4 ms·

What happens on the far side of the moon doesn't matter for us, either, but we still looked.

lisper 8y ago
> What happens on the far side of the moon doesn't matter for us, either, How do you know? Maybe the far side of the moon is chock-full of exploitable resources. You can't know until you look. > but we still looked. Sure, because we could. We cannot look beyond our light cone.
- Retric 8y ago
  For now we can just by waiting. With every second we see just a little further. Tomorrow we might look out at the stars and see the tips of giant teeth. But, probably not.
  - lisper 8y ago
    You don't quite understand the concept of a light cone. Yes, we get new data all the time, and the extent of our horizon is growing. But it is always finite. You cannot look backwards past the big bang singularity, and you cannot look forwards beyond "now" for any value of "now".
    - ieo838jdkd 8y ago
      We can’t But 200 years ago we “didn’t need” relativity and then we did Asking questions and wondering about the things we don’t know is how we now know about many valuable things that, in the past, didn’t appear to be valuable
    - nbulka 8y ago
      You may want to temper your claims with "based on the currently accepted Standard Model" or "with high probability." Because paradigm shifts occur.
      - lisper 8y ago
        See my OP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094991 "Barring some major unforeseen revolution in our understanding of physics..."
    - Retric 8y ago
      No, you fail to understand a light cones end at finite points. If I travel 1 light year, then I observe a different light cone and it takes 1 year for somone that stayed behind to receive information from me. This effectively means you can see something before the light cone at your current location would observe it. If you consider a light cone as all points out to infinity then that’s the entire universe. Instead at each point in time you have a different light cone that extends to the age of the universe. In theory we can never see past a second limit based on the expansion of the universe, but that’s yet to be observed speculation without any consistent theory of what’s going on.

> What happens on the far side of the moon doesn't matter for us, either, How do you know? Maybe the far side of the moon is chock-full of exploitable resources. You can't know until you look. > but we still looked. Sure, because we could. We cannot look beyond our light cone.

Retric 8y ago
For now we can just by waiting. With every second we see just a little further. Tomorrow we might look out at the stars and see the tips of giant teeth. But, probably not.
- lisper 8y ago
  You don't quite understand the concept of a light cone. Yes, we get new data all the time, and the extent of our horizon is growing. But it is always finite. You cannot look backwards past the big bang singularity, and you cannot look forwards beyond "now" for any value of "now".
  - ieo838jdkd 8y ago
    We can’t But 200 years ago we “didn’t need” relativity and then we did Asking questions and wondering about the things we don’t know is how we now know about many valuable things that, in the past, didn’t appear to be valuable
  - nbulka 8y ago
    You may want to temper your claims with "based on the currently accepted Standard Model" or "with high probability." Because paradigm shifts occur.
    - lisper 8y ago
      See my OP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094991 "Barring some major unforeseen revolution in our understanding of physics..."
  - Retric 8y ago
    No, you fail to understand a light cones end at finite points. If I travel 1 light year, then I observe a different light cone and it takes 1 year for somone that stayed behind to receive information from me. This effectively means you can see something before the light cone at your current location would observe it. If you consider a light cone as all points out to infinity then that’s the entire universe. Instead at each point in time you have a different light cone that extends to the age of the universe. In theory we can never see past a second limit based on the expansion of the universe, but that’s yet to be observed speculation without any consistent theory of what’s going on.