The online racing simulator
#51 - CSU1
Quote from tristancliffe :No it doesn't. A lot of countries use . where we use ,, so 1.000.000 is a million. If you are going to be part of the internet culture you'll have to learn things like this

GGGGGoddamn it, I've faild once again at being a smartass
Quote from Gentlefoot :A bit like not knowing if the fridge light goes off when we shut the door lol

Ah but I can confirm that it does! How do I know? I got in a fridge and shut the door I had a very trustworthy friend outside to open it for me.
Also, you are assuming we never find a way of observing something without using photons

A more important question for me is, why should we care what the world will be like in 1,000,000 years time?
I too have answered the fridge light question, only I was confident of being able to open it from the inside myself, so didn't require a friend.

I've attempted the same thing with boot lights in cars, but did require a friend for that one.

I'm hoping next year to answer the 'if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise' question. Not sure quite how yet, but suggestions would be nice. As a warm up I'm going to answer the (slightly related) question of 'do bears shit in woods', one I'm confident of being able to answer definitively.
Quote from tristancliffe :I too have answered the fridge light question, only I was confident of being able to open it from the inside myself, so didn't require a friend.

I've attempted the same thing with boot lights in cars, but did require a friend for that one.

I'm hoping next year to answer the 'if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise' question. Not sure quite how yet, but suggestions would be nice. As a warm up I'm going to answer the (slightly related) question of 'do bears shit in woods', one I'm confident of being able to answer definitively.

You sir, are a learned man!

Quote from Gentlefoot :i.e. they are so dense that not even light can escape their gravitational pull, we can never prove their existence because of the uncertainty principle.

Outside of the event horizon is very different though. Around and on the edge of this things can become exceedingly bumpy, causing matter to appear to eject along the axis of the black hole itself. By monitoring this, does it not imply that blackholes, or something that behaves similarly to a blackhole, exists?
Quote from tristancliffe :I too have answered the fridge light question, only I was confident of being able to open it from the inside myself, so didn't require a friend.

I've attempted the same thing with boot lights in cars, but did require a friend for that one.

I'm hoping next year to answer the 'if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise' question. Not sure quite how yet, but suggestions would be nice. As a warm up I'm going to answer the (slightly related) question of 'do bears shit in woods', one I'm confident of being able to answer definitively.

Good work that man! My cousin in the US reliably informs me that next summer he is going to answer the age old question 'how much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?' some kind of training scheme is involved apparently.
Quote from Gentlefoot :To answer that question I think we need to know whether the universe is expanding or contracting, and the rate of the expansion/contraction.

whatever it is its not enough to be of any significance in a mere million years

Quote from Gentlefoot :Usually in Mathematics, if you come up with the answer Infinity, it means you've made a mistake somewhere.

im quoting one of my tutors here
"4000 is infinite"
#57 - JJ72
I think, we will have S3.
Quote from mantis9 :Good work that man! My cousin in the US reliably informs me that next summer he is going to answer the age old question 'how much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?' some kind of training scheme is involved apparently.

A very important question that, so I look forward to hearing the result. I'm sticking with 23, but I'm not going to hold myself to a particular unit.
About how life ends...

After billions of years Sun expands to become red giant and swallows the inner planets. Maybe Earth too, but even if not at least it would make things pretty hot here melting and burning most of the stuff (Venus phenomenon in a grander scale). In the death Sun will become white dwarf. Little larger stars become neutron stars (c. 11-50 solar masses) and even more massive black holes (>50 solar masses).

Sun has about half of it's 10 billion years estimated life time left (as G2V class star). Larger stars are brighter but live shorter life and dying in more violent way. For example a small M class cool dwarf star could have 1 trillion years life time. So in this universum has never such star died yet. But a hot O class star can have less than 3 million years life time. One of the reasons scientists do not look for intelligent life around such stars (they are too hot anyway and some of them would radiate all life with X-rays).

It is not proved (I think) that every galaxy core has a black hole. Mostly because there are far too many to inspect and we cannot see them all. It is just an assumption that at least the larger ones have. It is not even easy to see well into a core of a galaxy (even Milky way).

There is dark matter which accumulates in the movement of the galaxies. This is the explanation to the fact that all the visible matter couldn't spin the stars so fast around a galaxy core. Then there is that dark energy which speeds up the expansion of the space. That is, the expansion is not slowing down or not that it would be even constant - it is getting faster. So there is really no evidence that space would ever collapse back in a 'big crunch' or such.

So after trillions and trillions years all stars die out, becoming white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes. Those (except the black holes) still radiate the energy from the hot remaining core, but eventually they will cool down and blend into the blackness of the space. There are some theories that black holes radiate some energy out so they might slowly 'evaporize' too like the all the neutrons and protons (which do have a very long life time - estimated >3e32a) which by evaporizing remove the died star cores. Eventually space becomes just a vast cold, lightless and empty space.

