Oof, I have bad, or maybe good, news for you: this isn't the universe. This is just the local structure of galactic superclusters to us. Just a knot on one of the myriad galactic filaments. 1 Gly out of a 30 Tly (edit: that's not right, closer to 100 GLy) and growing known universe. It's real big, don't get me wrong, but compared to the whole kit and kaboodle it's a rounding error.
SEA has a great video on The Great Attractor (and our local supercluster complex) that I recommend.
For a bigger view, check out https://mapoftheuniverse.net/ , although necessarily this isn't presented geometrically the way the one you linked is.
SEA, PBS SpaceTime, Astrum, Dr. Becky, Sixty Symbol, and Anton Petrov. With Anton being the one who is very weedsy with a daily video about a recently-published paper. That's the list of YouTubers I think I recommend checking out.
ParallaxNick, man! His videos - mostly about the history of astronomy - are spectacular, poetic, in-depth, thorough.
ParallaxNick has been doing a series of videos on the lives and works of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, then Kepler, now Galileo, and I assume Newton is next.
The reason it isn't presented geometrically, by the way, is because over such upsettingly huge distances "geometry" loses some meaning. The current position of everything is more a view through time than actual space. So the map of the universe is much more like a timeline than an explorable map.
At the scale of the map up top, a billion years more or less won't make a huge difference, so it makes fair sense to present it that way. But once you're up to 100 Gy and beyond... shit gets weird.
Wow I've never seen a map of the universe. Amazing. Is this the known/observed universe, or does it include parts that have only been theorized to exist?
It shows galaxies we have observed that cluster together. The James Webb Space Telescope has seen even farther galaxies, but I haven't found a bigger map that includes them.
Going through the list of largest structures on Wikipedia trying t o piece it together into anything the mind can grasp at once is difficult. Especially when one has one map image, and another has its own, and how they fit together is confusing. What's really frightening to me are the voids. I mean space itself is pretty immense, and just tackling the empty distances between our solar system's planets is hard, but there are places that are devoid of anything for giga-parsecs. Like, completely nothingness.
That's an oddly terrifying thought. Which makes me wonder... you know how stars sometimes get ejected from their parent galaxies and end up free-floating through the universe, all on their own?
Imagine if a star got ejected from one of those galaxies, managed to travel far enough away the parent couldn't be seen without advanced telescopes, and then life evolved on one of its planets.
That civilization would grow up in a world without stars. The sky at night would be pure black nothingness, except for the pinprick light of any other planets in the system. And then, after assuming their solar system was the entirety of existence for thousands of years, only in their culture's equivalent of the 1960s do they see the first light of other suns.
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov is kinda like that, it’s set on an Earth-analogue planet that orbits a system of six stars, so it’s never actually dark, except for one total eclipse every 3000 years.
Deep Space is neat, but the thing that really gives me a fun sense of philosophical vertigo is Deep Time. My favourite exploration of that is the video Timelapse of the Future, which shows time passing at a rate that doubles every five seconds (ie, time is passing at a rate of one year per second for five seconds, then two years per second for the next five, then four years per second, etc.)
The last stars in the universe go dark at around the 5-minute mark. The video as a whole is about 30 minutes long.
If you want a more uplifting view of that future, Isaac Arthur's Civilizations at the End of Time playlist goes into great detail about how intelligent life can persist throughout that entire duration and still have a good time.
Wow I just so happened to jump back on here and check out the Timelapse video right as my THC tablet kicked in. 10/10 highly recommend the experience, no pun intended.
I admittedly have not read a lot of Asimov but The Last Question is one of the few stories I've read in full (it helps that it's a short story) and I absolutely loved it!
Methane gas absorbs almost all the sunlight falling on the atmosphere at this picture’s specific infrared wavelength (3.23 microns). As a result, Saturn’s familiar striped patterns aren’t visible because the methane-rich upper atmosphere blocks our view of the primary clouds. Instead, Saturn’s disk appears dark, and we see features associated with high-altitude stratospheric aerosols, including large, dark, and diffuse structures in Saturn’s northern hemisphere that don’t align with the planet’s lines of latitude. Unlike Saturn's atmosphere, its rings lack methane, so at this infrared wavelength, they are no darker than usual and thus easily outshine the darkened planet.
Terraforming the moon isn't possible. There is no atmosphere. The article is using the term terraforming wrong. It specifically means changing an entire planet. Building a base with a greenhouse isn't terraforming.
I’m not sure that a “minor to moderate” storm qualifies as “TERRIFYING”, but they got a click out of it. (criticisms aside, space weather is a really cool subject!)
There is so much to love about Mars. I would also like to add that its absolutely gorgeous from orbit AND the surface. Sure Jupiter looks great from Orbit, but I doubt we will ever take a cool photo from deep in the atmosphere. Its also distinct from the other planets when viewed with the naked eye from earth because of its very notable red tint.
Why bother terraforming planets, or settling them at all? With current tech we could capture an asteroid, throw it into an Aldrin Cycler orbit, and hollow it out into an O'Neil Cylinder. Boom, instant colony which can hold hundreds of millions of people and naturally cycles between near Earth and near Mars every couple years. Repeat as necessary.
I definitely think this is the cooler way to go. You could even put engines on them so that they could migrate around (slowly; I'm envisioning engines that modify their orbits, not allow for free motion). We could have space stations orbiting Mars and the Moon coordinating drones below for research and asteroid habs that can visit these stations for transfers.
But as the article/book points out, there are still a ton of questions we need to answer before that is possible.
Yeah, I think that is a very slept-on concept. There are MANY asteroids in our system which could serve the purpose. We actually have enough room in this system for nearly infinite humans if it's done that way.
Part of the point they raise is exactly this problem, people like to say “someone” or “some company” etc but it’s literally a problem with the idea, who gets to do it? Who are we trusting with this life destroying capability? The reality of the idea demands we consider these questions.
Any government with launch capability, I guess. I get what you're saying but this is already how it works. NASA recently modified the orbit of an asteroid and I'm sure they're already studying how to do more. Any govt with launch capability probably already has access to nukes, though, so I don't think this is an existential threat.
So if tomorrow Putin said he was going to make a space colony by altering an asteroid orbit and secretly had the capability, you’re confident that’s not a serious problem you’re just handwaving?
Yes asteroids are an existential threat. This us the exact problem with these discussions, they’re being talked about like these spherical cows in a vacuum, but these are real serious things that need to be discussed. Space law isn’t settled, there’s almost no confidence this type of space settlement doesn’t massively increase our existential risk.
Putin already has nukes. They are a much more immediate existential threat and we have a framework in place to deal with it. I also don't know what you're proposing. If any entity has the capability to move an asteroid, how do you propose we stop them? NASA has already moved an asteroid and they didn't ask for anybody's permission.
They didn’t move an asteroid towards earth, or near it. Nukes are nowhere near the destructive power of an asteroid, and why add another threat at all?? like just why bother add a threat. You are better off building a city at the bottom of the ocean.
There’s just such a fundamental disconnect here about the proposal to just “move an asteroid and build a space hab there lol ez” and addressing the geopolitical, medical, and engineering problems that actually raises. These are real genuine questions with geopolitical ramifications that y’all are just handwaving away.
Look I want sieve settlements too, but it’s not doing anybody any good anymore to pretend anything about it is solved, easy, or even has good reasons to happen right now.
I'm not handwaving them away. We were having a fun conversation about theoretical concepts and you jumped in with "what about madmen who wanna destroy the world". I have no political power on the global stage so that question is so far outside my scope that it's absurd.
You're also handwaving away the fact that there's nothing we can do. It doesn't matter how settled space law gets. If somebody with the capability wants to do that, they will unless someone else forcibly stops them. Laws won't matter at that point (see all the humanitarian crises going on right now despite being against some law and how most of the world isn't actively stopping them)
And, yes, NASA tested asteroid redirection on an inconsequential asteroid. But that was a choice and now we know they have the capability. We're not adding a threat, it's already there.
Lastly, if you read my other comments in this thread and crossposted threads, you'll see me reiterating that the point of this article is that there are a ton of unanswered questions about space colonization and I don't think it's going to happen in our lifetimes. There's plenty of time for you to figure out how to write a law to stop physics/math or outlaw rocketry or whatever. So excuse me if I continue to imagine cool sci-fi futures.
I responded to a comment saying “but what about this” and pointed out that it doesn’t actually address any of the problems with space settlements.
The question is literally in the scope of this article because it’s one of the main topics the weinersmiths discuss! In a post about the book where they discuss that!
And space law does matter. The oceans, Antarctica, both are examples of very similar space law that’s been respected to date. This wacky pessimistic “space will be the wild west” is frankly absurd. It’s an easy zero thought answer that takes no effort to consider and takes no real world history into account, just vague “world bad mkay”
There’s a huge difference between dart and redirecting an asteroid to a specific near earth orbit. These are not comparable existential threats.
Yes! The article is about the exact unanswered questions like what I’ve brought up here. Your push back is just confusing and just seems overly defensive rather than engaging with the exact answered questions that are the topic of discussion.
And we may be settling space anywhere from ten to hundreds of years from now, but this isn’t some “haha what if” it’s genuinely a current topic of discussion due to the ever increasing feasibility.
pointed out that it doesn’t actually address any of the problems with space settlements.
