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Divers accidentally find a piece of the Challenger space shuttle
- wwwtyro 4y agoThe odds of this seem astronomically small.
- yamtaddle 4y agoOnce in a blue moon, for sure.
- emptybits 4y agoNo kidding. Actually, considering how mindblowingly huge but untouched the volume and area of our seas and seafloors are, "oceanically unlikely" is also a superlative I can get behind! 1.3 billion cubic km of water, the tallest mountain ranges and deepest canyons. Aside from occasional glimpses of the surface, it's forever out of sight and out of mind for nearly every person on the planet.
- _yb2s 4y agoCounterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen very often. The odds of a specific event like this are astronomically small, but there is an even more astronomically large number of different possible unlikely events. The sheer number of possible events is orders of magnitude greater than the odds of individual unlikely events, causing them to occur regularly. The universe is a really weird place, where really weird stuff happens constantly.
- DieBruderBauer 4y agoImagine if you took the Everettian interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
- skissane 4y agoIf it is true, doesn’t it follow that there are (very rare) universes where unlikely events happen so often that anyone in such a universe would effectively observe a different probability distribution of events? The thing is, if the theory is true, how do we know we are not in such a universe? We can say it is extremely unlikely because they are very rare - but we say it is “unlikely” and “rare” because we assume the global (multiverse-wide) probability distribution is similar to the local (this universe) one - but isn’t that assumption effectively equivalent to the assumption that we are not in such a universe? An argument which begins by assuming its conclusion is not much of an argument. However, if we can’t rely on that assumption, it seems in principle impossible for us to know what the global probability distribution is - how is that not a lethal blow to the entire theory?
- _yb2s 4y agoIf you insist on using old fashioned logic to reason when in a probabilistic universe where that kind of reasoning is only an approximation, you can say that the universes you are talking about don't exist. They are such a small fraction of possible universes, that you can safely 'know' you aren't in any of them without checking.
- realgeniushere 4y agoThis comment misses the point and just plays with the meaning of “know”. Not that epistemology isn’t interesting, but parent was referring to absolute certainty (contingent on your senses being accurate, of course).
- skissane 4y agoNot sure which parent you mean, but if you mean my comment, I wasn't talking about absolute certainty at all. Rather, I was attempting a reductio ad absurdum against theories which talk about the probability of different universes within a multiverse. Nothing I said is an argument against probabilistic reasoning/knowledge limited to the confines of this universe only.
- hammock 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoLike separate rolls of a single dice, I thought the occurrence of one event has no affect on the probability of another?
- _yb2s 4y agoIndeed, but I think you might be misunderstanding what I said. Think of the universe as a nearly infinite number of dice rolls all independent and in parallel. Any possible rare combination of dice rolls will actually be happening constantly.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shawnz 4y agoThe person you are replying to isn't saying anything about the probability of individual events. They are talking about the probability of at least one of many events occurring, which does change with the number of events being considered
- kelnos 4y agoRight, but while it may only be a 1/6 chance that a single die roll will give you a six, rolling more and more dice eventually makes it a near-certainty that at least one will give you a six.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoWhat are the odds of you winning the lottery? Now think of how many people win the lottery every year.
- ckastner 4y ago> Counterintuitively, extremely unlikely events like this happen very often. As the saying goes, "people win the lottery every day", and there are a lot of lotteries active on this planet.
- gerdesj 4y agoSir Terry Pratchett often declaimed in his novels that "Million to one chances happen one times in ten". The statistical terms used are completely wrong but the intention is clear: weird shit happens.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago"Fiction has to make sense, reality can do whatever it wants."
- lostlogin 4y agoYou sound like someone who has witnessed the last 5 years.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y agoThe idea is a bit older than that: Clancy here expresses an idea evoked in similar statements made by others, all derived from the orignial made by Lord Byron: Lord Byron: Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction. Mark Twain: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't. G. K. Chesterton: Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it. Leo Rosten: Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense. (attributed) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy#Larry_King_Live_(2000) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy#Larry_King_Live_(20...
- hutzlibu 4y agoI just thought, he made fun of the stereotypical heros taking their one in a million chance and allways succeeding, meaning it is a physical or dramatic law that one in a million chances are 100% guaranteed. (mainly refering to "Guards! Guards!", where they intentionally make one guards bow shot harder, to make his shot (at a dragon) a million to one chance, so it becomes a 100% shot, nice absurd logic and of course it does not work, but the chance for them surviving the stunt was one in a million..)
- WalterBright 4y agoSometimes, I drop something by accident, and the object falls in a strange way. I think "I could never in a million years duplicate the path that took."
- notacoward 4y ago"I could never in a million years duplicate the path that took." I still remember, from at least twenty years ago, an anti-duplication technology based on this idea. IIRC it involved embedding glitter in clear plastic and then measuring the reflections at different angles. Devilishly hard to duplicate, especially since one wouldn't know which angles would be used in a reading so the placement would have to be nearly perfect in every dimension. Unfortunately so would the alignment in a reader, which I think is what sank the idea. Still, the idea of physically embodying something so similar to a mathematical proof of work seems valid and quite appealing. "I could never in a million years make the glitter fall that way again." P.S. Here's a modern application of a similar technique to detect tampering with a laptop. https://archive.ph/g1kDW https://archive.ph/g1kDW
- bombcar 4y agoIt’s a million to one. And those happen 9 times out of ten.
- vikingerik 4y agoThe odds of this group of people, on this day, finding this piece of the shuttle, are of course astronomically small. The odds of some group out of millions of people, on some day out of ten thousand since the incident, finding some piece of debris out of thousands, are considerably higher. This is the multiple-endpoints fallacy. You only notice the events that happened after the fact, you never notice everything that doesn't happen.
- Alan_Dillman 4y agoExactly. This is why it is dumb when people say "The odds against life arising at random is astronomical." It did happen, therefore, the convoluted path to life wasn't what the skeptic speaker thinks it was. Multiple-endpoints fallacy and overly anthropomorphizing reality also makes a fool out of the Drake Equation, and the idea of "The Great Filter" is dumb too.
- pixl97 4y agoLet's give this one a few centuries and see how many exo-planets have life before deciding how rare it actually is.
- wizofaus 4y agoGoing on the evidence we have, it's certainly not impossible that our own planet (one out of something like 10^25 likely planets in the universe) happens to be the only one that life has arisen on, which I'd say qualifies as astronomical odds against for any random planet at least.
- vikingerik 4y agoRight. The odds against intelligent, industrial life arising at this star in this galaxy were astronomical. The odds against it arising somewhere among trillions of stars and galaxies are much less so. But I'm not so sure about that last. The Drake equation and Great Filter do handle the multiple-endpoints question correctly. They ask, with so many possible occurrences in the scale of the universe, why don't we see any of them?
- Eleison23 4y agoTHE ODDS ARE *NEVER* IN OUR FAVOR
- gleenn 4y agoHow far did the Challenger blow up off the coast? Maybe not that far. I bet the trajectory also could possibly bias towards the sea in case of an emergency for a less dramatic landing. Wouldn't want a shuttle landing on a building either obviously.
- idlewords 4y ago(Odds subsequently revealed to be 1 in 50)
- syockit 4y agoWell, it never left the atmosphere.
- brudgers 4y agoThe Challenger flight path was approximately vertical and so the debris field was relatively close to shore and in shallow waters of the continental shelf. Given what the documentary crew was up to, it seems probable the debris showed up on sonar and the dive team went down to check it out. So it is not exactly a chance discovery in the deep Atlantic by tourists on holiday. It is well funded professionals discovering something that looks a lot like what they were looking for.
- jl6 4y agoWhat seems amazing is that it isn’t covered in more sand and sediment. It would take such a small thickness of covering to hide it from view forever.
- googlryas 4y agoIt could be U shaped and not just a flat panel. Also, I assume the ceramic tiles have a very low coefficient of friction, so if it was stuck at any kind of small angle, the sediment might easily get carried off.
- themerone 4y agoI got to hold a sample of one of the white tiles a long time ago. I don't know if it was identical to the flown versions, but it was anything but smooth. I remember being able to feel and see individual silica fibers. It was very much a 3d surface.
- jjeaff 4y agoI believe they are rather similar to the fire tiles you can get to line the inside of a blacksmith's furnace. They are quite light, but also very fragile.
- daveslash 4y agoI wonder if it could have gone through cycles of buried/uncovered? I don't know anything about the waters off Florida other than they experience periodic hurricane events.
- brk 4y agoVery likely. I am in the west coast of Florida, and storms can really shift things around quite a bit. Passages between some of the small islands can open or close after a decent storm. Sandbars come and go, etc. The waters tend to be a little deeper on the east coast, which would tend to lessen the effects of large shifts, but over a timespan of nearly 40 years it is very likely the piece had been covered over at some point.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- taylorhou 4y agoSpeaking of finding, we still haven't found a significant trace of MH370. T_T
- jumboshrimp 4y agoI’m not so sure that’s true: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...
- bertrand-caron 4y agoWow, thanks for that, that is a fantastic write-up, and a pretty compelling argument (at least to me) that the mystery of MH370 has been mostly "solved" (spoiler alert: all evidence points to a murder-suicide by pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah).
- avhception 4y agoHere is another really good article: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-77fa5244bf99 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...
- klabb3 4y agoThere's a lot found that very likely belongs to the airplane. It's just not a particularly sexy story. Most likely it's pilot murder-suicide, they did find a highly suspicious looking path in the pilot/copilot's flight sim. Iirc, during the handover from Malaysia to Vietnam ATCs, the pilot depressurizes the cabin, turns off transponders, turns around to avoid civilian radar, and once out of radar reach heads south across the ocean until the fuel runs out. Perhaps to have time to himself or maybe deliberately to not be found, out of shame. It explains why the two main mysteries – why the initial search was a failure, and the lack of radio and transponder data. It's also easy to see why authorities and airline operators want to silence it, especially if they have plausible deniability to do so. There is simply less prestige lost in a failed international search-and-rescue than a national airline pilot killing innocent people for god knows what reason.
- ck2 4y agoBefore 9/11 it was the most traumatic incident. News showed that footage so many thousands of times over so many weeks, months, that I still hear the phrase in my head sometimes and I am really, really uncomfortable watching rocket launches even decades later.
- dboreham 4y agoNow Dexter's really worried...
- bmitc 4y agoDoes such a piece emit any radiation?
- regularfry 4y agoSeems unlikely, ignoring baseline background emission. Any particular reason to think it would?
- bmitc 4y agoIt's just my assumption would be to not to get near it unless I knew for sure. The spacecraft would obviously be bombarded with huge amounts of radiation in space. Astronauts inside these vessels experience rather high doses of radiation. The question revolves around the materials used and whether they become irradiated or not and stay as such or not. I would assume that they would select materials that do not continuing radiating once back on Earth at a concerning level, but I don't know enough about materials to know that and this appears to be an external piece.
- Goz3rr 4y agoBombarding something with radiation usually does not make it radioactive itself