Mind boggling facts that make you go..

Scania said:
Of WWII yes, current ones - especially Russian - can go far deeper.

Penguins are crap at firing Torpedoes and Nuclear missiles - Fact! :p
Click to expand...

Typhoon tested to 400m. Deepest observed Emperor penguin 565m. Of course there's some leeway here because Russia might not make a point of accurately declaring the abilities of their war machines.

As I understand it (I'm certainly no expert) the reason for this is that there's simply no value in designing a military submarine to go any deeper. As long as they can get beneath a few thermoclines, the purpose of being underwater has been achieved.
 
Orionaut said:
(On another note, define "Intelligent Life")
Click to expand...
For context of discovery, any form of life that has emitted detectable transitions intentional or otherwise.

-westy- said:
Oh definitely, our lifespan is so relatively short that it's unlikely that other intelligent life is existing at this exact moment. However in the grand scheme of things it's unlikely that we are the only intelligent life to have existed.
Click to expand...
The charces are there is life exiting now, but being millions of light years away, so we'd only know of their existance millions of year after they transmitting the signal. We can never know where life is at this current time, only in the past.

In the same way we've been transmitting detectable transmition for under 150 years, so the only potential life forms to detect us would have to be within 150 light years of us.
 
bazzabear said:
Typhoon tested to 400m. Deepest observed Emperor penguin 565m. Of course there's some leeway here because Russia might not make a point of accurately declaring the abilities of their war machines.

As I understand it (I'm certainly no expert) the reason for this is that there's simply no value in designing a military submarine to go any deeper. As long as they can get beneath a few thermoclines, the purpose of being underwater has been achieved.
Click to expand...

The LR5 rescue sub can go to a depth of 650 m and it's NATO replacement is rated to 610 m for operations. These aren't offensive weaponised subs, but are military. :)
 
bazzabear said:
Typhoon tested to 400m. Deepest observed Emperor penguin 565m. Of course there's some leeway here because Russia might not make a point of accurately declaring the abilities of their war machines.

As I understand it (I'm certainly no expert) the reason for this is that there's simply no value in designing a military submarine to go any deeper. As long as they can get beneath a few thermoclines, the purpose of being underwater has been achieved.
Click to expand...
Russia’s Akula-class submarines have a maximum operating depth of 600 metres, and their “crush depth” is very much deeper again.
 
bazzabear said:
Typhoon tested to 400m.
Click to expand...

The amazing thing about that is that that is only just over twice the length of the sub.

One has this vision of subs being tiny machines in the depths of a vast ocean, and they are really not like that at all.

Screw up a crash dive and you hit crush depth within seconds! Not at all like the flooding scene in "Ice Station Zebra"!

:eek:
 
Sasahara said:
For context of discovery, any form of life that has emitted detectable transitions intentional or otherwise.


The charces are there is life exiting now, but being millions of light years away, so we'd only know of their existance millions of year after they transmitting the signal. We can never know where life is at this current time, only in the past.

In the same way we've been transmitting detectable transmition for under 150 years, so the only potential life forms to detect us would have to be within 150 light years of us.
Click to expand...

Exactly - by the time that we've detected them, chances are that they're extinct.
 
-westy- said:
There's actually a theory about this, that there's probably other intelligent life out there, or has been - but our life span as a species is very short in comparison to the universe; it's likely that other intelligent life has existed, but has inevitably evolved itself into extinction; perhaps the planet that this life was on is out of our reach, or by the time we've discovered it it's too late and that species has gone. Likewise the other way around, perhaps they're too far away to discover us.

With the expanse of the universe, I personally feel that there must be intelligent life out there somewhere, even if its millions of light years away.
Click to expand...

It's called the Fermi Paradox
 
The problem we have discovering alien life is that regardless of how common it may or may not be, we're actually looking for life that we can communicate with as relative equals, with enough in common to be able to recognise it as life. There are billions of species on this planet for instance, with only a relatively small amount of them being able to recognise other creatures in a shared way.

It could be that we have "alien" life in our own solar system, or even here on Earth that we can never hope to communicate with because we are too different.

The Fermi paradox is one example of this. So long as we're trapped in our own space-time continuum, the distances involved make contact with aliens improbable. But that won't hold true for all life in the universe.
 
Merlin5 said:
Interesting video. I watched it twice but didn't really grasp why finding alien life would mean that the filter is ahead of us.
Click to expand...

The more life we find in our solar system shows it’s common and if the stars are not yet colonised then the reason must be something else.

