Fifth Anniversary of a Cosmic Onslaught 162
The Bad Astronomer writes "Five years ago today (December 27, 2004), a vast wave of high-energy gamma and X-rays washed over the Earth, blinding satellites and partially ionizing the Earth's atmosphere. The culprit was a superflare from the magnetar SGR 1806-20, located 50,000 light years away. The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
Five year old news? (Score:2)
I guess slashdot's servers must by 5 light years away huh?
Re:Five year old news? (Score:5, Funny)
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Oddly enough that explains all the dupes one sees on slashdot quite well. They are being uploaded from various star systems, and teh editors don't see the final page until after they have already clicked on submit.
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You, sir, are a geek. Well, then... carry on!
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Cause (Score:2, Funny)
After investigating further, the scientists found that the the star likely ate at Chipotle earlier in the day.
50005 years ago? (Score:1)
Re:50005 years ago? (Score:4, Insightful)
It didn't happen 50005 years ago, it happened 5 years ago and 50000 light years away. There is no objective time.
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5 years ago is "Earth receive time".
50005 years ago is when it happened in Earth's frame of reference.
There is no objective time, but that's not a reason to go on a crusade and burn every calendar and clock we have. We're on Earth, so we use Earth's frame of reference.
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It didn't happen 50005 years ago, it happened 5 years ago and 50000 light years away. There is no objective time.
No, you've got it all wrong. It's happening as we speak. Just ask the photons.
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Aaah the joys of relativity.
I challenge you to figure out where and when the event actually happened relative to a given fixed position.
Everything is moving around, and no given reference point sees where everything really is at any given time, just where it was at any given time in the past (depending on distance).
Try not to think about it too hard. Your head will asplode.
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The reason your head will asplode is because you're still talking about stuff like "where everything really is" - which is meaningless.
50,000? (Score:2, Interesting)
50,000 light years away and did all that? Imagine if it was say only 500 ly. We are kind of lucky that we don't have any flaky stars nearby....or do we?.....(cue scary music).
Or sometimes far off stars merely have to "point" our way. Magnetism and other forces can focus radiation like a lens, and it may all point to a narrow spot in the sky. If your planet happens to be in the path of the beam, woes be. God doesn't play dice with the universe, he plays Russian Roulette. Time to buy some galactic insurance.
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Or 5 ly, like Alpha Centauri!
Eta Carinae (Score:5, Interesting)
50,000 light years away and did all that? Imagine if it was say only 500 ly. We are kind of lucky that we don't have any flaky stars nearby....or do we?.....(cue scary music).
Eta Carinae is expected to go supernova real soon (astronomical time scale - could be tomorrow, could be 10^6 years from now). It's less than 8000 ly away which is not very close, but much closer than 50000ly. And when it goes pop, Eta Carinae will be a pretty big one. Its rotation axis does not point towards us, so effects would be mostly limited to satellites and anything in the upper atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae [wikipedia.org]
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It was me. (Score:1, Offtopic)
I activated my Saturday Night Fever Ray Device i hid near pluton. Puny earthlings. Expect more of this to come - i will turn all of you to freaks like below :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHWeuQyFouo#t=0m16s [youtube.com]
So that way I got a 771 error (Score:2)
So that way I got a 771 error
Tsunami (Score:5, Funny)
That's just 1 day after the tsunami. Could there be a connection?!
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Not likely. Tsunamis rarely cause starquakes.
Nope. There was about 43.5 hours between them (Score:2)
But according to wikipedia, the earthquake that caused the tsunami occurred at 2004-12-26 00:58 UTC. According to this paper [iop.org], the "cosmic onslaught" hit us at 2004-12-27 21:30 UTC.
So, no. It isn't possible for the neutron star event to have caused the tsunami as it was outside of the tsunami event's light cone.
