Planets in our galaxy covered

[Reply #40 on:]

Do we ever see the mine?

i forget.

[Reply #41 on:]

 

Originally posted by Nasty Pasty:
Do we ever see the mine?

i forget.

Yeah, the collapsed entrance to the mine anyway.

[Reply #42 on:]

 

Originally posted by David A:
 Yeah, the collapsed entrance to the mine anyway.

Oh, ok. thanks.

[Reply #43 on:]

"The plan is to pave over the area and get on with our lives"

Hahaha, robots have no rights.

[Reply #44 on:]

 

Originally posted by Alliteration:
Hahaha, robots have no rights.

There was an interesting thread about that about a week ago.

[Reply #45 on:]

 

Originally posted by Nasty Pasty:
 There was an interesting thread about that about a week ago.

Right here, baby.

Robots obviously do have some rights.  They can vote, for example.

[Reply #46 on:]

 

Originally posted by David A:
Robots obviously do have some rights.  They can vote, for example.

But they are destroyed when broken and are society's workhorses.

[Reply #47 on:]

 

Originally posted by Woodbot 2.0:
Bravo,Mr.David A.!   

 

Originally posted by Nasty Pasty:
 Zoidberg: "Such a man... I'd follow him to ends of the earth..."

How about a nomination, then?

[Reply #48 on:]

 

Originally posted by David A:
 How about a nomination, then?

done and done David A.
 

PS Vote for me next month. *

[Reply #49 on:]

 

Originally posted by David A:
A quick rundown of the solar system, as seen on Futurama:

The Sun: The closest we come to visiting the sun is in "The Farnsworth Parabox", when Hermes almost throws a box containing Universe 1 into the sun.  Also, job deserters are fired out of a cannon into the sun, and a television program called The Real World: The Sun is filmed there.

Mercury: Fry and Amy visit Mercury in "Put Your Head on My Shoulders".  It has one gas station.  Mercury has a breathable atmosphere in the 31st century, but it is still very hot.

Venus: Venus is never actually visited during the series, but Fry and Leela dance in a Venusian garden in her dream in "The Sting".

The Earth: Earth is seen in almost every episode.  Enough said.

The Moon: The PE crew goes to the moon in "The Series Has Landed".  Aside from the amusement park, the moon remains much the same as it is today.

Mars: The PE crew visits Mars in "Mars University" and "Where the Buggalo Roam".  Mars has been terraformed, and is home to Mars University, where Amy is a student and Professor Farnsworth teaches.  Amy's parents own the Western Hemisphere of Mars, where they have a buggalo ranch.  Mars was once inhabited by a race of native Martians, but they have since left in search of a new planet.

Jupiter: Jupiter itself is never visited during the series, but in "Put Your Head on My Shoulders" Fry, Amy, and Zoidberg visit Jupiter's moon Europa.

Saturn: Saturn is also never visited during the series, but Fry and Leela dance along its rings in the holophoner sequence in "Parasites Lost".

Uranus: Although Uranus is never seen during the series, in "A Big Ball of Garbage" we learn that its name has been changed to Urectum.

Neptune: The PE crew visits Neptune in "A Tale of Two Santas".  Santa's ice fortress is located at the North Pole of Neptune, where he opresses the local Neptunian people.  Like Mercury and Mars, Neptune has a breathable atmosphere.  Neptunians are also seen throughout the series, most notably Elzar and Heather.

Pluto: The PE crew goes to Pluto in "The Birdbot of Ice-catraz".  Pluto is home to a penguin preserve.  Pluto has a breathable atmosphere, and a climate similar to that of Antarctica.

Haley's Comet: The PE crew goes to Haley's Comet in "Crimes of the Hot" to get ice, but the comet is out of ice.

Great list. Could come in handy for future reference.

[Reply #50 on:]

Don't forget, Algore flew off to help collect cans on Jupiter as well.

[Reply #51 on:]

theres a lot more planets in our galaxy

[Reply #52 on:]

Isn't this necro posting >> Oh well (sorry if thats the wrong term). And whats the deal with the Neptunians on Neptune, they are all little people. Is it a different race of Neptunians, or is it just a coincidence that they are all really short whereupon Elzar and otehr Neptunians are regular height.

[Reply #53 on:]

They're just really shrimpy because Santa doesn't feed them. And Neptune doesn't look like it's chock full of a lot of food, either.

