[Q&A+] Ginormous Space Interferometer, China's Mars Sample, Boring Interstellar Objects | Q&A 373
Can we just combine all the space telescopes into a giant interferometer with insane resolution? When will new interstellar objects become mundane? Which rock should China take from Mars to Earth? And in Q&A+, what's going on with Vera Rubin's data?
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Comments (10)
Is there practical ways to do interferometry in your back yard? Can you link up two telescopes via the wireless and use this for really bright objects like the planets and moons? I was asking since interferometry is for bright stuff…this sounds like it could be really cool. I assume it’s not that easy or it would be a feature for telescopes now right?
haha wanna know where the secret satellites are? Just look at the holes in the Vera Rubin data!
did you have a pre recorded video for the past I think 3 videos?
I think it's important not to blindly trust people who claim to be experts. To be clear, I believe climate change is real. However, I do not necessarily trust climate scientists. There is too much groupthink. While I believe climate change is real and a very serious problem, I believe many “experts” believe it is incumbent upon them to convince the public to support limits on fossil fuels by being alarmist in terms of both timing and severity. Take, for instance, The Inconvenient Truth that sea levels would rise by 20 feet by next year. Then there are the claims that the science is settled. That is the most unscientific thing a scientist can claim. Science is never settled, and scientists should always be prepared to incorporate new data that might conflict with their theories. Newtonian Physics was settled for 300 years until Einstein came along. Again, climate change is real and a serious problem, but it is important to be wary of experts with an agenda. I also believe in vaccines, including for COVID-19. I completely understand that since it was a new disease, some things that disease experts believed at the start of the pandemic turned out not to be true. However, dissenting experts were censored by social media at the strong urging of the federal government. Dr. Fauci was rather emphatic that COVID-19 arose naturally and was not the result of a lab leak. However, the consensus today appears to be that the virus escaped a lab in Wuhan. We should certainly listen to people who are more knowledgeable on a subject than we are. I listen (mostly, I should eat better) to my doctors. I listened to the lawyer I hired after I injured my back in a car accident. At one point, I saw a neurosurgeon recommended by my lawyer. Unsurprisingly, he recommended surgery. However, a different neurosurgeon recommended I try more physical therapy and other less invasive treatments first. Who do you think I listened to? Ultimately, I did have surgery, but not until three years later. In conclusion, I'd like to share a quote from Robert Heinlein that I used as my high school yearbook quote. From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long: "Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it."
Two things we know: Increasing CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere is warming the planet, and for every degree celsius the atmosphere warms, it is able to hold 7% more moisture. These are not political opinions, they are scientific facts. And given that the atmosphere has warmed 1.75 degrees celsius during the Industrial Age, we can conclude that the atmosphere is holding at least 10% more moisture. We have no frame of reference for how these increases are affecting weather patterns, and computer models can only tell us so much, but the impact is increasingly obvious and accelerating. I suspect that heat waves and heavy downpours, when they occur, will trend toward more catastrophic. I'm 66 with no dependents, and I won't live long enough to see the worst of it, but my nieces and nephews are having kids of their own, and I know the world is going to be a far, FAR more unpleasant place if and when they get to be my age. At the root of the problem is uniquely human narcissism and greed and excess, which is why I'm not hopeful we'll be able to mitigate climate change before a full scale ecological collapse is underway. And that's exactly what will happen if we continue pumping carbon into the sky.
"is somebody trying to make me not trust experts, and what do they get out of that?"
Here in Europe, "experts" were used by politicians, oil companies and car manufacturers to sell people the lie that diesel was the green fuel of the future, using carbon dioxide emissions as evidence. Audi won Le Mans with two diesel powered LMP1 cars. It has been calculated that an extra half a million people each year die in the continent of Europe due to the extra pollution caused by the rise in diesel engines, purely due to "experts" and "carbon emissions" being used to sell the lie that diesel is a "green fuel". Experts and "authority" are not always to be trusted.
Politicians and Companies will always select someone whom they will claim to be an "expert" so long as that petson says what they want them to say. It is for us, the public, to use critical analysis to decide who is lying. For example, I always knew that diesel is a dirty fuel, just as I know that battery powered electric cars are a rich world solution for clean air that destroys the environment in poorer countries.
the experts that have continued to lie and manipulate studies for money and continued research grants? what i can't understand, is how such a limited understanding of the earths climate, not weather, is judged by a handful of molecules. and how much money was made off those arguments with special legislation to the tune of hundreds of billions. wouldn't it be nice if experts could be held to account with the scrutiny of science, not cancel culture and shaming for counter considerations.
CO2, methane, notified oxide, sulphur dioxide, these are molecules we understand really well, but it is the work of decades to understand how they function across our atmosphere and earth systems.