It does address some of the problems. We already have a lot of the capability. Like I've said, moving an asteroid has already been demonstrated. Capping the dig sites makes it reasonable to maintain an atmosphere inside the hollow body of the asteroid and the body of the asteroid protects inhabitants from radiation. We can build soil using basic principles we've used for millennia here on Earth and raise crops so the hab could possibly be self sustaining. This addresses most of the scientific issues the article presents.
You keep ignoring a lot of what I'm saying so it feels like you're not actually arguing with me and this is a personal bugaboo for you. I never said "space will be the wild west". There are already laws in place that work and prevent a lot of bad things. What I was trying to get across is that laws don't actually stop people from doing bad things. Putin invaded Ukraine, Israel is bombing civilians, etc, even though those are against international laws. The laws are a deterrent but can't actually stop someone. And the international community has shown they will not forcibly stop countries from breaking these laws. What would stop people from doing something like this is the same as what currently stops countries from using nukes.
There’s a huge difference between dart and redirecting an asteroid to a specific near earth orbit. These are not comparable existential threats.
They redirected an asteroid into an orbit farther from Earth. That's not a huge difference from bringing its orbit closer to Earth.
My push back is because we are just randos on the internet having a fun conversation about hypothetical far futures, not an organization with space launch capabilities, and you started yelling at us for being irresponsible with existential threats. No matter how this argument here end, nothing will change in the status of space law and the ability to ram asteroids into Earth. So we wanted to spend our time theorizing about the fun questions and there's no international law requiring us to submit a thesis on how we would prevent a global apocalypse before we play armchair scientist/explorer.
There’s just so much wrong here, and so much absurdity.
And really, “were just randos so I won’t engage with the topic of the post and how dare you for ruining our fun because surely nobody should be remotely serious in their conversations about something that may be killing people within our lifetime” just ain’t the argument you think it is.
Again, you keep avoiding replying directly to my points. Can you explain to me what's wrong or absurd about my post?
so I won’t engage with the topic
I've been engaging with you. I'm trying to understand what exactly you want to happen. You keep mentioning how dangerous asteroids are and then casting my responses as "lol ez" or "world bad mkay" I just don't understand what you want here. Are we not allowed to talk about asteroid habs at all because there is a hypothetical danger to them? I don't know how to prevent people from crashing an asteroid into the Earth. But I still think the idea of asteroid habs is interesting and, because I'm not actually moving an asteroid myself, I don't think that's dangerous.
We're already entrusting the safety of ourselves and everyone else on this planet to governments and corporations, every day. This particular concept doesn't inherently carry more risk than, say, the keeping and storing of nuclear weapons all over the planet or research into biological warfare conducted by just about every country - in fact, the risks of asteroid harvesting could (and very likely would) be far less than those things.
One thing to make clear - "near Earth orbit" does NOT mean "low Earth orbit". Near Earth can imply a Lagrange point, lunar orbit, cycler orbit, etc. There are many ways to store something like a large asteroid in a way that would be just as safe as having a natural satellite (the moon) or having nothing there at all, so this is not really a limiting factor. There is a vanishingly small chance that a captured asteroid would hit Earth - that's simply just extremely unlikely unless you were trying to do it on purpose. That's a whole other topic - kinetic bombardment may be a real problem in the future, especially if we don't pursue space infrastructure while another nation / group does. But you wouldn't need big asteroids for that - something the size of a city block would do just fine.
So, who will do the asteroid wrangling first? Probably SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, or some other space agency or nation which emerges as a power in space over the coming century. I don't think this is actually a very important question overall and especially right now, since we don't have any real space infrastructure to speak of at the moment. There is also nothing illegal about doing it - anyone could capture an asteroid and return it to orbit the Earth, right now. Except if they do that (actually insert it into Earth's orbit), it would fall under the same classification as the Moon and would become the property of all humanity. This is why such an asteroid would likely not orbit the Earth itself - maybe the Moon or another close point we can easily access.
But, one thing is certain - someone (yes, that terrifying unknown) is going to do it. Even if it's just for mining purposes, as long as we continue to advance as a species, we'll be moving big rocks around the system eventually. This idea may seem outlandish to someone who hasn't considered it, but the truth is that we have the tech to do it right now, it's not that complex, and there are less risks than projects we're already doing now.
As for why? Well, ending the resource limitations of our species, having access to nearly limitless energy, and allowing all of mankind to live at the same level of abundance and prosperity seem like pretty good reasons to me. Right now our whole species is standing shoulder to shoulder in a single room, arguing about the resources inside of that room and who should be in charge of them, and basically nobody is even thinking about opening a door and seeing what's on the other side of it.
