Black hole swallows earth

[thejakeman]

Originally Posted by vid

I read this in the New York Times. Honestly, I don't think the risk, no matter how improbable, of humanity and our entire world imploding is worth ANY new discovery. I mean, it would kinda be taking a step backwards: a really, really, really, REALLY big step.

but you would be dead. so why care?



furthermore, dark mater and dark energy seem to me to be the scientific equivalent to pantheism, making unproven claims of mysterious invisible particles causing the force of gravity

well you're right at the moment dark energy and dark matter are about as proven as space ghosts from the fifth dimension, thats why they are building that huge Accelerator. In hopes of finding empirical evidence. Right know it's like the theory of the big bang before they had any proof of it. The scientists just hope to find proof. If they don't then maybe they will think of something else but, something has to be keeping the galaxies together and causing them to exponentially speed away from each other.

A lot of scientists stick to the motto of Sherlock Holmes. When you have eliminated the impossible all that remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

[Bareon]

Uh.. we could be in a "node of space" or so I guess you might call it....
If the big bang did happen.. what's to say that our physics in this region are completely dictated by that event.. wait.. let me back up a bit first..

It could be that the universe is expanding because of a series of "collapse nodes" and "expansion nodes" that are spaced throughout the universe like a checkerboard in three dimensions... and since we cannot see up to the edge of our own square?.. or whatever you'd call it we think that the universe is repelling itself, I mean we could find a computational equation that says that empty space is repelling empty space.. but..what does that mean exactly? that there is no such thing as truly empty space? just "empty" as we perceive it?

Ah back to topic... So therefore the universe could be a series of "meetings and partings" where time is 'reset' so to speak because space is reset..... So "dark matter" if such a thing really exists could be the remnants of the old matter that were "refreshed" into the matter we have today..

[Prof_Sai]

Dark energy and dark matter are not the names of anything anyone thinks is out there, so much as giving a name to our own lack of understanding. It is sort of like "Planet X" was in the 1930s to 1970s. Dark matter was variously thought to be subatomic particles, or jupiter sized planets floating in deep space, or black holes. Proposals for dark energy are equally varied.

The problem with space nodes is that you wouldn't need to see the edge - you would be able to tell that some parts of space were expanding faster then others. If you weren't in the exact center of a node, there would be obvious asymmetry in the expansion. In fact, the universe looks exceedingly uniform. Also, we have seen back in space/time to the era where the first stars formed, and confirmed that there was nothing else behind that but a dark opaque space as predicted by the big bang.

[lolzor]

About 99.9% of scientists agree that this is just as safe as anything else we do. In fact, the people who think this will create a black hole are the same people who thought that a similar project completed around 2000 in California would do the same thing. We already decided those fears hokus pokus and built the damn thing. Now we are just moving on to a slightly larger scale project that still produces much less focused energy than natural processes that occur in space (which don't produce black holes).

[Prophet Tenebrae]

Some people pissed their pants that when they did the first atmospheric test of the a-bomb... there are always going to be doom sayers, whose sole consolation is that perhaps, someday something will blow up the world and kill everyone, at which point they may very briefly enjoy the fact they were right - eventually.

But really, I'm of the impression that no one here is remotely qualified to do anything but read wiki articles and regurgitate them (at best) - myself included.

[Bareon]

Originally Posted by Prof_Sai

The problem with space nodes is that you wouldn't need to see the edge - you would be able to tell that some parts of space were expanding faster then others. If you weren't in the exact center of a node, there would be obvious asymmetry in the expansion. In fact, the universe looks exceedingly uniform.

Possibly... if it was on a smaller scale than what I am talking about, its kind of like how people believed the world was flat...but not also to the same degree...Uhmm...If you were the size of an ant, one might say that the world was mostly flat with various hills placed on top.. all because of perspective.. uhm.. wait.. bad example..

I mean.. what I'm trying to say is, if we are in the path someplace of the radius of the big bang, the plane of expansion could be so large that our tools today have no way of differentiating if some parts are expanding 1/200000 of a molecule faster or slower.. because the larger it is, the harder it is to tell what is going on about oneself.. and we'd need to... I dunno.. maybe see 0.00005% of the area around us to actually tell if there is a curve or not... and hence since we cannot tell how far we can actually measure we don't know if it could be or not.

So you can say the expansion of the universe is even, but we don't have enough samples from further out to tell for sure, also, we'd need several thousand years worth of galaxy positions to relate them all to each other (to mathematically compare the slow motions of the galaxies to their relative positions in order to determine speed), and so far we only have star charts that might be that old...

Originally Posted by Prof_Sai

Also, we have seen back in space/time to the era where the first stars formed, and confirmed that there was nothing else behind that but a dark opaque space as predicted by the big bang.

Time and space are intricately interlocked, where there is no space there is no time... so if space collapsed into the node that created the big bang, it would be like a RAM drive suddenly powered down, and no data can be derived from it further back than the loss of power..

(space includes the area about planets that is an absolute vaccum... and since we are 3-D beings the true concept of there being "no space" is quite hard... maybe even impossible for us to imagine, but with math there might be a way to piece it together.)

