Moore's law for proverbs

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by ChapmanF, Jul 26, 2026 at 8:56 PM.

  1. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    Experts Met at MIT to Discuss The Possibility of Alien Tech Around Black Holes. Here's What Was Discussed : ScienceAlert

    "It turns out that at these distance scales, if you want to transmit a zettabyte of information, it's just faster to sling your hard drive at it instead of trying to beam the information yourself."​

    seems to differ only in scale from one I knew in my early career:

    "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag tapes."​
     
  2. PriusCamper

    PriusCamper Senior Member

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    Black holes are indeed the universe's greatest subatomic hard drives... Stacking data in its most compacted form possible, as in every atom of the planet we live on and all its recorded history from the earliest gases and billions of years of lived experience is innevitably turned into a black hole that will be compressed down into a sphere of about 0.69 inches, yet it would still have the same weight and relative gravity as it does right now. That's heavy man, real heavy! Black holes are like the ultimate defrag utility for our universe's hard drive!
     
    #2 PriusCamper, Jul 27, 2026 at 1:38 AM
    Last edited: Jul 27, 2026 at 1:45 AM
  3. Mendel Leisk

    Mendel Leisk MMX GEN III

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    If we can include neutron stars, a physicist was describing (ok, on YouTube) that if you were unfortunate enough to be “standing” on one, you would be quickly disassembled, due to the extreme increase in gravity from your head to feet.

    It occurred to me, while nowhere near as extreme, there must be a little bit of the same phenomenon happening, here on our relatively light-and-fluffy Earth.
     
    #3 Mendel Leisk, Jul 27, 2026 at 9:20 AM
    Last edited: Jul 27, 2026 at 5:53 PM
    futurist and PriusCamper like this.
  4. Mr.Vanvandenburg

    Mr.Vanvandenburg Senior Member

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    Thus we have Star Trek episodes to watch and imagine with and become a “Star Trek junkie.” Beaming is disassembling and reassembling, we watch it and believe it.
     
  5. PriusCamper

    PriusCamper Senior Member

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    China just had a huge breakthrough in instantaneous quantum transfer of particles from one location to the next. Turns out they're able to transfer way more than anyone thought possible, but still a long ways to go...
     
  6. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    maybe they could transfer xing-xing to another planet
     
  7. John321

    John321 Senior Member

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  8. Mr.Vanvandenburg

    Mr.Vanvandenburg Senior Member

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    Good, we won’t need straits of hormuzzes.
     
  9. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    Black Holes would serve as Write-Only Memories. Bit Buckets.

    Quantum Mechanics (QM) requires that information cannot be destroyed, but QM and General Relatively (GR) have several unresolved contradictions, or paradoxes, and black hole event horizons are where some of problems occur. It is possible that Hawking Radiation might eventually help resolve this paradox.

    Under GR, the matter and energy fallen into black holes do not stop as a compact solid sphere, but collapse all the way down to a singular point. That "sphere" around that point is the event horizon, from which nothing can burp back out. QM doesn't seem to allow the same description, instead suggesting a hard-surface firewall at the event horizon.

    An Earth-mass BH, if such exists (possibly created during the Big Bang, no known process since) would indeed be the size of a penny or marble. A Sun-mass block hole would be about 6 km across. The heaviest known galactic BH is somewhere around 60 billion solar masses, making its event horizon much larger than our Sun's Kuiper Belt, but smaller than the Oort Cloud. Its event horizon's circumference would be more than a light-month.

    From discussions I remember very long ago, neutron stars can have both mountain ranges and atmospheres, but the strong gravity limits their heights to about a centimeter or so.

    Later, I read that astronomers even obtained some spectroscopic measurements of a neutron star's atmosphere, illuminated from below by hydrogen-burning fusion on the star's surface. These stars can accrete hydrogen drawn off a companion star, building up a thin surface layer of hydrogen, which then ignites as a hydrogen bomb-like fusion reaction, creating a bright flare. Since these stars commonly rotate fairly rapidly, tens to even a thousand revolutions per second, the flare becomes a visible flash each time it rotates around the near side.

    Disappearance is different than transfer from one known location to another.