Black hole swallows earth

[thejakeman]

Originally Posted by Prof_Sai

The speed of light is factored into the colonization time. (it was Actually 5 million years.)

http://stuff.mit.edu/people/etekle/Articles/aliens.html

Assuming a typical colony spacing of 10 light-years, a ship speed of 10 percent that of light, and a period of 400 years between the foundation of a colony and its sending out colonies of its own, the colonization wave front will expand at an average speed of 0.02 light-year a year. As the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes no more than about five million years to colonize it completely. Though a long time in human terms, this is only 0.05 percent of the age of the galaxy.

Edit:


You've got to be kidding! Look how few science fiction stories came close to predicting the Cell Phone or the Internet. Captain Kirk's ship holds vital data on a library of floppy disks, and needs a human to plug it into the reader! The nature of new ideas is that often no one foresees them until they are all over the place. No one thought that there was anything wrong with smart phones until the iPhone hit the market, and now everything else is trying to be a clone. In 1898 someone wanted to close the patent office, because everything that could be invented had been!

cell phone: a portable phone. wow. so revolutionary. it combines two existing technology (radio and phone) to make one. not that original. internet is a collection of computers accessing documents from each other. not that original. iphone: fancy phone with touch sensitive screen. touch sensitive screens have been around for over 30 YEARS. only now are that handy enough to fit in a phone. not the original. really, you can't name anything made in the past 5-10 years that isn't a composite of older ideas.

[thejakeman]

as Jake T Katt said, we have gone from simple tool using to a high tech civ in a short amount of time. we grew exponentially as our population grew. but unfortunatly we didn't also evolve exponentially.

[Prophet Tenebrae]

Evolution is - if anything - a process that slows as organisms become more advanced. While some bacteria can go through a dozen generations in a matter of hours we're up to... what 30ish years in the developed world for a generation? Not to speak of all the counter evolutionary stuff we do - and not killing cripples/the Welsh really irritates me for at least 7 distinct reasons.

Anyways, technological progress is somewhat inherently exponential - not things like your iPhone which are fancy but of little practical use in terms of advancing the frontiers of science - computer X means you can design computer Y which is more powerful a lot more easily, computer Y lets you make discovery Z and so on.

Of course, one might argue that with genetic engineering you can change all that and so on.

As to "no one" predicting the future... Haven't both Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke been credited with predicting it? Much like Jules Vernes predicted the submarine and so on... And if you've seen "How William Shatner changed the world", you'll see him give credit to Star Trek for leading to the production of mobile phones etc.

[genderhazard]

The Star Trek Communicator as precusor to the cellphone is somewhat revisionist. If you asked people in the 60's to describe a communicator without using the word communicator they would say It was a small walkie talkie.

On the black hole note the guy who coined the phrase black hole died the other day.

[Sailordolly]

Originally Posted by darksin229

Yeah but think of whats will going on when it happens. because of the hole is growing so slowly the people will running mad if they know they all will die no chance to do anithing to it just wait for it.

All accounts claim that the black hole will be as small as an atom, if not smaller. Now, how long would it take to squeeze the entire mass of the Earth through an atom-sized event horizon, even with the material pushing through at light speed? Thousands of years at least. We will have plenty of time to develop the technology to escape from Earth if need be.

[TrunKated]

Originally Posted by Prof_Sai

The speed of light is factored into the colonization time. (it was Actually 5 million years.)

http://stuff.mit.edu/people/etekle/Articles/aliens.html

Assuming a typical colony spacing of 10 light-years, a ship speed of 10 percent that of light, and a period of 400 years between the foundation of a colony and its sending out colonies of its own, the colonization wave front will expand at an average speed of 0.02 light-year a year. As the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes no more than about five million years to colonize it completely. Though a long time in human terms, this is only 0.05 percent of the age of the galaxy.

Edit:


You've got to be kidding! Look how few science fiction stories came close to predicting the Cell Phone or the Internet. Captain Kirk's ship holds vital data on a library of floppy disks, and needs a human to plug it into the reader! The nature of new ideas is that often no one foresees them until they are all over the place. No one thought that there was anything wrong with smart phones until the iPhone hit the market, and now everything else is trying to be a clone. In 1898 someone wanted to close the patent office, because everything that could be invented had been!

Um....

The original Star Trek had them all walking around with cell phones. Communicators, they were called. For the 60s, hey were effing close to cell phones.





And they didn't always use floppy disks, they used something closer to flash drives with no moving parts. In fact, they didn't even have to be plugged in.

I haven't found a clip or pic of it, yet, but I remember Bones taking a solid state memory block and simply setting it into a slot and using it to save or bring up information.

In the 60s.

Actually, Science fiction actually inspired a lot of our current tech.

That being said, I doubt we will ever go faster than the speed of light or be able to matter transport.

[Prof_Sai]

It would start small, but as it consumes matter, it would grow rapidly - and the surrounding matter would enter at the speed of light so even when it is small it would eat fast. Technically, all black holes are point sized - it is the event horizon that grows.

New ideas:
The automobile did not change the world until the electric starter was invented. Before that, you could kill yourself trying to crank up the engine, so only tech nerds used one.

