Wow, that is a lot of… stuff I don’t understand. Very cool though. Neat to have it all in one place.

Keep an eye on this site when Thursday rolls around.

‘Shadow biosphere’ is another term for it. Here’s a brief primer on the possibility: https://earthsky.org/earth/invisible-alien-life-exist-among-us-silicon-based/

It’s tempting from a worldbuilding standpoint to extrapolate from that to a full-fledged parallel civilization just out of phase with ours.

There’s also the ‘dark ecosystem’ concept, where those ancient life forms evolved on a parallel but separate track from ours and survived by virtue of being functionally invisible to us.

There is no way for us to have any information whatsoever about an object until the light (ie, information) has reached us. For all intents and purposes, from our local reference frame, it hasn’t happened until we observe.it.

We can only view it from where we are in spacetime , and thus all the date we have on it is from our own reference frame. Any predictions about its fate are based on OUR viewpoint, not that of a point many light years away.

There is literally no way for us to know if it has “already” gone supernova. That reality has not reached us yet, and is therefore nonsensical to talk about.

Moths will be vexed.

I don’t plan on dying (not much choice in the matter anyway, as a tentative believer in the quantum immortality clause of the many worlds theory), so I’m looking forward to it regardless. However, I would love to share the experience with my family, so if it goes off in the span of a typical lifetime from now, that’s even better.

While this is far from definitive, as stated in the article, it sure is damned exciting. Never mind solar eclipses, when was the last time a supernova was visible to the naked eye? I’ve read estimates that when Betelgeuse goes off, it might be bright enough to be visible during the daytime. That’s wild.

Significant? Probably not. But measurable? Yeah! 80 centimeters is infinitesimal on the scale of the entire planet. Personally, though, I think that’s cool as hell that we’re able to detect that small of a shift.

I am so glad I powered though GEB when I was young. It changed the way I see reality, and I’ve based my worldview on that foundation ever since.

Man, if I could only go back and tell my younger self to not forget all about the dream I had when I was a kid to work for NASA. Life happened, and I forgot I ever wanted that. This woman is living the dream.

The mobile web interface sucks diarrhea geysers, so yeah, those of us who use our phones more than our, ahem, desktop terminals prefer an app that’s actually optimized for mobile.

Might as well keep it simple and call it what it is without the branding. There is plenty about a site like reddit that we should carry forward, but plenty were should leave behind, and redundant jargon is the latter.