[Reply #54 on:]

yeah i guess thats right

[Reply #55 on:]

what about dog doo seven thats in the episode
route of all evil

[Reply #56 on:]

Unlikely it's in The Milky Way Galaxy (aka: The Galaxy of Terror) since Milky Way Galaxy is not near the edge of the Universe. At least it isn't if you use the AAAAAAA maps.

[Reply #57 on:]

Do you mean Google Universe? I think the Milky Way is at the edge

[Reply #58 on:]

"The Edge" would be about 14 billion light years from Earth/Milky Way.

[Reply #59 on:]

yeah but 14 billion light years is nothing compared to the whole universe which would take around 500 billion light years to cross from side to side.

[Reply #60 on:]

Hmmm... don't think so since the Universe is "only" about 14 billion years old. Since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light then it can only be a maximum 28 billion light years in diameter from the point of the Big Bang. However, it is infinite.

[Reply #61 on:]

sorry i got it wrong it is 156 billion light years which would mean that it would take 142 billion lightyears to get from the milky way to the far side of the universe

[Reply #62 on:]

What makes you so certain that nothing can travel faster than light?

[Reply #63 on:]

Physicists. Name something that can.

[Reply #64 on:]

All I'm saying is that it could be possible. We don't know about it yet but it could be possible. Don't say "nothing can move faster than light" but rather "light has the fastest speed we know of"

[Reply #65 on:]

Bah! Vapid sophistry couched in a mushy vocabulary! Your equivication only reveals your preconception that travel on a Universal scale can only be achieved by accelerating mass with a brute-force application of energy.

[Reply #66 on:]

   Physicists. Name something that can.

Well, a couple of 'things' that immediately spring to mind are Group Velocity and Phase Velocity. Both of which can be shown to exceed the velocity of light in a vacuum under certain circumstances.

(That's not to say that, in these cases, any information is travelling faster than the speed of light.)

Also, if you shine a sufficiently powerful and sufficiently well focussed laser at a distant object, the 'spot of light' that the laser causes to appear on the surface of the object will move if the laser is rotated. If the laser-object distance is large enough &/or the laser's rate of rotation is fast enough, the spot will be moving across the object's surface at a speed which is faster than the seed of light.

Next you'll be telling us that according to the laws of aerodynamics Bumblebee's cannot fly. 

[Reply #67 on:]

Yes. But obviously you know that light is strange stuff, behaving like a particle one moment and a wave the next. Now that it is known that gravity's effects on mass also acts at the speed of light that speed "limit" can be seen as far more fundamental than just a characteristic of only light.

In the vacuum chamber velocity experiments photon 10 is not emitted before photon 10 enters right? It's more like photon 10 bumps or influences photons 1-9 ahead in line if I remember correctly.

The laser-on-a-turntable thought experiment is fascinating. It wouldn't take too many RPMs to get the "end" of the laser beam to rotate at a faster than light speed. Although the human eye would likely just see a ring of light one has to wonder what happens to the distance between emitted photons. But here again nothing is actually moving faster than light. The photons from the laser individually move forward at light speed but have no circular velocity. The illusion of a faster than light ring itself is more like a movie or animation made up of frames, not actual movement.

If you substituted a very long stick for the laser beam you would either run out of energy to make it spin or the stick would fracture from the centrifugal force.

The only phenomenon I know of that indicates there is something beyond these type of limitations is subatomic particle spin or Spooky Action at a Distance. That's where you create a pair of subatomic particles with the same spin. Keep one and send the other across the Universe. If you change the direction of spin of the particle you kept the particle arcoss the Universe will also change to the same spin instantaneously. Very spooky indeed, binary too.

[Reply #68 on:]

sorry i got it wrong it is 156 billion light years which would mean that it would take 142 billion lightyears to get from the milky way to the far side of the universe

That's not quite right.  The observable universe can only be 14 billion lightyears across because the Big Bang was only 14 billion years ago.  The uncertainty in when the Big Bang was is a couple of billion years, so the universe couldn't possibly be bigger than about 16 billion lightyears across.  You could argue that there might be an "unobservable universe" beyond our current horizon, but it would defy the laws of physics to even know if such a thing existed.

What makes you so certain that nothing can travel faster than light?

The force required to accelerate an object is F = mass*acceleration/gamma, where gamma is 1/squareRoot(1-v^2/c^2), where v is the speed of the object, m is its mass, and c is the speed of light.  As you get closer and closer to the speed of light, that gamma term goes to infinity.  It would take an infinite force to accelerate an object to the speed of light.  You couldnt do it even if you used all of the energy in the entire universe.  You could get really really close, but you couldn't get all the way there.  And you certainly can't go faster.

