Talk:2783: Ruling Out

Wow. the amount of citation needed tags is excessive. Here's a fun idea, do like that SMBC comic and actually find and give citations. 172.69.70.72 19:41, 31 May 2023 (UTC)Bumpf

Definitely. I fixed one (it should have been after the comma), during some other edits, but was sorely tempted to remove maybe two of them to just keep the funniest one(s). Whichever that(/they) might be. I expect they'll almost all evaporate in a future edit, though, as there's plenty of editting bound to be done. 172.70.90.219 19:47, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Nice work to whomever on that! Xkcd never fails to make me smile if not LOL, and Explainxkcd never fails to teach cool facts. o7 172.69.134.147 21:28, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there has been serious scholarship about the habitable zone of some quasars. Let's see.... Here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2364/1/012057/pdf Not absolutely certain, but absolutely not ruled out. 172.69.134.24 20:02, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I think that Cueball's scientific team did a study to discount the possibilities of quasars in the habitable zone of a star, not of a habitable zone around a quasar.172.71.166.249 20:52, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

A quasar could exist in the habitable zone of a star, and if it was particularly dim, it wouldn't make the zone inhabitable. There's no minimum brightness for quasars, is there? For example, [1] defines quasars in terms of relative magnitude, so I don't see why a tiny black hole with a small but sufficient accretion disk in translunar orbit couldn't qualify. 172.69.134.162 20:54, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Relative to their entire galaxy! Fixed explanation. 162.158.166.175 09:02, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't know how to properly describe the length of time the Moon's orbit of the Earth has been known. If you think that the moon orbits the earth, but you also think the sun, stars, and planets orbit the earth, do you actually have any way to justifiably say that you know that the Moon orbits the Earth? Also, is it worth pointing out the reasons that the moon is such an obvious thing to know about (i.e. its visibility and prominence to the naked eye, its cultural significance,...)?162.158.174.183 20:59, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Interesting xkcd (sort-of) reference here. Back when What-If questions started being solicited, I sent in something (roughly) like "When trying to justify the original geocentric theory of the solar system, it is said that it had always 'looked like everything went round the Earth'... What would it have looked like if it had always looked like everything, including the Earth, went round the Sun?" ...which I'm pretty sure never got answered. Probably didn't spark enough possible scope for that good old xkcd magic. But I saw plenty of other good stuff, so no regrets on my part. 172.70.162.251 23:14, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I think your question was particularly difficult to answer in any way other than "Everything does go around the sun. To see what that looks like, look up." I suppose your question (if I'm understanding what you may be looking for) may be stated otherwise as "How different would the movement of our Solar System need to be in order to make it obvious that everything revolves around the sun (to a layperson observer on Earth)"? 172.70.206.194 14:50, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Y'know, I'm not entirely convinced that "tectonically active black holes" is something that we're actually capable of ruling out 172.68.174.190 22:33, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Even if the black hole is tectonically active, its activity is in one direction only: forward, where you can never catch up to it. The damage is extreme, but it's held safely in the boundary of the singularity. 172.70.130.203 01:10, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Did anyone else see the connection between this comic and the NASA briefing yesterday on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, their term for UFOs)? In the briefing they discussed that the approach they'd need to take is one of ruling out everything else instead of saying for certain that "this is a UAP". I think that's the entire intent of this joke - to comment on the NASA briefing. 162.158.175.113 11:50, 1 June 2023 (UTC)