[Q&A+] 3I/ATLAS Comet Special | Q&A 355
How can we realistically tell if 3I/ATLAS is an alien spaceship or not? Can we turn an interstellar comet into a transmitter? Would the government suppress information about a dangerous asteroid? And in Q&A+, why aren't there more asteroids outside the solar system?
Watch the video here (with no ads) or on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3yed1iFQ9Aw
Comments (6)
Great job! I absolutely love my country and anyone and everyone who is interested in the sciences, healthcare professional especially. New Brunswick welcomes you as do most Canadians thank you merci
Our family have visited all provinces that are bordering USA. Some places we’ve been for 3 times. Cannot think about better place to drive on road trip to escape our south heat. Canada is a great place to travel.
Hey Fraser, great plug for Canada at the end of this show. As a fellow Canadian from Québec, it was grest hearing you describe very accurately the provinces. Great country we live in.
Not Canadian but love Canada. Spent years in Quebec and Ontario & met a multitude of interesting/diverse people. Good government (both sides) too. I don’t blame you for being proud.
That last question had me wondering about how exactly a comet differs from an asteroid. A comet is a "dirty snowball that develops a tail/coma from outgassing as it gets closer to a star. But how different is that from a rubble pile asteroid? I guess the main difference is the orbit. Comets have highly elliptical orbits that take them close enough to the sun to cause the outgassing that creates their tail/coma and takes them to the outer solar system or further. If a comet had a more circular orbit close enough to the sun to outgas its volatiles, it would almost certainly have exhausted them long before hairless apes began studying the night sky. So, how many of the asteroids in this system would qualify as comets if they only had a different orbit? Of course, whatever orbit an icy-asteroid/comet might have, in the mid to outer system, each one is a gas station for future explorers. That made me think of another question. Solar power will be less useful in the outer system, which will likely require outposts in the outer system to use nuclear reactors or fusion. In case useful fusion remains 20 years away, how common is uranium in this system's asteroids?
A von Neumann probe, would never be able to send information in a "time that matters" for the civilization that sends it. When that happens, because we are capable of doing that, the self replicating machines quold be like galaxy virus, they would exhaust planetary resources just to advance to the next system. Without any knowledge to be "shared" in the end.