That said, there are theoretical particles called 'tachyons' that might travel faster than the speed of light.  The problem is that the Schroedinger equation predicts that information cannot be sent faster than the speed of light because it would result in time travel and break the laws of conservation of energy.  This means that it would be impossible to tell the difference between a tachyon being created and one being destroyed, and you wouldn't be able to observe it while it actually exists.

Bah! Vapid sophistry couched in a mushy vocabulary! Your equivication only reveals your preconception that travel on a Universal scale can only be achieved by accelerating mass with a brute-force application of energy. 

And how would you travel across the universe without accelerating a mass?  Wormholes?  Those haven't been shown to actually be possible, and you still have the problem that you can't get somewhere faster than light without traveling back in time, which violates just about every law of physics that we have.  You could argue that our laws are wrong, but then why do they agree with experiment to such amazing precision?

centrifugal force

  Bad futz!  You should know not to use that word!

If you change the direction of spin of the particle you kept the particle arcoss the Universe will also change to the same spin instantaneously

Are you certain?  You're talking about entagled quantum states, right?  I thought that if you changed one state the other would change automatically, but only after enough time has passed for a light signal to pass from one object to the other.

[Reply #69 on:]

No, it's instantaneous regardless of distance. It's spooky.

[Reply #70 on:]

that is spooky.  I'll have to look that up.  I dont see how that wouldnt violate causality.

[Reply #71 on:]

yes speed of light is the fastest we know of but...
imagine you were on a space ship capable of doing the speed of light.
time would stop.
thats what happens when light speeds.

All the distance covered by the light in the early universe gets increased by the expansion of the universe

say 14 billion years the universe has existed

the big bang happened in the very CENTER of the known universe
28 billion light years
BUT

All the pieces add up to 78 billion-light-years. The light has not traveled that far, but the starting point of a photon reaching us today after travelling for 13.7 billion years is now 78 billion light-years away

That would be the radius of the universe, and twice that -- 156 billion light-years -- is the diameter. That's based on a view going 90 percent of the way back in time, so it might be slightly larger.

[Reply #72 on:]

   All the pieces add up to 78 billion-light-years.

Pieces of what? Which pieces?

[Reply #73 on:]

If you've ever wondered how big the universe is, you're not alone. Astronomers have long pondered this, too, and they've had a hard time figuring it out. Now an estimate has been made, and its a whopper.

The universe is at least 156 billion light-years wide.

In the new study, researchers examined primordial radiation imprinted on the cosmos. Among their conclusions is that it is less likely that there is some crazy cosmic "hall of mirrors" that would cause one object to be visible in two locations. And they've ruled out the idea that we could peer deep into space and time and see our own planet in its youth.

First, let's see why the size is a number you've never heard of before.

Stretching reality

The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Light reaching us from the earliest known galaxies has been travelling, therefore, for more than 13 billion years. So one might assume that the radius of the universe is 13.7 billion light-years and that the whole shebang is double that, or 27.4 billion light-years wide.

But the universe has been expanding ever since the beginning of time, when theorists believe it all sprang forth from an infinitely dense point in a Big Bang.

"All the distance covered by the light in the early universe gets increased by the expansion of the universe," explains Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist at Montana State University. "Think of it like compound interest."

Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."

All the pieces add up to 78 billion-light-years. The light has not traveled that far, but "the starting point of a photon reaching us today after travelling for 13.7 billion years is now 78 billion light-years away," Cornish said. That would be the radius of the universe, and twice that -- 156 billion light-years -- is the diameter. That's based on a view going 90 percent of the way back in time, so it might be slightly larger.

"It can be thought of as a spherical diameter is the usual sense," Cornish added comfortingly.

(You might have heard the universe is almost surely flat, not spherical. The flatness refers to its geometry being "normal," like what is taught in school; two parallel lines can never cross.)

Hall of mirrors

The scientists studied the cosmic microwave background (CMB), radiation unleashed about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe had first expanded enough to cool and allow atoms to form. Temperature differences in the CMB left an imprint on the sky that was used last year to reveal the age of the universe and confirm other important cosmological measurements.

The CMB is like a baby picture of the cosmos, before any stars were born.

