Post AkdkgLvm1uKBzEUOhc by aprilfollies@mastodon.online
(DIR) More posts by aprilfollies@mastodon.online
(DIR) Post #AkdZkZhzeCZ4Ncr26i by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-08-04T22:33:38Z
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I know that stars can age. That they grow into red giants, or become supernovas. They they have a lifespan. I know this information, the evidence seems reasonable. It's all very logical. But at a deeper level something in me resists this being true. Stars seem eternal, the sun seems eternal. I wonder if I can ever really let this idea sink in?I think if it did? My skin would go cold.Is this something that you feel like you really *know* ?
(DIR) Post #AkdZu08QlQiMwjiOOW by JamesHMcLaren@qoto.org
2024-08-04T22:35:20Z
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@futurebird Inthin with our limited lifespan we just have no sense of scale to measure things that change on the order of billions of years.
(DIR) Post #AkdZz4B79tR0vzNyAi by ohmu@social.seattle.wa.us
2024-08-04T22:36:16Z
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@futurebird Madeline L'Engle worked this feeling well, I thought.
(DIR) Post #AkdaHQTD165XHebUMy by justafrog@mstdn.social
2024-08-04T22:39:35Z
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@futurebird It's a bit like knowing a battery will run out after you die.It's a very abstract concept which has nothing to do with how you live.It's a fact for someone in the future to deal with. I can blissfully ignore it.
(DIR) Post #AkdaWXE2BPhOZvi6Iy by catselbow@fosstodon.org
2024-08-04T22:42:11Z
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@futurebird I could say the same thing about people. It seems impossible that someone I know as a living, breathing person could die, or could have died in the past. Maybe that's why we invented ghosts and the afterlife.After stars die, do they persist as ghosts? Do they awake in some stellar Valhalla?
(DIR) Post #Akdaeq3u26bBJdvmVs by aprilfollies@mastodon.online
2024-08-04T22:43:48Z
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@futurebird I always think about stars as finite objects - particularly as my field is the end of stellar ’lives’. Instead, I have the sense of awe coming from how those lives are almost inconceivably long.I got to set my hand against a Roman aqueduct once, and stood there thinking about the two thousand and more years it had seen. Yet the shortest-lived stars see many *million* years. 🤯. The star that dies today saw the human species develop…
(DIR) Post #AkdakkMK9InxMlMf2W by ak@mastodon.social
2024-08-04T22:44:52Z
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@futurebird Hate it when I accidentally experience geological time 😱
(DIR) Post #AkdbAIyiZYhXyXVgnY by Red_Shirt_no2@c.im
2024-08-04T22:49:28Z
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@futurebird No. At the time scale of stellar lifetimes, it all seems rather abstract.But it affects me philosophically. In 4 billion years, our Sun’s expansion will destroy our Earth. In a few trillion years, there will be very few stars left.All life is transient. Don’t set aside being good to people now for the sake of some imagined future; because that, too, shall pass.
(DIR) Post #AkdbNG3QksbEfgtI80 by drexer@ciberlandia.pt
2024-08-04T22:51:49Z
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@futurebird is it too much of an annoyance if I feel like you should play The Outer Wilds?It's a very weird answer to tell you to play a videogame as an answer to that almost existential question, but it forced me to look at and examine the psychological impact of such questions.
(DIR) Post #AkdbX8QzwN5hw0ckpU by yonder@spacey.space
2024-08-04T22:53:37Z
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@futurebird Our star is at least a third generation star. It might be higher than three, but what strikes me about the estimates is they are low numbers.The only life in the universe we know about, on Earth, appeared pretty much as soon as it possibly could have.I don't know what it means but the sense is that started early and also it'll all be over fairly quickly, as in how many generations of stars there are to go. If you look at it in a linear way that is
(DIR) Post #Akdbj7eUfuMcz1eWWG by missqarnstein@eldritch.cafe
2024-08-04T22:55:45Z
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@futurebird I'd say there's a psychological danger in intuitively and mentally getting physics. There's an opportunity to grow but also a way into the dark.
(DIR) Post #AkdcIEzLOHZrs79PlI by recursive@hachyderm.io
2024-08-04T23:02:04Z
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@futurebird well, that explains some things about me
(DIR) Post #AkdcLoMML0ImRUcPom by LGS@friendsofdesoto.social
2024-08-04T23:02:04Z
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@futurebird Douglas Adam's writings are the only that keeps me from going to far down that rabbit hole.
