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Might be much harder to bootstrap your astronomy in that situation as well. As I understand, we built much of our picture of the universe on the fact that we c
by FredPret 2y ago
Might be much harder to bootstrap your astronomy in that situation as well.
As I understand, we built much of our picture of the universe on the fact that we can do precise parallax measurements of nearby stars.
Then we used that to see how far the nearby Cepheid variable stars are, and used the patterns those exhibit to measure distant galaxies. Then at some point we could determine the distance to a certain kind of supernova, and now we have a 3D model of the whole observable universe.
But it starts with parallax measurements which are limited in range.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cosmology-standard-candle-not-so-standard-after-all https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cosmology-standard-candle-not-...
- gcanyon 2y agoOoh, this is super interesting! This video by The Science Asylum lays out the "distance ladder" in great detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpdwJNNskk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpdwJNNskk This wikipedia article also lays out the distance ladder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder so if our hypothetical "intelligent species on a planet orbiting an orphan star" were more than 30,000 light years away from the nearest star, they wouldn't be able to measure that distance with accuracy using the technology we have now. That might not apply to ranging whole galaxies? And they could get better with time? In any case, my idea that they might take off for a "nearby" star "only" ~100 light years away because they don't know better is foolish.