So a pretty nasty future? Hopefully humans, if they still live after so long time, have found a way into a parallel universum (there are theories about multiple parallel universums). The bad thing is that Scawen might need to recode part of LFS as that universum might have different physics.

That's how I understand it. But in 1 million years Earth should be fine as long as humans haven't destroyed it (by turning it into a Venus like environment or nuclear winter), we are not struck by a comet, sucked by a loose black hole or conquered by aliens. Actually in space or even geographically 1 million years is not so long.
Some evidence of a black hole (or something similar):
Attached images
Cosmic Searchlight_resize.jpg
I don't think any 'real' scientists deny existence of black holes. It is mathematically/physically understandable and working concept (Einstein's theory of relativity). And so scientists knew it before they saw any of them. Usually the scientific discussion is already on the nature of the black holes (like do you loose information what they swallow).

Because black hole sucks everything including light, it cannot be seen directly (well it is just a black circle). But you can 'see' it indirectly in few ways...

1) A star (in binary systems) is orbiting it. It can be calculated from this how much mass the BH has.
2) Something is being sucked into it. This is usually like hot gass which while being heated generates EM radiation not just in visible length.
3) Gravitational lensing. Mass makes space to curve and light follows this too. So large mass makes light bend. BH and even less massive objects like Sun bend light from background objects (other stars).

...maybe something else too I cannot remember right now... All of these have been spotted and verified.

If it is hard to understand the concept, you might try to think it just as an object which has escape velocity over the speed of light (=c) (the surface where it is exactly c is called event horizon and no information can be get from inside, where ev>c).

Also the objects closest to density of BHs, the neutron stars, bend light a lot. Because we know that more massive stars: a) exists b) in death collapse into something more dense which has escape velocity>c. ...then do you need more? It is not even the hardest concept. Try understand that universum is not infinite, but is still infinite (where does it expand? from what did it originate? etc), but you still do not deny it's existence, right?

It is thought that there are lot of 'loose' black holes wondering around. If they are not feeding, and they have no visible companions, the only way to see them is gravitational lensing. It took some long time and careful observation of space, before they spotted it. Some large black blob moved over some background stars and the light from them is bended. This gave me real 'goose pimples' when I saw the clip. It was really convinsing - this could mean that our solar system might meet such a thing too and we could do nothing. Maybe we wouldn't even notice it until the orbits of outer planets started to go funny. An 'interesting' way to die
Quote from tristancliffe :
No, it's not obvious that there is something of huge mass. Obviously there is huge mass towards the middle, but nothing to say it's a single entity. Why can't it be lots of stars orbiting each other very very fast.

Well, science usually works like this:
1. You have an experiment, and you can't explain the result.
2. You make up a new theory (trial&error) that covers your result (without contradicting previous experiments)
3. You make predictions. (Your theory will have other consequences).
4. Until you find an experiment which contradicts your theory, it stands.

Now, back to topic, black holes are not a theory in this process, because there is, as you pointed out, indeed no direct need to have them. There is no experiment where the only solution would be a black hole. And more importantly, the thought that there might be black holes, is older than the thought they might sit in the center of each galaxy.
They are a consequence of Einstein's General Relativity. Thus if there were no Black Holes, Einstein'd be proven wrong.
OTOH his theory made pretty good predictions so far (like the already mentioned bending of light). So it seems likely that black holes exist, and it'd make sense if they sat in the center of galaxies. (If we assume they exist, they'll surely form clusters around them.) That's why people search them there and find many hints that they might really be there. There are still some missing parts though, see Hawking radiation for example..

So long story short: While your bag of stars could maybe lead to the same galaxy appearance (you'd have to explain why we can't see them, although we can see all other stars), it'd be so much nicer if it was a black hole
lol I knew if I said the fridge thing, that would happen.
Quote from TheDeppchef :
So long story short: While your bag of stars could maybe lead to the same galaxy appearance (you'd have to explain why we can't see them, although we can see all other stars), it'd be so much nicer if it was a black hole

In some cases it really cannot be anything else in our knowledge of physics. For example our galaxy centre. It is measured that some stars in the galaxy core have so much speed and their orbit around the center is so small that only what works is a giant black hole. Like the stars' speed give us the mass of the object and of course it has to fit inside the orbit and conclusion is that it cannot be anything else.

Opposite examples are. In some cases there can be bit discussion about if it could be possibly a neutron star. Like the radio source Cygnus-X, which is a binary system (BH orbited by another star). The orbit of the giant star around the BH takes like 5-6 days. The star is visible and it's orbit around an invisble point is seen/measured. It gives that the BH should be like 6-20 solar masses. Together that the companion star usually looses part of its gas into the black hole causing gas heating up and mass ejection along the BH poles.
Thank you alot for sharing your deep knowledge guys.Really thank you.


FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG