NASA: We’ve been getting a lot of footage of you being cringy in high school.
Space is beautiful
Submitted 1 day ago by Stamets@lemmy.dbzer0.com to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/c6cb2d0a-4227-42c6-8644-f3cf0cb2f86e.webp
Comments
saltnotsugar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
janus2@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
oh god oh fuck there’s indestructible physical evidence of my Homestuck phase
hakunawazo@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Dicska@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Meh, amateurs. Being cringy as a kid at times is pretty much inevitable. That’s when you learn your ways.
You can watch me being cringy as an adult for decades.
harmbugler@piefed.social 19 hours ago
You can already do this with the light bent around black holes, it’s just a bit hard to make out the image… make sure you wipe down your black hole with a damp cloth, you don’t want a smudgey black hole
ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 6 hours ago
Instructions nuclear, toaster stuck in black hole
niktemadur@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
“Aw man… that’s the third goddamned cloth I’ve dropped into this goddamned event horizon this week… and it’s barely just Tuesday.”
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Redd Foxx was ahead of his time.
this@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
If you did this quickly with a warp drive or whatever, you would still need at least ten years to see the results, so you could only see as far back as when you put the mirror up at the most.
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 6 hours ago
No, you can see 20 years into the past, but only in 10 years. If you managed to will it into existence now, the light that left us 10 years ago would arrive at the mirror now and start heading back. That light would hit earth 10 years from now, so in 2035 we’d be able to see 2015
mybuttnolie@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
and if you look through the butt end of the telescope, you can see in the future
blackbrook@mander.xyz 20 hours ago
Isn’t the butt end, the end you normally look through? I’d think the end facing the stars would be the front end.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 21 hours ago
It’d actually be cool as fuck if we could make some kind of Payday-style time machine that lets you see into the past by simply looking at light reflected off other celestial objects.
It could theoretically work looking backwards, but not forwards as it was used in the film.
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 20 hours ago
Kolanaki@pawb.social 19 hours ago
lol
Real time, tho. That way we can see photographs from before cameras, too. Watch what dinosaurs were doing n stuff.
ameancow@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Alternatively, and slightly cheaper, put a satellite into orbit and just record everything on the ground it looks at, hang onto recordings for 10 years.
InnerScientist@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
But that’s boring, doing it with light is way better.
Also the governments already do that and don’t want to share.
icelimit@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
Wow that’s what the movie was called. It’s been on the back of my mind for years.
notsosure@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
You may need to squint a little.
stevedice@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Yeah, but it’d take us strictly longer than N years to place a mirror N light years away form Earth, so kinda useless.
Sprawl@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
We just need to point our telescopes towards the phantom zone where Zod and his buddies can reflect the light back.
bravesilvernest@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
It would be neat to record the mirror as it was going.
Ignoring physics of moving a mirror near the SoL, having a recording of it would both be cool to watch and would help confirm on a macro level the effects of speed-related dilation.
Lumidaub@feddit.org 1 day ago
SoL
Satellite of Love?
wewbull@feddit.uk 21 hours ago
Sound of Linguine
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Squish of Lumbago
Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Or youd see 20 years into the future… Let that one bake your noodle for a spell…
echodot@feddit.uk 12 hours ago
No that’s not how light works. It’s not 20 years either direction otherwise you could use your bathroom mirror to see into the future
Sprawl@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
No you always see into the past.
Light cannot travel back in time. The reflection you’d see in the mirror is the light that left the Earth 20 years ago.
Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
The mirror always looks back… (insert annoying spooky laugh)
But, just to be less of a Halloween spookster. The mirror is placed in a rather exotic location in space, and between the mirror and the Earth is… wait for it… youre going to hate this lol… a naturally occurring closed timelike curve! See, I told you youd hate it lol.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
But only after 10 years. You couldn’t see anything that wasn’t visible from the viewpoint of the mirror beforehand, as from earth’s point of view the mirror isn’t there yet. And if you’re there anyway… you can just look at Earth with the craft that’s on the position of the mirror already.
Beacon@fedia.io 1 day ago
That's why we need to find a natural mirror somewhere already out there, so we can see into our past. Something like a planet made of pure mercury, or an arrangement of blackholes doing gravitational lensing that bends our light back to us, or whatever
Klear@quokk.au 1 day ago
Just look in any mirror. What you see is also you in the past.
kernelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
I’m assuming the inverse square law would hinder us from seeing anything useful. But now I’m imagining scientists being ecstatic about discovering a foreign signal, only to realise its us from the past
ameancow@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
We… we have tools for seeing our past. We have extensive records of imagery from as far back as we have orbital satellites. You can go on Google Earth right now and look at older maps.
I mean, I get why it would be cool to see a reflection from the past, but literally every reflection you see is from the past. At a certain distance from your reflective or distorting surface, you’re going to need major image processing to make out a clear image of the planet, so again, at that point it’s far easier to just look at recorded images or videos.
There is a much cooler idea though that you can exploit from this principle: you can use a star or other dense object in space to work like a light-lens, we could build this now but it would be a very expensive and long-term project, because we would need to send a series probes out past the distance that Voyager 1 has already traveled over 40 years. We would also need to know ahead of time what our target is so we place the probes in the right place, placing the sun between the probes and the target at just the right distance.
If you take the distorted light from around the edges of the Sun and reconstruct it, you can theoretically see details of continents and other surface features of Earth-sized planets in entire other solar systems, which would be fantastic.
bravesilvernest@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Hey, don’t you bring logic in here!
IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 1 day ago
Only after 20 years. Light will take 10y to make it from earth to the mirror, and 10y to travel back.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
No, the light would be reflected as soon as the mirror is set up. If the mirror is set up 10 lightyears away it would take 10 years for you to see it and whatever it reflects. There already is light on the way to the position of the mirror before you set it up.
anothercatgirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 hours ago
it takes way more than 10 years to ship a mirror from Earth to some place 10 ly away from earth.
dontsayaword@piefed.social 1 day ago
None of these sound like deal breakers to this great idea