Its okay to disagree, thats what Science is about, disagreeing to the point of a mutual discovery that cannot be disproved by either side.. I know my theory has tons of flaws in it also. Hahaha.

[TrumanGrace]

Originally Posted by Prof_Sai

Grace, not everyone who has a different opinion is "gullible".

Odd, I don't recall saying that people who preferred one product over another were gullible.

I remember saying that people who are duped into thinking that the iPhone was doing something other phones haven't (simply by calling the mp3 player an "iPod" and a browser an "internet communications device") were gullible, which in no way in indicative of a person's opinions of a product. In easier words, a person believing that marketing buzzwords are something different than what they really are being gullible, the people who think that there is a difference between an iPod and an MP3 player.

Oh, wait, you're pretending I'm saying something I'm not so you can have something to argue against. No way I can stop you. Build your straw man and make up your points to the fictional comments you're responding to then. I'm not going to stop you

[whackadoodle1]

The expansion of the universe, however, will not continue indefinitely. There is more than enough evidence from dopplar scans that the outward movement of all matter is, in fact, slowing down. We also know the initial expansion of the universe was EXTRAORDINARILY FAST! What happens when that expansion stops its momentum? Gravity will inevitably act to pull everything back toward one another, and in an inconceivably vast amount of time from now, everything will crush together and be compacted into a speck of matter no larger than the head of a pin, just as it was in the beginning.

The argument can then be made that perhaps this is how the universe has always acted. Explosion, Expansion, Apex, Retraction, Collapsion, and back around to explosion again. But if this is the way of things? Are we the first universe ever to exist? Or are we just the latest in a long line of hundreds? For that matter, how did this cycle begin in the first place? Where did this matter come from? What is the impetus for causing the big bang in the first place?

These are the REAL questions to ponder. There are still many things science cannot answer. Many things we still have to take on faith, or just not think about at all. Eternity is a concept our finitely structured human minds can never grasp. To us there must always be a beginning and an end, but by definition, eternity doesn't work that way. Eternity is, in effect, a circle. A circle has no beginning or end. It simply IS. So by this theory, we can infer that if the universe is, itself, eternal, then there has to be some kind of eternal force driving its life cycles. The laws of physics didn't just write themselves, nor did we invent them. Where did those laws come from? Who, or what wrote them?

Science will never, never, never, never, never, never, NEVER answer these questions definitively. Which is why science will never truly defeat the notion of a God or some higher power definitively.

And now that I have thrown gasoline on the fire, go ahead and discuss whilst I watch in amusement.

[Sailordolly]

Originally Posted by whackadoodle1

The expansion of the universe, however, will not continue indefinitely. There is more than enough evidence from doppler scans that the outward movement of all matter is, in fact, slowing down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy

According to redshift measurements made about ten years ago, the expansion of the universe has been SPEEDING UP for about the last five billion years. It is this increase in speed which led to the notion of the existence of some kind of large-scale diffuse anti-gravity which we currently call Dark Energy.

Originally Posted by Always the Quiet One

1) We are a lost colony of the colonizing species. Perhaps there was a great galactic empire that has since broken down, maybe our ancestors were exiled and given one use ships that dissolved and seeped into the earth as crude oil.

They'd have to have brought all of the ancestors of modern animals and plants with them as well, and these animals and plants would have had to replace ALL of the previously existing species, because all of the life that we can currently identify is clearly genetically related to us and to each other--unless you want to invoke the idea that by some incredible coincidence our extra-terrestrial ancestors were 99% genetically and biochemically identical to the life that was already here.

Originally Posted by Prof_Sai

I like the shuffle because you can use it without looking at it, or even taking it out of your pocket. You won't realize how nice this is until you've used one for a while.

I prefer my Nano. My problem with the Shuffle is that you have to remember in your head what tracks you have put on it, and what order they are in, since there is no display to tell you what's on it. Your only alternative to remembering is to scan through all of the tracks one by one, if you care about finding a specific track.

[TF-Viewer]

*sigh*

Black holes don't even work that way... if you could make one in a particle accelerator it would've happened years ago.

A star collapsing into itself makes a black hole, because it actually has the mass to pull that off. All it's mass, all it's gravity focused into a point the size of a pin needle. Speeding up tiny particles isn't going to give them the same mass as a star, the theory that when matter moves at the speed of light it's mass becomes infinite is just bullshit poppycock nonsense. Science can't even agree on whether light is waves or particles to begin with. If it's particles then we already have particulate matter moving at the speed of light all around us at all times (the idea of solar sails is dependent on light having mass as well). Artificially accelerating more particles to that speed or close to it isn't going to destroy the world. All the talk about how something man created could end all of existence is just mankind being arrogant and full of it self.

[Prophet Tenebrae]

Actually, it's not that science can't agree - it's that light is a particle that sometimes acts like a wave and the speeding up of matter isn't anything to do with the blackholes... black holes are really about density. You're smacking particles together in a very specific way in a collider - I'm fairly sure the chances of it happening in nature are small to say the least.

And yes, while there is a school of thought that says Earth may have been seeded from space (by tumblin' asteroids etc.) for it to have been done by an advanced civilisation would be in total contrast to pretty much all material evidence that exists... although, it's still more in line with facts than Creationism.