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Yes, the magnetar was outside the tsunami's light cone by around 50000 light-years. Remember, even if the earthquake had enough energy that could propagate through vacuum, that information will only reach the magnetar in ~50 thousand years. Yeah, the earthquake probably emitted some energy in gravitational waves and gravitational waves propagate in vacuum, but a really, really small amount of energy went that way; and you can safely say that the amount of energy from it that will someday reach the magnetar
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Thats what I call spooky action at a distance.
I think the GP was trying to be funny, since Phil Platt's article mentions that specifically.
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That means Jar-Jar Binks was real?
NOOooooooo!
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Neutrinos? (from the wikipedia page).
I don't think it's totally ridiculous to assume that different particles with different magnetic moments were affected differently by the immense magnetic field of a magnetar. But if the Gamma, Xray, and radio waves arrive within seconds of each other, it's hard to imagine another particle could've made the trip 1.5 days quicker. But maybe that's just my lack of imagination and poor math skills.
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Maybe the particles that causes the tsunami also started 1.5 days earlier.
Was there anyone in space that day? (Score:2)
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Phil says further down in the comments that the ISS was behind the earth when the main pulse hit.
If it had been in front, the astronauts would have gotten the equivalent of a dental X-ray.
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Seriously this sounds like the event that made the Fantastic Four, maybe some astronauts or cosmonauts need to be checked.
I call dibs on checking the chick you've not yet found. You can keep the rocky formation, the Bonzo impersonator and the unmanly... unmanlily? ...unmanley?... gay stretchy guy.
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On an outer-space adventure
They got hit by cosmic rays
And the four would change forever
In some most fantastic ways
No need to fear
They're here
Just call for Four
Fantastic Four
"Don't need no more."
"That's ungrammatical!"
Oh, Reed Richards is elastic
Sue can fade from sight
Johnny is The Human Torch
The Thing just loves to fight
Call for Four
Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four
There's Galactus looking hungry
And old Dr. Doom is near
Here come the Skrulls invading
Do you run and hide in fear?
No way, no way
No way
Just call for Fo
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Blasted Whom? (Score:5, Interesting)
The blast lasted 200ms. During that time, half the Earth was facing away, shielded by not just atmosphere, but the rock of the solid Earth. Which direction relative to the Earth (latitude, longitude) did the blast come in from, and hit directly (except for atmosphere, and a bit of satellite shadow)?
On a related subject, which direction does our Solar System "point" at? When it's the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, what angle on our solar orbit are we making with a line directly to the galactic core? What angle that day with the a tangent to our galactic orbit? Where are we looking at, anyway?
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It's all relative. :)
There will be some very upset folks in the future. Eventually, we will meet up with some ancient space traveling race, and they've already mapped 10x our visible universe. We'll find out that the the magnetic alignment of North and South, universally South is considered "up", and our solar system is on a weird tilt compared to other populated systems. Because of that tilt, it's knocked all of our planets on weird axis tilts, and has made humans deformed
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Thank you for answering none of my questions, including an answer you denoted as obvious.
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Well, it's all relative.
From This report [arxiv.org]
"SGR 180620 was 5.25 from the Sun at the time of these observations"
From This report [nasa.gov]
"The times of the flares were 21:28:03.5 and 21:30:26.6 UTC"
So, if you could see our Sun at those times (+- 5.25), or you could see the moon, you could see it. Other reports indicated that it was clearly reflected off the moon also, which would be expected.
Check the star chart [wunderground.com] for that time. If
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Hmmm, and Eta Carinae is in the same general area of the sky as Saggitarius (speaks the northern-hemisphericist, using a broad brush).
If *that* star pops at *that* time (in Earth's reference frame, I for one hail our new hypernova-wielding-JWSmythe overlords!
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The earth always "points" the same direction, towards Polaris in the North. (Always is relative..., but in this instance, "always" defines a few human lifetimes)
So, since the center of the galaxy is located somewhere between Sagittarius and Scorpius, and those constellations are visible during the northern hemisphere's summer, I'm assuming that the Northern Hemisphere points away from the Galatic center, while the Southern Hemisphere points (slightly) towards the center.