Exactly who does it and how it’s responded to are incredibly important for the future of space.
near earth orbit ≠ Leo
Sure. Not necessary for the existential risk to be dire.
moving asteroids around
Yes, something which carries inherent and extreme inherent risk as the effort required to toss one into earth’s gravity well is essentially the same as putting it anywhere else.
someone who hasn’t considered it before
I certainly imagine you’re not trying to implicate me with that one.
reasons why
None of those are likely reasons for asteroid wrangling. You’re better off settling the bottom of the ocean. Literally. So much better off. As much as this idea of building radiation bombarded, almost entirely medically unresearched, cramped, expensive beyond belief space stations sounds nice, we’re probably better off spending those dollars just building more apartments and improving farming technologies for a while. There’s no conceivable future where building space settlements solves a single current day issue.
There is not a single resource in space valuable enough to justify mining it. Asteroids with ppm concentrations of ore are good only for settlers because it’s that hard to get resources out to them across the months those voyages would take from earth.
Asteroids only really look like a valid resource when you’re building a dyson swarm and you’re not excited about peeling off the earth’s crust.
NASA should stop relying on contractors to do all their project management, design, and manpower. Reagan fucked over most of government, but especially NASA by requiring that nearly all functions be bid out to commercial sources. Now congress not only fights over where the contact administration is located (aka the various Space Centers, scattered into as many congressional districts as possible regardless of efficiency) but which fat-cat, for profit entities will get those contracts. NASAs entire mission now is just wealth program for contractors.
SLS seems like it has 0 benefits of being public or private. NASA doesn’t own the full design anymore, so they can’t even take it to other manufacturers, but they also aren’t insulated from any cost issues, and the manufacturers have no incentive to improve anything. It really feels like the worst of both worlds.
As a side note, I’m still pretty new to the industry (as in, new to working in, but having followed it for a lot longer) and the program management and systems engineering contracting/outsourcing going on was mindboggling to me when I started to hear about it from former coworkers moving into those roles. Of all the things to outsource, those two things seem like the last two that really need to stay in house.
No sound bite does the system justice. I started my career with a decade at a NASA center, lucky beyond my stars to end up in a small group of ~30 engineers and scientists who did small satellites within a group (mech, elec, struct, avionics - everything) that shared an old high-bay facility with the in-house machine shop. Contractors augmented the civil service workforce by about a factor of 2-3 if I had to guess. None of the purported benefits of contracting existed - nobody was ever laid off during slow times, the same contractor was awarded a time-and-materials contract every year and when a “new bidder” technically won, it usually turned out to be an outfit who saved 1% and hired all the people from the old contractor. The private sector workers got paid a bit more, got a couple days fewer annual leave, and similar benefits. We paid an additional 60-80% overhead to the contractor for their side of management, accounting, and administrative costs, about a quarter to half of which we’d have saved if it were done in-house.
But I digress. The reality is that the SLS is essentially a private, for-profit operation run by contractors on a cost-plus basis to NASA internal technical standards with a heap of oversight and a 500% add-on for must-not-fail methodology. The system cannot be fixed because there are 535 people who have 435 competing requirements for the results of the organization. Specifically, the most important mission of NASA, to the people directing the spending, is that at least some of the money gets spend in their personal backyard. Space exploration and earth sciences are cool, but not a single of those 535 money managers keeps their job based on the technical success of NASA projects. Being beholden to a single contractor for services is a dangerous game, but “winning” a contract requires that someone beat out all other offers. Ironically, having a single big contractor, like the aggregation that was USA (United Space Alliance) was cheered for the efficiency of having a single entity, and yet the option of bringing all of that expertise into NASA itself was “inefficient government largess”.
Anyway, there are a lot of things wrong with the space program in general due to the way it is managed. Luckily, the people - scientists, engineers, technicians, etc. - are generally dedicated to their mission and the advancement of science so we still manage to do impossible things before they become commonplace to people on the outside. It’s easy to overlook the accomplishments of the past when viewed through the lens of MEMS and nearly unlimited processor power, but the things NASA did (well before I was there) with the technology at hand really is amazing.
The moon is huge, nothing lives there and it’s unlikely we’ll reach levels of trash visible from earth in the near future. So lunar surface pollution is probably one of the smallest environmental concerns of all time.
This is basically what's thought to have happened with proto-Earth and Theia in one of the main Moon-creation hypotheses.
Main planet forms, creating a gravity well. Smaller clump forms at a Lagrange point of that gravity well. Then it gathers too much material or something else causes a destabilisation of the Lagrange point, causing the smaller, possibly now well-formed clump, to fall towards the Lagrange centre, i.e. the main planet.
In Earth's case, the clump was Theia and the resulting collision exchanged material and ultimately spat out the Earth and the Moon.
Maybe the same will happen in this burgeoning system, but we might be waiting a while to see.
It's at the L5 point and currently forming, I don't know if it's possible but I really hope they can guess at the likely end mass of each proto planet in the system.
Will this planet exceed the mass ratio for stability at L5? What happens to the the orbits when the two gas giants form?
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