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March 20, 2015
The spiral arms of our galaxy... are corrugated.
— weird enough already for their wobblesome braiding habits in response to who-knows-what dark invisible gravitational forces — are corrugated. The mass of stars rise up and drop down in these helical waves from our galactic centre; and from our own position, part way up one wave, the next wave was blocking our view outward, and from all directions tending to omit much of the stellar flotsam in the troughs. Careful analysis now lets us see through the blockage. There’s more stars down there in the dips, as well as up and over the extra wave, and thus our galaxy turns out to be so decidedly more populous. Add another hundred billion stars, easy. Hell, add two hundred billion. Give them Obamacare. More, there is more : Essays in Idleness
Posted by gerardvanderleun at March 20, 2015 10:35 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
Add as many stars as you want, there is still a lot more nothing than something.
All the space between the stars, planets, galaxies is empty nothingness. Just like the Grand Canyon, the nothing defines it all.
Posted by: chasmatic ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://americandigest.org/sidelines/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 21, 2015 4:56 AM
Wait... they thought it was flat as a tabletop before this? I always assumed it was shaped like that, what kind of idiot didn't?
Posted by: Christopher Taylor at March 21, 2015 8:33 AM
I have no idea how we ever got along before without knowing this. Somethings carry an immediacy beyond belief like the Omnipotence of Obama. Life isn't the same until one is bathed in such knowledge.
Posted by: Vermont Woodchuck at March 21, 2015 8:55 AM
From a Time article at HotAir:
"We know of precisely one world on which life has existed, and the rest is largely guesswork. Fill in that one Drake blank with a zero, and the entire equation collapses to zero too."
To state the obvious, the first statement above clearly proves that the "blank" in the Drake equation is NOT zero, thus making the second statement mathematically correct, but irrelevant to the question.
While the author correctly notes that the whole equation "collapses" if the blank (as he calls it) is zero, he fails to appreciate the converse: that the titanic numbers, distances, and time involved also mean that the whole equation "explodes" if it is NOT zero! And it is, of course, very provably not - just pinch yourself!
Posted by: DaveR at March 21, 2015 9:03 AM
Come to think of it, there's a lot of nothing in a human body. All that air between the protons and neutrons and atoms and molecules, why if we'd get rid of that we would be a lot smaller.
Posted by: chasmatic at March 21, 2015 10:30 AM
VC: good observation about the Drake.
The astronomers keep detecting more mass (other than dark matter) in the universe. Such science is unsettling.
Posted by: Ken at March 21, 2015 2:10 PM
Hey Ken, the Drake comment was mine. I do that all the time: read the name ABOVE the comment as the author. This site makes it doubly easy to do by using horizontal lines to separate the comment and the comment author's nic. This has the effect of grouping the nic of the previous comment with the current comment! Oops! Pull those human-factors socks up, Gerard!!
Posted by: DaveR at March 22, 2015 9:06 AM
DaveR; thanks for being so polite. I am very careless in comments, touch type, work fast, usually don't proof, and can't think of any good excuse for those habits.
re the Drake. I believe, or sense, that such a construction can be both valid and meaningless. But such a duality leads to thoughts above my pay grade.
Posted by: Ken at March 22, 2015 6:24 PM