• Comment105@lemm.eeEnglish
            5·
            2 months ago

            Delicious spacedust.

            It was exploded, then turned onto something green eventually, then something haunted consumed and excreted it, then something WAY MORE HAUNTED did a bunch of weird shit to it like letting little things fart in it.

            Such delicious spacedust.

  • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
    441·
    2 months ago

    Is there a word for this type of hypersimplification to evoke wonder? If not, can we coin one?

  • banazir@lemmy.mlEnglish
    32·
    2 months ago

    The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

    Carl Sagan.

      • Jax@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        Maybe he should try his hand at teaching too, it seems like he’s got a unique skill for simplifying complicated concepts.

        • littlecolt@lemm.eeEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          If he had a TV show, I bet it could reach many people and we might all learn from him.

  • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
    241·
    2 months ago

    An explosion is pure entropy. It’s high energy releasing to a low energy state in an uncontrolled manner

    We climb down the energy slope very slowly to reverse entropy and create order

    The universe is like us - temporary order emerges as it slides towards entropy

    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      But are we actually creating order? To maintain life’s order, we are creating much more disorder somewhere else.

      Life is but an entropy maximization machine.

      • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        On the overall scale of the universe? No, not even remotely close. On the local scale of the Earth, generally yes.

        • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Well, as much as possible anyway. When considering mass alone, life is quite efficient.

          According to Wolfram Alpha:

          The sun produces 3.8 * 1028 watts.

          A single human produces 104 watts (calculated through the average caloric intake assuming that intake ≈ energy consumption) through heat radiation.

          Therefore:

          1 kg of human converts 1.5 watt into heat.

          1 kg of the sun converts 0.0002 watt into (heat) radiation.

          And while I have nearly no understanding how entropy is calculated, from those values alone it seems like humans produce more entropy per kg than the sun. I’m pretty sure entropy is somewhat related to energy production though.

          • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Yes, if you consider just a human-mass equivalent portion of the Sun then it’s not doing much, but that’s not really a useful comparison. We’re talking about total net entropy here, not entropy per unit mass.

            But yes, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll concede that if you had octillions of people our total metabolic energy output would, in fact, be significantly higher than that of the Sun.

            • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              2 months ago

              This raises the question of how many kg of human mass is required to start fusion and create a human star? How does fusion even work if you have a mix of different elements? Would the human star pulse in a cycle of collapsing until hydrogen fusion starts, exploding out until it stops and then collapsing again? Or would any fusion ignite enough to stop it from collapsing into a neutron star or black hole?

              And if I’ve asked this question, does it mean xkcd has already attempted an answer? Or at least a comic that mentions it?

    • buttfarts@lemy.lolEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      According to the Lotus Sutra the Earth is also a sentient being.

      The Chan School of Buddhism says that all phenomena are mind. There is nothing that is not mind. We, as humans, are a mind in a mind.

      • portuga@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        No that’s not exactly right. It’s not that everything is only mind. Our subjective experience is only mind, you don’t actually see experience as it is but instead your experience of life is only mind in the sense it gets filtered by your sensory apparatus and hence it isn’t real as you don’t really sense reality as you are capable of. Doesn’t mean reality doesn’t exist if you’re not looking

  • Maeve@kbin.earth
    10·
    2 months ago

    Just recently mentioned the conscious universe theory in conversation with a friend.

  • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
    92·
    2 months ago

    I hate that this is popular. This is a creationist level understanding of the big bang.

    You ever use a spray can for a while and the can gets cold? It’s more like that.

  • niktemadur@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    2 months ago

    But it wasn’t really an explosion, it was more like a spontaneous, insane inflation that found itself suddenly huge and empty, only after it was through with that particular stage did it zap itself full of energy and matter everywhere all at once. Then it continued growing in volume and thinning out via regular ol’ relativistic expansion.

    EDIT: looking a little bit closer, there’s the thing about zapping all over itself after Inflation, it was almost perfectly half-and-half matter/antimatter, which then proceeded to join and annihilate into pure energy, but for some reason probably related to the Weak Force, just a little bit more matter was created than antimatter.

    And that’s what we are and see today, 1 part out of every 8 million-and-one. For every 4,000,000 parts antimatter, there were 4,000,001 parts matter, only that 1 left over particle of matter, multiplied a bazillion times.

    That’s just a whole other level of amazing than just saying “an explosion”.

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.eeEnglish
    74·
    2 months ago

    Life is anything that moves, reproduces, senses, grows, respires, excretes and eats.

    Consciousness is more mysterious and less well defined.

    • MrSoup@lemmy.zipEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      Yes, but how do living things come into existence? What makes a cell alive?

      It’s not about defining what a living being is.

        • SurfinBird@lemmy.caEnglish
          7·
          2 months ago

          “Jiggle physics is the real science. Everything else is stamp collecting.” - Einstein maybe

          • Rolando@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            2 months ago

            "What is a jiggleo?

            A dead body

            Well, he ain’t really dead, but he ain’t like

            Anybody that you’ve ever met before

            He’ll eat monopoly and shit out connect four"

            -ICP

        • dessimbelackis@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          “And so people come to sorts of agreements about, uh, how much of a wiggle is a wiggle; that is to say a thing. One wiggle, you can always reduce any one wiggle into sub-wiggles. Or see it as a subordinate wiggle in a bigger wiggle. But there’s no real fixed rule about it”

      • JackGreenEarth@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        I would define those terms, but you would just ask me to define the terms I used to define them, wouldn’t you? Eventually, language is known by other people without being defined in terms of language.

        • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          Not really, i left out the term reproduce because i think it has some reality. But others like sensing — does an atom changing the electron cloud due to an electric feild or nearby atom count as sensing because it senses the presence of nearby atoms or whatever?

          Won’t growing constitute of some large mass body collecting more mass due to its gravitation?