(DIR) Post #AkddMQUOflLceaEeIq by bertwells@mathstodon.xyz
2024-08-04T23:14:03Z
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@futurebird I like this question. The way I use a words is an attempt to avoid getting things twisted up while I am talking to other people. So I tend to stick to the rather old-fashioned "justified, true belief" definition of Knowledge.So in that sense, yeah I would say I "know" all kinds of stuff that I have good familiarity with the evidence for (like the absurd time spans involved in geology and cosmology, for example).Where I draw the sharp line is when I talk about what I can Perceive or Conceive. I can, for instance, form a conception of large time scales, but there is no way I can have any perception of them. In math, there are things that I can follow the logic of, so I "know" that they are true results, but have not yet figured out a good way to form a concept of that would allow me to explain them to myself or others in plain language.
(DIR) Post #AkddjF6DBdlnzKnoYa by barrygoldman1@sauropods.win
2024-08-04T23:18:08Z
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@futurebird energy comes out of the sun. that can't keep up FOR EVER.eternal is an ancient voodoo concept. let go of it.anyway its a whole ecosystem out there of stars being born, having sex, giving birth to new stars, dying...such interactions have traveled across our galaxy back and forth about 40 times since its birth. (i tried calculating the rate at which supernova outflow travels)
(DIR) Post #AkddlFtnBV6n30xA3M by valdelane@mas.to
2024-08-04T23:18:18Z
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@futurebird While I don't completely grasp cosmic distances or timescales, I am deeply comforted by the idea that I am a fleeting speck on a bauble in one of an approximately gazillion star systems, each of which will end.
(DIR) Post #AkdiJTUzWgH8tDvQjA by impermanen_@zirk.us
2024-08-05T00:09:34Z
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@futurebird my mind is still pretty scared of impermanence, but my gut is with the mystics who say a full understanding of the impermanence of all things is accompanied by a great peace, joy and fathomless compassion. Because with that understanding comes a profound recognition of a pure presence that’s *outside* of time: pure in the sense of possessing a knowing quality but empty, vivid but referenceless, prior to any thought. That’s our true nature, phenomena its illusory play.
(DIR) Post #AkdjODYGLRcSpfHTKC by _thegeoff@mastodon.social
2024-08-04T23:54:05Z
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@aprilfollies @futurebird The forest analogy is apt here. If you live in a forest you see seeds, saplings, various sizes of tree. Some may be centuries older than you, some may be there centuries after you die. But you can work out how trees and forests work.That's human-lifespan astronomy 😎🖖
(DIR) Post #AkdjOEamTZEC3lSztA by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-08-05T00:21:38Z
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@_thegeoff @aprilfollies So what is the swarm of army ants in all of this?
(DIR) Post #AkdjYojex2773GfLns by _thegeoff@mastodon.social
2024-08-05T00:23:32Z
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@futurebird @aprilfollies On that scale? A gamma ray burst passing by.
(DIR) Post #AkdkgLvm1uKBzEUOhc by aprilfollies@mastodon.online
2024-08-05T00:36:02Z
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@futurebird @_thegeoff I looked up when ants evolved, and though I can’t say for army ants specifically, if they go back a hundred million years, they may have seen stars that no longer exist to our human eyes. Which is also awe-inspiring! ✨ 🐜 🐜 🐜
(DIR) Post #AkdlZklbOMCmwP9HFI by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-08-05T00:46:08Z
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@aprilfollies @_thegeoff This is pretty exciting. Ants existed for a long time but were not as dominate as they are today, then something happened, maybe flowering plants, maybe new eusocial organization and they exploded.
(DIR) Post #AkdmF1VS3kncjMH0qm by MichaelPorter@ottawa.place
2024-08-05T00:48:16Z
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@_thegeoff @aprilfollies @futurebird Nice 😊 Similar to my "fruit fly" analogy - If you were a fruit fly, and had a couple of days to figure out the life cycle of humans, you could do it by flying around and observing all the different stages of human development. Around the same time, Getty Images came out with the following video - It shows a constructed life story out of still images, all taken of different people and things. I lightly censored it to avoid phone calls from parents of grade nine students 😄https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7xc7J8bdsU
(DIR) Post #AkecSroy3qAeMZKAng by StarkRG@myside-yourside.net
2024-08-05T10:38:41Z
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@futurebird When I was about 13 I read a book called "Deep Time: The Journey Of A Single Subatomic Particle From The Moment Of Creation To The Death Of The Universe And Beyond." I didn't really have an issue with it until my early 20s when I couldn't shake the idea that nothing we did mattered because the end state of the Universe can't be altered (probably). I resolved this by realising that it's the end state that doesn't matter, what happens *now* is what matters.https://archive.org/details/deeptime00davi