It’s entirely possible the stars may never be colonised. Even light speed travel is too slow for civilisation.
 
ScoTTyBEEE said:
The more life we find in our solar system shows it’s common and if the stars are not yet colonised then the reason must be something else.

It’s entirely possible the stars may never be colonised. Even light speed travel is too slow for civilisation.
Click to expand...


Voyager 2 has officially left the Solar system!:cool:

It is technically possible even now to build a colonising star ship.

30Ly is probably the practical limit.

The big problem is that we would have to strip mine the planet to build it.

Earth might have enough available resources to build two, at a pinch!

:/
 
Orionaut said:
Voyager 2 has officially left the Solar system!:cool:

It is technically possible even now to build a colonising star ship.

30Ly is probably the practical limit.

The big problem is that we would have to strip mine the planet to build it.

Earth might have enough available resources to build two, at a pinch!

:/
Click to expand...

By the time we are capable of building a colonising star ship we will be mining the solar system so resources won't be a problem.

With regards to not detecting any intelligent life I did read recently about some concerns people had that we hadn't detected any "signals" yet. I can't remember exactly but I think the point was we have powerful telescopes that detect light and radio waves from far distant times and even if developed civilisations had come and gone shouldn't we be detecting their radio waves, even if red shifted due to distance/time. But it is eerily silent out there.
 
Orionaut said:
Voyager 2 has officially left the Solar system!:cool:

It is technically possible even now to build a colonising star ship.

30Ly is probably the practical limit.

The big problem is that we would have to strip mine the planet to build it.

Earth might have enough available resources to build two, at a pinch!

:/
Click to expand...

Given the failure of even short term closed environment experiments on Earth, I'm not convinced that it's currently possible to build a closed environment that would function perfectly for the centuries (millenia?) it would take to reach 30LY with current propulsion technology. Even if we desolated the entire planet to do it.

Freakbro said:
By the time we are capable of building a colonising star ship we will be mining the solar system so resources won't be a problem.

With regards to not detecting any intelligent life I did read recently about some concerns people had that we hadn't detected any "signals" yet. I can't remember exactly but I think the point was we have powerful telescopes that detect light and radio waves from far distant times and even if developed civilisations had come and gone shouldn't we be detecting their radio waves, even if red shifted due to distance/time. But it is eerily silent out there.
Click to expand...

One possible explanation is that more advanced technology strongly tends to be more efficient, so technology even a bit more advanced than ours might well not uselessly throw loads of energy into space all over the place. If that is the case (and I think it would be) then we would only be able to detect a signal sent deliberately and in our direction.

Also, our current technology can only detect energy from a great distance if the source is strong enough. If a civilisation 1000 LY away had technology 1000 years ago that was roughly on a par with our modern technology, I don't think we'd be able to detect the waste emissions from their broadcast TV service, for example.
 
Angilion said:
One possible explanation is that more advanced technology strongly tends to be more efficient, so technology even a bit more advanced than ours might well not uselessly throw loads of energy into space all over the place. If that is the case (and I think it would be) then we would only be able to detect a signal sent deliberately and in our direction.

Also, our current technology can only detect energy from a great distance if the source is strong enough. If a civilisation 1000 LY away had technology 1000 years ago that was roughly on a par with our modern technology, I don't think we'd be able to detect the waste emissions from their broadcast TV service, for example.
Click to expand...

Yea, good points. It's just so damn hard to pin down some of those variables in the drake equation :p
 
Orionaut said:
The amazing thing about that is that that is only just over twice the length of the sub.

One has this vision of subs being tiny machines in the depths of a vast ocean, and they are really not like that at all.

Screw up a crash dive and you hit crush depth within seconds! Not at all like the flooding scene in "Ice Station Zebra"!

:eek:
Click to expand...
The Kursk sank in water shallower that the vessel was long, 100m vs 154m.
 
Orionaut said:
The amazing thing about that is that that is only just over twice the length of the sub.

One has this vision of subs being tiny machines in the depths of a vast ocean, and they are really not like that at all.

Screw up a crash dive and you hit crush depth within seconds! Not at all like the flooding scene in "Ice Station Zebra"!

:eek:
Click to expand...

I don't believe I've ever felt informed by media that submarines potter about only a couple of hundred metres down. The exaggerations are substantial.

Regarding the penguin... at the claimed 565m it was noticed at that would be a water pressure of 838psi... :eek:

Does it completely flatten its lungs to get there or what.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom