At least 4.367 light years, yeah? ;-> Y'know, we could do a Gallifreyan Matrix or New Earth Testimony type database, but that would involve lots and lots and lots and lots of time travel... :-/ Uwk
Proxima Centauri, a M type star, is a bit closer than the Alpha Centauri A-B system. Then there is also Barnard's Star which is also a type M star. Alpha system is around 4.5 light years, I think I read ba more accurate measurment, but I don't remember it. Proxima is around 4.2 light years away. Not sure the distance of Barnard's Star. It moves quicker than most stars do. If you want to see the scale of our galaxy and universe, note that most red dwarf stars are not shown, here is a site: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/
Its 5.978 light years to Barnard's Star from Earth. Then you have Wolf 359 at 7.78 light years from Earth.
I didn't eat the Skittles, because I do not like Skittles, I just like Green. I took the Skittles and made this Picture of Ttobey *points to picture of Ttobey* by gluing the Skittles to a stretched canvas and then spraying them with a lacquer seal!!
And to think, there are theories about the multiverse... ;-> Uwk who can't help but see a petri dish full of sand grains at that last scale...
I like the non-standard Skittles to eat, like when they emphasize different flavor groups. Basically, anything that tastes halfway natural in a "big brand" American candy, I'll appreciate. ;-> Uwk who still way prefers Jelly Bellies
Well, thats just one universe. Still plenty of theories, some by physicists, who claim there are multiple universes.
Good Afternoon ROAD TRIPPERS!!! How are you enjoying the Extraterrestrial Highway? I am happy that Schmet suggested doing the entire Highway instead of just the couple of stops that I had on the Itinerary. Its a good thing she suggested it when she did since the Alien Research Center Gift Shop is open on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. I don't know about the rest of you, but I bought a ton of stuff in the gift shop, I will have Alien themed things coming out my ears for the next decade!! I don't care for Jerky but I hope those of you that do stocked up on tons of it as you will not find Jerky with names like that anywhere else in the world. And our selfies and group shots in front of the sign will be fond memories forever. The back gate of Area 51 was very interesting. We were observed by cameras every second from the time we turned on the road until we were well out of the area. There are parking areas on both sides of the road outside of the gate and desert camo dressed soldiers at the gate, if the soldiers are photographed and the photos are published, the soldiers lose their jobs. So please, if anybody took photos of them, please do not publish them. The number of different cameras and antennas and other unknown devices that can be seen with the naked eye, with binoculars, with a monoscope or a telescopic lens is incredible. There are devices out there that I have never seen before, what they would be used for I have no idea. When we left the Area 51 Back Gate, we continued our Travel to the Crystal Wash Rock Art. Petroglyphs are the dominant rock art form at Crystal Wash and they are etched onto rockfaces by pecking, abrading, scratching, or a combination of these techniques. Pictographs, or painted rock art, is only represented in small quantities at Crystal Wash. A third type of rock art known as cupules or pit-and-groove rock art, are cuplike depressions or pits in boulders and are thought to be the oldest form of rock art, first appearing in parts of the Great Basin 7000 years ago. Most of the petroglyphs are being abraded away by time and the elements but you can still see an amazing number of them. They seem to indicate that this wash was a travel route to another destination. Next we visited Mount Irish. We went to the Petroglyph site. From there, those out for adventure were able to hike to the summit of Mount Irish Proper where you can see further into area 51 and even with a cell phone zoom get pictures of hangers and such that you cannot get from the back gate area. The Mount Irish petroglyph site is rich with Rock Art, with three distinct areas to explore. The numerous petroglyphs, along with scatters of chipped and ground stone, pottery and rock shelters, suggest the sites were occupied from 1000 B.C. to the 1860s. Most of the petroglyphs are of the Great Basin Representational stylem (A.D. 1-1500) often depicting bighorn sheep and mule deer. There is an abundance of wildlife in this area which is a conservation area, protected by the State of Nevada. Next we went to The Shooting Gallery. This is another prehistoric Rock Art Sites, Hunting Sites, and Camp Sites. Hunter gatherers made short duration visits repeatedly over a millennia to the Shooting Gallery, leaving behind rock art and the remains of their daily lives. Making a living in this area required a deep knowledge of the environment’s plant and animal resources. This included knowing when was the best time to relocate campsites to take advantage of seasonally available resources. The Shooting Gallery was used as far back as 6,000 years ago but was most intensively used during the past 3,000 years. Small groups of related households visited the area to hunt, gather wild plants, and to make and use rock art. During the winter these family households congregated with other household in large lowland villages. Two styles of rock art can be found in the Shooting Gallery. By far the most common is Basin and Range traditional art that includes abstract designs, stick-figure anthropomorphs, and a range of animals but most commonly bighorn sheep figures. The Shooting Gallery contains one of the largest concentrations of bighorn sheep figures in eastern Nevada with hundreds of depictions of this animal made singly or in groups on tuff outcrops. This style is of great antiquity and continued to be made by hunter gatherers into the nineteenth century. The second rock art style is much rarer and is only found in Lincoln County. This is the Pahranagat Style, a schematic way of depicting people as either decorated rectangles (usually without heads) or as solid pecked oval or rectangular forms that have hands with long fingers, a short line protruding from the top of the head and eyes indicated by negative space. Only the decorated rectangular type (or pattern body anthropomorph [PBA]) is found in the Shooting Gallery area. This style appears to have been made from around 3,000-800 years ago. Major concentrations of this style are found in Pahranagat Valley and the Mount Irish Archaeological District. This is the first time I have ever seen petroglyphs like these. During all my geology classes they never taught about this style of petroglyph. I took a lot of pictures of these so I can do a lot of research when the road trip is over. Then we journeyed to Tikaboo Peak. From the summit, which is 1000 feet up slippery shale, I am glad we have teleporters, your reward is a stunning view of the Tikaboo Valley, and of course, the Holy Grail, Area 51. While not much to see except some white buildings, most of which require binoculars to get a good peek at, your imagination can run wild with fantasies of the extraterrestrial wonders located within. Finally, it was time to hit Rachel, Nevada and have a gander and some lunch!!! The only service in Rachel is the Little A'Le'Inn a restaurant/gift shop/ motel. There are no gas stations or grocery stores in town. After lunch we continued on our way. No updates for those yet as I am to busy seeing them to write about them yet. We have Lunar Crater, Frenchy Lake, and Tonopah which is where we will be having cocktails and dinner at the Tonopah Brewing Company after scoping out the town a bit. Then porting back to Reno to relax in our hotel.
What do you all think of this theory? This is from one of my Astrophysics texts: Boltzmann Brains The Boltzmann brain argument suggests that it is more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a false memory of having existed in our universe) than it is for our universe to have come about in the way modern science thinks it actually did. It was first proposed as a reductio ad absurdum response to Ludwig Boltzmann's early explanation for the low-entropy state of our universe. In this physics thought experiment, a Boltzmann brain is a fully formed brain, complete with memories of a full human life in our universe, that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Theoretically over a period of time on the order of hundreds of billions of years, by sheer chance atoms in a void could spontaneously come together in such a way as to assemble a functioning human brain. Like any brain in such circumstances, it would almost immediately stop functioning and begin to deteriorate. The idea is ironically named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who in 1896 published a theory that tried to account for the fact that we find ourselves in a universe that is not as chaotic as the budding field of thermodynamics seemed to predict. He offered several explanations, one of them being that the universe, even one that is fully random (or at thermal equilibrium), would spontaneously fluctuate to a more ordered (or low-entropy) state. One criticism of this "Boltzmann universe" hypothesis is that the most common thermal fluctuations are as close to equilibrium overall as possible; thus, by any reasonable criterion, actual humans in the actual universe would be vastly less likely than "Boltzmann brains" existing alone in an empty universe. Boltzmann brains gained new relevance around 2002, when some cosmologists started to become concerned that, in many existing theories about the Universe, human brains in the current Universe appear to be vastly outnumbered by Boltzmann brains in the future Universe who, by chance, have exactly the same perceptions that we do; this leads to the conclusion that statistically we ourselves are likely to be Boltzmann brains. Such a reductio ad absurdum argument is sometimes used to argue against certain theories of the Universe. When applied to more recent theories about the multiverse, Boltzmann brain arguments are part of the unsolved measure problem of cosmology.
Oh, I dunno, I like the idea of a Big Crunch->Big Bang->Big Crunch->etc. kind of theory, at least for our universe. So we're expanding now, but black holes, if they absorb each other, are apparently additive afterwards: if a 25 bajillion (technical term ;->) ton black hole "eats" a 15 bajillion ton black hole, the end result is a 40 bajillion ton black hole (if neither evaporates eventually, like Hawking thought could happen). That's a lot of mass. And spiral galaxies, of which there are a gracious plenty, seem to have hypermassive black holes at their cores (which is why, when I was a little kid and saw my first depiction of a spiral galaxy, immediately went, "Hey, that looks like water going down a drain!" long before anyone thought there might be a black hole there [at least among the public; dunno what the astronomers were doing back then, bit before Carl Sagan and /Cosmos/]... ;->), which will probably eventually eat all their orbiting stars (and smaller black holes) and gobble up nearby dwarf galaxies and local star clusters nearby, gaining in mass. Well! You get enough black holes gobbling up things, including dark matter and each other, pretty soon (relatively speaking [heh!]), you'll have a universe full of just those. How much mass would have to be assimilated into one small area to go critical? Uwk who also likes the idea of a multiverse, a universe of universes
Good Morning ROAD TRIPPERS!!! Today is our last day in Reno, Nevada. The rest of our afternoon on the Extraterrestrial Highway was just as unique as the morning and early afternoon. Lunar Crater National Natural Landmark is a Volcanic field covering 100 square miles and contains cinder cones, lava outcroppings, elongated fissures, ash hills, and the 430 foot deep Lunar Crater which is a maar. A maar is a shallow, broad crater formed by explosive eruptions close to ground level, usually caused by heating of subterranean water. After speaking with the folks at the Little A'Le'Inn, I thought it better to cancel the stop at Frenchy Lake, which is not truly a lake in natural terms, but a mostly man-made reservoir that is stocked with fish by the State of Nevada, and put that time to better use moving straight on to Tonopah and exploring more of the town there before cocktails and dinner. Tonopah was interesting to say the least. The Clown Motel seems to be the big draw. I was extremely happy we were not staying the night. Did I say, I do not like clowns? They have a shopping and gambling complex, it has a taxidermied bear in it named James, everybody is supposed to say hello to James, "hi James *waves*". There are other stores, this is just the largest complex, like a mall with a bunch of nickle slots, James the taxidermied bear, and a myriad of other taxidermied animals. We visited The Tonopah Historic Mining Park which had a few miles of self-guided trails and plenty of old facilities to explore. Staring down one of the open shafts, we started to understand what these mines must have been like to work in during the heyday of their production, and why the nearby cemetery is full of its former employees. Speaking of the cemetary, we visited the Old Tonopah Cemetery. The Old Tonopah Cemetary was founded on May 7, 1901 with the burial of John Randel Weeks, and was active until April 1911 when the number of dead outgrew the tiny plot, and the growing town required a new cemetery. Some three hundred people are interred at the old location, including many of Tonopah’s pioneer residents, many of whom fell victim to the mysterious 1902 “Tonopah Plague”, the cause of which still remains a mystery. Other eternal residents include some fourteen miners who fell victim to the Tonopah-Belmont Mine Fire of February 23, 1911, among them Big Bill Murphy who died saving miners at age 28, and Nye County Sheriff Thomas Logan, killed in a shoot-out in a Manhattan bordello. The Old Tonopah Cemetary is right next door to the Clown Motel, convenient huh? This town actually has a who's who list of visitors, this is a copy of a clipping I picked up during our visit: A list of those who’ve visited the town reads like a Who’s Who of American West mythos. Wyatt Earp and his wife came through (“The sagebrush was rapidly giving way to streets and buildings” Josephine Earp wrote in her memoir). Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey was robbed in a bar there after a $100 prize fight. In the ’50s, Barbara Graham, “The Butcher of Burbank,” passed some time in local haunts before heading to LA and committing crimes later depicted in a Susan Heyward movie called I Want to Live. During his reclusive Desert Inn years, Howard Hughes (or one of his lackeys) bought stakes in nearby mines, but as with most of Hughes’ late-in-life ventures, nothing much came from them. Finally, we headed to the Tonopah Brewing Company for cocktails/drinks and dinner before heading back to Reno to shower and relax after a very long day. Of course being an insomniac, I could not sit still or sleep, so I went and played penny slots and won $400.00..... Today is a take it easy day. The only thing left on my list of must sees is the National Bowling Stadium. We will depart our hotel for the Stadium at 10 am local time. Then we will be visiting the National Automobile Museum. Then we can stop and have lunch. Then I thought we might visit the Fleischmann Planetarium & Science Center and The Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum. This will give us a nice leisurely day, we can take as long at each of the 4 places as we wish with our time delays. I have scheduled cocktail hour for 7 pm and dinner for 8 pm at The Brew Brothers in The El Dorado Hotel and Casino in Reno. *casts the group speed buff, tells everybody to take some hats from the table next to her and some hat boxes from the table next to that, the hats have a Pennywise the Clown, A Large Metallic Alien like at the Alien Research Center, Some Petroglyphs like at Mount Irish, Some Tombstone Etchings from The Old Tonopah Cemetary, some Pictographs, and the Extraterrestrial Highway Sign, triple checks and adjusts the time delays before relocking the security cover, stealths over and puts a hat on Ttobey with a Large Metallic Alien on it, stealths back to her spot, looks back at Ttobey and giggles before giving the thumbs up, then shouts* Alrighty ROAD TRIPPERS, I yammered on and made us about 15 minutes late leaving, its a good thing its a leisurely day. If you see anything while we are meandering about today that you wish to stop and look at a bit closer, just give a shout!!! EDIT: Tomorrow, we will be porting to Winslow, Arizona and visiting Meteor crater, then over to the Grand Canyon where we will be spending our time in Arizona at the Grand Canyon Lodge.
Well, I'll just reference 'string theory' which I don't understand but it may fit how this universe came about. As far as I know, blackholes were theoretical, until an infrared telescope saw into the center of out galaxy fairly recently and spotted an area where stars are zooming along at incredible speeds, orbiting nothing. Turns out, its a black hole. Which, using a planet wide array of radio telescopes, was finall, well the outer edges of it, proving it is really there. I remember blackholes were mentioned in 1950s science fiction, before that they were called something else I don't remember, and scientists said it was just ficiton don't be silly. Then theoretical physicists went over the idea, and found it plausible. Apparently upsetting the rest of the physicists, including some theoretical physicists. Then evidence was found for them being in the center of all galaxies. Watching some documentaries from 20 years ago about this, if you can find them, shows them politely disagreenig with each other. Sort of politely. Anyway, they do exist. Ahem, on to the road near Rachel, NV. Gero drives his hover car around, and some folks ask him where he got it. "Its imaginary. Just take the negative square root of infinity. Then if it doesn't appear, you didn't use enough decimal places" ( I just made that up. ) Pictographs. Hmmm... I wonder if some of my distant cousins drew those...
When I was a child, my dad preferred to drive at night. (It couldn't have had anything to do with the three little girls in the back seat, could it?) I have memories of waking in the middle of the night, and going in to see White King, World's Largest Dead Polar Bear in Elko, NV. We stopped every time we drove through, I think.
My mother shocked us kids upon more than one occasion. We could never figure out where she got the idea, but this is what happened. We would go to an amusement park. We thought to go on the rides. She just wanted to look around and maybe go on some rides. The cashier at the entrance politely told her there was an admission fee to get in. What did we do ?! We drove home, never getting in. Anyway, I have been to amusement parks since then. And I pay the fee to get in. last stanza of a poem by Edgar Allen Poe: "Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride," The shade replied— "If you seek for Eldorado!"
When we were kids we would drive every summer from PA to Rhode Island. We stopped every time at a rock off the freeway that looked like a frog. It was called Frog Rock. I don't remember it looking that much like a frog but I bet it's still there. Well quick google search, it's still there. https://www.eastfordct.org/page/77
It has everything to do with the three little girls in back, roads at night are safer cause there are less idiots about.