Multitouch is the smart phone equivalent of the starter - this is what got the big patents. The idea that you would pinch and rotate objects to make them smaller or bigger is new. Distinguishing between intentional and accidental touches is new. It's not that the iPhone was the first to do these things, but it was the first to make them practical for ordinary people to use.

I'd also count the Wii controller and podcasting as new. What about the web browser? LED screens? Vibration as computer feedback?

It can take 30 years for new ideas to be implemented in a way that can change the world. Just because you aren't aware of those new ideas yet doesn't mean they aren't out there.

[Prof_Sai]

Star Trek:

You could call those little plastic squares floppies or flash drives, but the point is how the technology changed people's lives.

When Bones uses his medical authority to get Kirk to stop obsessing, he writes a one word prescription on a square "eat!" and has nurse Chapel give it to him. Basically they use the squares as paper. You would sometimes see people with a cart full of squares, sticking them into a computer one after the other. There was no network on the Enterprise.

They had communicators, but only when they go down to the planet. When they were walking around the ship, they talked via panels on the wall. (The implication being that communicators were too expensive for everyone on the ship to have one.) If you were too far from a panel, you were stuck - send out a search party.

People on the ship had to go through O'hura to set up communications with people on the planet.

(I'm only talking classic trek here, because by the time Next-gen came out, there were real cell phones floating around.)

[Prophet Tenebrae]

Yeah - DAMN, whoever wanted to use a mobile phone before the iPhone! You're talking bollocks - yes, the iPhone had a bunch of fancy gimmicks but it's hardly as if smartphones were either languishing in the doldroms beforehand or waiting for the iPhone to break into the popular market, the convergence of multiple technologies on phones has been in the offing for years - to say that somehow the iPhone interface is going to do more than merely change the nature of the interface seems rather counter to both the past and the likely future. Yes, everyone is trying to copy it but you're trying to put it on a pedestal.

As far as things go, the web is probably the best example in modern technology of something facilitating large scale usage of an existing product... the Internet had been used by people for sometime - Academics mostly... as I recall Arthur C. Clarke was bouncing e-mails around before much of this board was even a glint in the milkman's eye - but that was all thrashed out in the ol' command line etc. Actually, it would probably be more apt to say that it was the rise of Windows and the web... because Windows meant that you no longer needed to have an instant recall of a few dozen DOS commands.

Ah, I miss DOS.

And unless I'm misinterpreting - you're quoting the adage about technology requiring 30 years to fully integrate into society.

Also - black holes... it would be a micro black hole that was created. The chances of creating one are astronomical, the chances of it being stable even more so... and of course, if Stephen Hawking is right, it would just evaporate due to Hawking radiation... If not... well.

[TrumanGrace]

Originally Posted by Jake T Catt

But then about point 4.

Maybe they got one whiff of what we're like, and they want nothing to do with us. (like in a Red Dwarf conversation: "Ewwww, that planet's got humans! yuck!")

Maybe we don't have the faster than light signal receiving "radios" so we can't hear them talking to us

Maybe they have an agreement not to communicate with species that haven't developed faster than light travel, a common sci fi idea (like in Star Trek)

Or, useful planets are so few and far between that contact between galatic races becomes almost impossible no matter how good the techonology, because it turns out the speed of light really is the limit, and it takes a galaxy's worth of energy to achieve it.

But wait, there's more! Maybe species evolved enough become pure energy, or go to a different dimension.

Someone's been watching too much Stargate. Oh wait it was me.

Or maybe they were already here, found the planet unfit for life, and left before the first human even existed?

Humans have existed for such a short period of time in relation to th ehistory of even the planet, much less the universe. Whose to say they hadn't already come and left when it was still a big ball of molten rock?

[TrunKated]

Originally Posted by Prof_Sai

Star Trek:

You could call those little plastic squares floppies or flash drives, but the point is how the technology changed people's lives.

When Bones uses his medical authority to get Kirk to stop obsessing, he writes a one word prescription on a square "eat!" and has nurse Chapel give it to him. Basically they use the squares as paper. You would sometimes see people with a cart full of squares, sticking them into a computer one after the other. There was no network on the Enterprise.

They had communicators, but only when they go down to the planet. When they were walking around the ship, they talked via panels on the wall. (The implication being that communicators were too expensive for everyone on the ship to have one.) If you were too far from a panel, you were stuck - send out a search party.

People on the ship had to go through O'hura to set up communications with people on the planet.

(I'm only talking classic trek here, because by the time Next-gen came out, there were real cell phones floating around.)

Yes, you are talking classic star trek. And despite your attempts to downplay it they were very forward thinking in much of their technology. In later treks, both classic and otherwise they explored many different technologies that were way ahead of our time.

Scifi isn't fortune telling, but it has predicted a lot of things. Maybe not always specifically, but to one degree or another.'


By the way, there are a bunch of studies showing that cell phones are very bad for your health. I am minimizing my use of them.

Also, all Apple products are over-priced.

[kooh]

We have had giant meteorite messages, all of which have been proven wrong, but i dont think a black hole is gonna suck us anytime soon.