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A given point on the Earth's surface faces one half the universe at any time, with the other half blocked by the Earth behind it (actually the unblocked part is a little bigger than the blocked part because the Earth's surface curves back into the blocked part). It's a given point on the surface, most of which points (except for the poles) travel in a circle around the Earth's axis, and with the Earth in an ellipse around the Sun, that I'm talking about.
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That's an interesting question.
I did some quick calculations, and it appears that the blast was "above" 23.28 degrees S and 142.13 degrees W. This is over ocean, but Tahiti (and other islands) are nearby.
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We have a winner :).
Interesting that the blast hit the Earth from an angle at which nearly all Earth's humans were blocked by the mass of our planet. "Near Tahiti" is approximately the center of the least populated hemisphere on Earth.
Re:Frist Post! (Score:4, Interesting)
The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
There's no way for me to get my head around these numbers to "truly" feel it. What methods can you use to visualize such extreme numbers?
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Re:Frist Post! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nope, not enough. Assuming the drop of water is 0.1 cm^3, your "bucket" would need to be the size of *two thousand* Olympic swimming pools to get approximately the same ratio.
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I'm sorry, I used the wrong set of dimensions off the web site I used to get the dimensions of an Olympic-size swimming pools. The correct answer should be two hundred and fifty Olympic swimming pools.
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Meme regurgitation is really only ever funny if you use them correctly.
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What are you talking about? You assume the size of a drop of water but neglected to even mention the rate at which it accumulates. Wikipedia places the Olympic-size swimming pool at 2,500,000 L. To fill that in 25 years (25 * 365 * 86400 = 788,400,000 seconds) is about 3.17 mL/sec. That doesn't seem too far off from the roof-leak I had about 2 weeks ag
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Of course, drops come in lots of different sizes, but I'm guessing that one was on the large side. At some point the drop will get too large for surface tension to properly hold it together and it breaks up -- (assuming it's falling in gravity, anyways.)
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It's Bouquet!
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The galactic team must have won big for the coach to get the Gatorade Bucket like that.
Re:Frist Post! (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming that we are working with the standard burning library of congress as the measuring unit, we can define the energy release in those terms:
1 Burning Library of Conress (BLOC)
4kcal/g
20TB data
1MB/novel
1 novel = 200g
4,000 metric tons
16 billion kcal
Solar output ~~ 10^22 kcal/second
250,000 years = 8*10^12 seconds
energy of event: 8*10^35 kcal
energy of event/BLOC ~~ 5*10^25 burning libraries of congress
1 billion BLOC/second for 1.7 billion years
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8*10^34 not 8*10^35 however, the calculation is still largely correct as 10^35 was a typing error.
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Technically the error occured at the step that calculates the solar output. The Sun puts out 1400W/m^2 electromagnetic radiation at Earth's orbital distance of ~150 million km. The total output is equal to the surface area of the orbit (4*pi*r^2) which is 4*(3.14)*(1.5*10^11)^2 = 4*10^26 W for which 1 kcal/sec = 4180 W which means ~10^23 kcal/sec energy is released. Doin the math leads to 10^35 being the correct answer leaving the remainder of the math quite correct.
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The purpose of the economy is to produce what is needed not to guarantee the buggy whip manufacturer a job.
No, the purpose of the economy is to keep the people civilized through the production of goods, rather than the destruction of rivals. Necessity is often an illusion.
A buggy whip would be more useful than say, all magazines currently being printed, because I could at least beat horses and people with it.
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Sounds like you need it in Smoots!
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The sun's a sticky note, the neutron star's an LOC.
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The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
There's no way for me to get my head around these numbers to "truly" feel it. What methods can you use to visualize such extreme numbers?
A fifth of a second is about the time it takes to blink. It's about 12 frames of a 720P HD video signal.
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A fifth of a second is about the time it takes to blink. It's about 12 frames of a 720P HD video signal.
Or, a fifth of a second is also the built-in physiological delay between the beating of your heart's atria and it's ventricles. 0.2 seconds is the norm. lub dub, lub dub, lub dub.......
