believe the Sun. It defies human logic.

No matter how many explanations, OK there's probably just the one, I cannot ever get my head around it.

It is a bit like the Emperor's New Clothes. It's there I'm told, so work from that. I cannot.

Without the Sun, for our local Solar system, nothings doing anything.

I'm not religious, but some entity is toying with us. :mad:
 
What is it about the Sun that you don't believe?

It's big, at least compared to human scales, but so what? A better way of looking at it is probably that we are small. But it doesn't require anything terribly complicated to explain it: Newtonian gravity, 19th century thermodynamics, some basic nuclear physics and a little undergraduate quantum mechanics. Like anything, if you want to understand it in sufficient detail you will find complications, but compared to even an amoeba it's really quite a simple object.

Or are you thinking of the ways in which small changes to the laws of physics, such as the relative strengths of the fundamental forces, would render the solar system or the universe uninhabitable? That's a legitimate question, and I personally find attempts to dismiss it by postulating a multitude of different universes with different laws of physics, conveniently unobservable and hence unfalsifiable, glib and shallow. But the Sun is just one small element of that.
 
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Actually it is: as it uses up its fuel the outer envelope expands.

But it's nothing to worry about just yet. It will be a problem in about 5 billion years' time though...
 
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