The focus of the new work, which was published last week in the journal Physical Review Letters, was a search of CMB data for paired circles that would have indicated the universe is like a hall of mirrors, in which multiple images of the same object could show up in different locations in space-time. A hall of mirrors could mean the universe is finite but tricks us into thinking it is infinite.

Think of it as a video game in which an object disappearing on the right side of the screen reappears on the left.

"Several years ago we showed that any finite universe in which light had time to 'wrap around' since the Big Bang would have the same pattern of cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations around pairs of circles," Cornish explained. They looked for the most likely patterns that would be evident in a CMB map generated by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

They didn't find those patterns.

Don't look back

"Our results don't rule out a hall-of-mirrors effect, but they make the possibility far less likely," Cornish told SPACE.com, adding that the findings have shown "no sign that the universe is finite, but that doesn't prove that it is infinite."

The results do render impossible a "soccer ball" shape for the universe, proposed late last year by another team. "However, if they were to 'pump up' their soccer ball to make it larger, they could evade our bounds" and still be in the realm of possibility, Cornish said. Other complex shapes haven't been ruled out.

The findings eliminate any chance of seeing our ancient selves, however, unless we can master time travel.

"If the universe was finite, and had a size of about 4 billion to 5 billion light-years, then light would be able to wrap around the universe, and with a big enough telescope we could view the Earth just after it solidified and when the first life formed," Cornish said. "Unfortunately, our results rule out this tantalizing possibility."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Impossible? Cornish Explains Further

Update, 8:25 a.m. Tuesday, May 25

This article generated quite a few e-mails from readers who were perplexed or flat out could not believe the universe was just 13.7 billion years old yet 158 billion light-years wide. That suggests the speed of light has been exceeded, they argue. So SPACE.com asked Neil Cornish to explain further. Here is his response:

"The problem is that funny things happen in general relativity which appear to violate special relativity (nothing traveling faster than the speed of light and all that).

"Let's go back to Hubble's observation that distant galaxies appear to be moving away from us, and the more distant the galaxy, the faster it appears to move away. The constant of proportionality in that relationship is known as Hubble's constant.

"One seemingly paradoxical consequence of Hubble's observation is that galaxies sufficiently far away will be receding from us at a velocity faster than the speed of light. This distance is called the Hubble radius, and is commonly referred to as the horizon in analogy with a black hole horizon.

"In terms of special relativity, Hubble's law appears to be a paradox. But in general relativity we interpret the apparent recession as being due to space expanding (the old raisins in a rising fruit loaf analogy). The galaxies themselves are not moving through space (at least not very much), but the space itself is growing so they appear to be moving apart. There is nothing in special or general relativity to prevent this apparent velocity from exceeding the speed of light. No faster-than-light signals can be sent via this mechanism, and it does not lead to any paradoxes.

"Indeed, the WMAP data [on cosmic microwave background radiation] contain strong evidence that the very early universe underwent a period of accelerated expansion in which the distance been two points increased so quickly that light could not outrace the expansion so there was a true horizon -- in precise analogy with a black hole horizon. Indeed, the fluctuations we see in the CMB are thought to be generated by a process that is closely analogous to Hawking radiation from black holes.

"Even more amazing is the picture that emerges when you combine the WMAP data with [supernova] observations, which imply that the universe has started inflating again. If this is true, we have started to move away from the distant galaxies at a rate that is increasing, and in the future we will not be able to see as many galaxies as they will appear to be moving away from us faster than the speed of light (due to the expansion of space), so their light will not be able to reach us."

[Reply #74 on:]

But what's past that?

[Reply #75 on:]

Bah! Vapid sophistry couched in a mushy vocabulary! Your equivication only reveals your preconception that travel on a Universal scale can only be achieved by accelerating mass with a brute-force application of energy.

Seriously though it's possible and you can't prove otherwise. Fancy words or no. And I suggest that you use a more upscale lexicon the next time you try to sound scholarly. Even Juliet could read and comprehend your post in less than a minute.

[Reply #76 on:]

Anything is possible given enough rolls of the dice but I bet you woke up in the same reality, where you haven't hit the lottery jackpot, as you did yesterday.

[Reply #77 on:]

freddo, I've got a degree in physics and I'm currently teaching astronomy courses at university.  You can take my word for it when I say the universe is not more than 14 billion years old.

[Reply #78 on:]

He's right, it's all gotta be mathmatically correct. That's physics.

[Reply #79 on:]

i didn't say it was more than 14 billion years old but its possible that there is a faster wave than light maybe invisible that is propeling the universe faster than the speed of light.