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I guess it depends [answers.com] which medical school you studied at, and which text books you read.
However Google returns 65,300 hits for lub dup, and 11,200,000 hits for lub dub. So if google is any indication, I am "right" and you are "wrong"...
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The energy released was mind-numbing: in one-fifth of a second, this supercharged magnetic neutron star blasted out as much energy as the Sun does in 250,000 years!"
There's no way for me to get my head around these numbers to "truly" feel it. What methods can you use to visualize such extreme numbers?
"I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm
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That's the energy released from the combustion of seven bazillion Libraries of Congress.
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OK, to put it in Slashdot standard units, look at this picture:
http://arweb.sdsu.edu/es/virtualtour/childrens_ctr.html [sdsu.edu]
Now imagine this one joining the game:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22158290@N04/2139767266/ [flickr.com]
That's the kind of scale we're talking about.
(Note, the photos were chosen for amusement, not accuracy. They are intended to show "big" and "small", not specific ratios.)
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That 250,000 times one year of solar output number wasn't very meaningful, since the star released all the energy in 1/5 of a second.
So, we should look at the actual ratio. There are 31,557,600 seconds in an average year (365.25 days). Five times that (to account for 1/5 seconds) is 157,788,000. That number, times 250,000 is 39,447,000,000,000.
So, for that 1/5 of a second, the neutron star put out about 39.5 trillion times as much energy as the Sun. Since the Sun puts out about the energy of 100 billion H-b
I don't know. (Score:1)
I don't know about the lights, but don't get me angry. You won't like me when I am angry!
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Gamma rays travel at the speed of light, so there is no possible warning should something like this happen closer to us. When you see it, it's already there. It could all be over any minu
Neutrinos also travel at the speed of light. Don't believe me? Well, why is it so hard to prove they don't [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Zero warning (Score:5, Interesting)
Neutrino oscillation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation [wikipedia.org] proves that they DON'T travel at the speed of light.
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If they are slower than the gamma and xrays, they won't be of much use in forecasting anyhow.
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Neutrinos are slightly slower than gamma and xrays in vacuum, but they're way faster when traversing an exploding star or such so they kinda get a headstart.
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Neutrino oscillation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation [wikipedia.org] proves that they DON'T travel at the speed of light.
The quote from the first line of the page you linked reads thusly: Neutrino oscillation is of theoretical and experimental interest since observation of the phenomenon implies that the neutrino has a non-zero mass, which is not part of the original Standard Model of particle physics.
It doesn't sound like anything is proven, or else it would be "case closed". The jury is still out on this one (although contrary to my posts, I believe the neutrino to be massive--just as you believe.)
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Errrr... the line you quote from the page does nothing to cast doubt on the accepted mass-having, non-light speed-traveling nature of the neutrino. I remember reading that they discovered neutrinos had mass years ago, and I haven't heard from any scientific publication claiming otherwise since.
In the sense that nothing can be proven in science, yes, the case is not closed. But in the usual usage of the phrase the case is closed, nailed shut and buried six feet under the ground.
Re:Zero warning (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't sound like anything is proven, or else it would be "case closed".
Wikipedia is not authoritative. Neutrinos have been known to have mass for over five years now, and the physics community is now focused on refining the parameters that characterize massive neutrinos. [queensu.ca]
Although we know that neutrinos have mass, we don't know what the mass is because our current experiments are only sensitive to the square of the mass difference between different types of neutrino. However, we do know that all types of neutrino have mass, although the most plausible values are less than a millionth of the electron mass, making it tricky to detect by time-of-flight measurements because any detectable neutrino is going to be ultra-relativistic, travelling so close to the speed of light as to be indistinguishable from a massless particle under almost all circumstances, which is why it was so difficult to prove they do have mass.
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If neutrinos traveled at the speed of light, they wouldn't have time (literally) to oscillate.
This is independent of rest mass.
However, if they travel at less than c, they have to have rest mass or their energy and momentum would be zero.
