[ExI] LIGO is back online

Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com
Fri Dec 2 22:38:45 UTC 2016


On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 1:01 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> Eh, I think I missed that distance by a mere 3 orders of magnitude.  We
> would only need to look about 300 thousand light years out past the moon to
> gaze upon a sphere of volume giga cubic parsecs which could hide behind the
> moon.  Had we looked out my original mental calculation of 300 million light
> years, that moon-eclipsing sphere would be a billion giga cubic parsecs, or
> perhaps we could call it an exa-cubic parsec sphere, or a giga giga cubic
> parsec if we didn't mind risking getting the kids stirred up going around
> giga giga-ing everything until ya want to swat em.
>
> OK so that's why one should always do BOTECs with an actual B of the E.  I
> missed the distance by 3 orders of magnitude and the volume by 9 orders, oy.
>
> 300 thousand LY isn't that far away, a tenth of the way to the nearest major
> galaxy (not counting the dwarfs and local debris.)  The volume of the Milky
> Way (depending on how you count it, such as a sphere out to here and ignore
> everything outboard of us from the center of the galaxy) would be a couple
> thousand cubic mega-parsecs.
>
> Space is big.

What would you DO with all that bigness?

I imagine filling it with information about all the smallness we have
over here... down to every last planck volume of stuff we have inside
our heliosphere (for example).  I don't know how many bits it takes to
describe the salient details of a planck volume.  Maybe some of the
position information is inherently part of the map, so that the
position of a volume inside our heliosphere is exactly translated to a
planetary body that is sufficiently far away that it can be "hidden
behind" the planck volume it describes.  You can probably write a lot
of bits on a planetary-sized (or galaxy-sized) object but since you
don't have to write much about the actual position, you save a lot of
addressing info.

I know, this is a version of holograph theory but it's still
interesting to think about.



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