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It’s interesting that you are expressing an opinion about something that you could calculate in the same amount of time it took to write down that opinion.
by heavenlyblue 5y ago
It’s interesting that you are expressing an opinion about something that you could calculate in the same amount of time it took to write down that opinion.
- weaksauce 5y agoIt seems like they are going for the "the easiest way to get a right answer is give the wrong answer on the internet" approach.
- Spare_account 5y agoCunningham's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham's_Law%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham'...
- Sebb767 5y agoTo be fair, for someone who is not well-versed in either optics or space physics, calculating the answer is not that straight-forward.
- kadoban 5y agoYou can do pretty well just comparing the ratios of the size to the distance, right? Or is it more than that?
- idealmedtech 5y agoThat's a start, for sure, but to do a super accurate calculation (the kind I feel unqualified to carry out), you need to take into account apparent size, redshift, whether or not there's gravitational lensing, interstellar dust in the way, etc etc. But I want to reiterate that what's meaningful about this discussion is in part how unintuitive things at the far edges of our scales of perception really are. It's a muscle that, left untrained, will lead you to make incorrect characterizations like the one I made.
- idealmedtech 5y agoIt's been over a decade since my last astrophysics class, but I appreciate you being charitable about my assumed knowledge! I think if anything this thread shows: 1) how absolutely mindblowingly big space is 2) how bad humans really are at intuiting things at the scale of space