Xyph

You'd still have to use fuel to fly against the rotation of the Earth as well, since you wouldn't just lose all that momentum as soon as you left the atmosphere.

It wouldn't be useful as energy if it remained as matter.

The Wiki page on "Star Lifting" has some details about removing material from the star, but it's mainly the parts from the popular definition that I've bolded that interest me. What would constitute an "unstable" star, and how could it be stabilized? Is there any way to prolong the lifetime of a star beyond star lifting? What sort of "envelope material" could be mixed with the core? Surely any technique to significantly prolong or reduce the lifetime of a star would alter it's brightness - am I correct?

The point is to survive and evolve, both individually and as a species. We are, ultimately, just another function of the universe and just as much a natural phenomenon as planets and stars, after all, and the function of biological life is to survive and evolve - which makes that the point of our existence.

Apparently, black holes are 100% efficient matter-to-energy converters, in which case it wouldn't matter what you used. We're probably quite far from that at the moment, though.

A robot dinosaur wouldn't be nearly as good - it wouldn't feel real. I know it's not strictly real anyway, but if it was a well engineered biological dinosaur it would be far closer to reality than a robot, and could at least be said to be, hopefully, as close to a dinosaur as we can get. And although I confess to being somewhat more bothered about the entertainment value than the scientific value, surely the act of engineering a dinosaur would have some scientific merit? True, you wouldn't be able to find out anything new by studying it's genetics, but a variety of hypotheses concerning the specifics of dinosaur biology could be tested by simply implementing them and seeing how well it works in practice. I would think it'd take quite a few "prototype dinosaurs" to get to the "finished version" anyway, and there would be scientific value in that, wouldn't there?

This is interesting. Would these universes have the same physical laws as their parent universes? Will the life of the black hole dictate the duration of their Big Bang, or is this universe going to have a white hole continuously spewing matter into it's space?

But as long as it was engineered to possess all the properties of dinosaurs that we can infer from what remains of them, it would be good enough, I think.

So black holes are actually wormholes to other universes?

There are electrons in the sun. Plasma contains electrons.

Because matter cannot travel at or beyond lightspeed. Why would it, anyway?

It's not being pulled into the black hole faster than the speed of light. Matter can be accelerated to quite phenomenal speeds, sometimes close to the speed of light, prior to entering the black hole, but it's not going at light speed or any faster.

That seems a bit like saying that we shouldn't be able to tell how massive black holes are because the effects of the mass of the black hole can be observed outside the event horizon. The event horizon wouldn't apply to gravity, since gravity isn't affected by gravity, so there's no reason why gravity couldn't momentarily leak out a bit. We still can't actually see, visually, what's going on inside the event horizon, we can just infer the existence of a mass beyond it, which we could do anyway, since more massive black holes have larger event horizons.

No' date=' that's correct. I don't know what has the bigger influence, although it's probably the moon, by far, but the sun is also having an effect on the Earth's rotation. Given enough time, anything will become tidally locked to what it's orbiting (same side always facing it), although for the Earth to become tidally locked to the sun would take far longer than the sun has to live. Eventually, the Earth would even become tidally locked to the moon, but once again, the solar system isn't going to last long enough for this to happen. Again, it's because of tidal locking, which will occur eventually in any orbital system, as the gravitational pull of each orbiting body slows the rotation of the other. Pluto and Charon have had long enough to become tidally locked to each other, as have Mercury and the sun, as above. Extrasolar epistellar jovians are almost exclusively tidally locked to their star, as far as I'm aware, and there's been at least one example of a star tidally locked to it's planet. Any two orbiting bodies will eventually become tidally locked to each other, given enough time.

I think most problems with depression probably arise from the fact that society at the moment likes to - for the most part, it seems to me - treat death as an uncomfortable inconvenience best ignored, rather than a fact of life, which results in some being unable to deal with the realisation that it will come. I don't think some religions are doing too much to help the matter, either, since the advent of science has allowed existence to come under more direct scrutiny, and some can be left with a feeling of hopelessness in the absence of religious comfort in the same way that some are left with hopelessness in the absence of the reassurance of society. I'm no psychologist, though, so I dunno, I could be wrong.

We like living because it's evolutionarily advantageous to like living, just as it is to accompany such with acceptance of death.

If there are more than 2 types of discrete properties to represent, it'll just take more code to represent it. Binary could still be used for this. Yeah, the result isn't going to be the real world, but I still see no reason why, theoretically, it couldn't be a perfectly accurate representation of it, when the right equipment is used to read the binary. Although, chances are, by the time such a thing could be done even for an incredibly small part of reality, there'd be less clumsy ways to do it than binary.

Dyson shells, ringworlds, orbitals, and the like - obviously these structures would all require materials of incredible tensile strength (less so with orbitals, perhaps), close to the strong nuclear force, etc., but could such a material ever be made? Nanotech seems to be coming up with materials with tensile strengths far above naturally occuring materials, so what are the chances something could be created with a strength close to that required by megastructures?

I've read that strange matter (or quark matter, or the degenerate matter supposedly found at the center of neutron stars) could potentially be stable beyond the conditions in which it was formed, unlike neutronium, which is only maintained by intense gravity. So, I'm wondering, how likely is this? I've also heard that it could have "cannibalistic" properties, in that it would potentially convert all normal matter it came into contact with into more strange matter. How likely is this? Is there even any way to tell? Out of interest, how dense would strange matter be (obviously very, but numerically)? How quickly would it be able to cannibalise ordinary matter? Could things be built out of it, or would it remain spherical?

Oh yeah, haha, sorry, I forgot about that other star. A full rotation of the galaxy takes about 225 million years, as far as I remember.

The stars aren't that far away. It's very hard to see anything billions of light years away with the naked eye. I'm not sure of the specific limits of what can be seen and what can't, but it takes only four years for light from the nearest star to reach us, in which time it wouldn't have moved very much at all. Stars on the other side of the galaxy would have around 80 millenia to move around, which might be time for some significant changes, but nowhere near what would change in billions of years.

The stars will have moved slightly since the light you see began it's journey towards us, so no, they won't be in the exact same position. I think they generally move very slowly, though, so what you can see might not be too far off.

As technology and knowledge of the workings of DNA improves, is it at all likely that parts of the missing code that can't be extrapolated from living relatives could be substituted with "written" approximates? Using whatever knowledge can be gleaned from the incomplete reconstruction, and, of course, what can be roughly worked out even from fossils, maybe?

The one that is spinning has artificial gravity on the inside surface. You can tell it is spinning because it has artificial gravity, and the other one doesn't.

Yeah. I see no reason why not. If everything is truly discrete at some level, then even binary represented only by approximate voltages should be good enough. It would only be a representation, obviously, but theoretically it could still be a 100% accurate one.