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Science isn't about proving something doesn't happen, it's about proving something empirically happens.
So there's no scientific value in saying, for example, that 0% of lab rats survive being placed in 0 degree salt water for 2+ hours then? How about for 90 minutes? What about 45 minutes? When exactly DO they survive?
Of course science can prove negatives. It doesn't matter if you're demonstrating how something works, or CLEARLY demonstrating how it DOESN'T work (w
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What you're thinking about is still proving that something DOES happen - demise of rats in your example. Or failure of that particular experiment.
Re:Zero warning (Score:5, Informative)
You're misunderstanding what a negative argument is.
Go try to test this hypothesis: "No rat can survive 2+ hours in 0degree salt water, ever."
You can test it all you like, with a million rats if you so desire. But you can never confirm it, even if you test a million of them. There might be some rat genotype out there capable of surviving, and you can't prove there isn't. That's trying to prove a negative.
In your example, you have proven that some average survival time of your rats is 2.5hrs. That's a positive.
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You're misunderstanding what a negative argument is.
Go try to test this hypothesis: "No rat can survive 2+ hours in 0degree salt water, ever."
You can test it all you like, with a million rats if you so desire. But you can never confirm it, even if you test a million of them. There might be some rat genotype out there capable of surviving, and you can't prove there isn't. That's trying to prove a negative.
Sure you can prove that kind of negative buy turning it into positive. You can perhaps (if it is true, though in this particular case I very much doubt it) prove that some essential moleculer or cellular structure in rats body will not survive that environment for that long, ever. Just increasing the temperature of the environment by a few hundred degrees would probably allow proving that no rat will survive there 2+ hours, ever, for any sensible definition of "rat", "survive" and "ever".
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Of course imperfect does not mean useless.
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Sorry but you are conflating proof with observation and extrapolation. Your prediction that no rat can survive is based on very strong evidence but it's not proof. Nature does not have to obey logic, you cannot under any circumstances predict the future with 100% certainty. Proof is found in axiomatic systems such as maths, it is not found in science.
But that applies to positive "proofs" as well, and I commented on the claim that you can never prove a negative.
Of course the real glitch is thinking in the terms of positive/negative. It's better to ask for example "What are the parameters of an environment where no rat will survive for 2 hours, never ever". Then you can start with "temperature and pressure where entire mass of the planet containing the rat will reach ionization temperature in 2 hours due to laws of thermodynamics" and go down from that.
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If you were to test it on every rat in existence, leading to the total exctinction of the rat species, then blow up the earth, and kill every other sentient being in the universe, while ascending to godhood and changing the laws of physics so that salt water can no longer exist, then I think that would pretty much prove it. Your problem is that you're just lazy.
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In your example, you have proven that some average survival time of your rats is 2.5hrs. That's a positive.
I'm curious why that would be considered proven.
You state that I can't prove that all rats die if put in 0-degree water for 4 hours, because even if I test 1,000,000 of them, rat # 1,000,001 might survive for 20 hours. However, you state above that I could say that the average survival time is 2.5 hours. How is that? What if rat #1,000,001 though 2,000,000 all survive for 20 hours? That would radically change the average time.
Seems like you can't prove a negative or any summary statistic.
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It's okay. Quantum probability time-paths have resulted in a back-up of us. However, your next girlfriend will be 70% uglier than otherwise would have been. That's the price one pays for using quantum backup devices.
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Yes, but it's raining dohnuts.
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Damn, now I got to go dig thru my DVD collection and watch it again.
Mmmmm...Milla.
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Just wait a few months, the LHC will trigger one for your viewing pleasure.
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Actually, due to the number of cosmic events, this is in fact true and inevitable. Every large earthquake is tightly correlated with a nice selection of cosmic events.
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tl;dr.
I'll wait for the good remake of the movie, and just read the summary here on Slashdot.
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The difference between that and say a bullet? Not too much, except for the gravitational influence it would have. Kinda something along the style of Tunguska incident. The hole would be trivial at that point.