Gravitational redshift would likely mean that any light escaping from your one-atom-short-of-a-black-hole would no longer be in visible wavelengths. So it might not look visibly different at all.

I worked it out to 84nm (diameter of H ~ 50×10^-12 m, multiplied by 1708), about the thickness of a bacterial flagellum. Much smaller than this commenter's result. I suspect something went wrong with their odd choice of units.

>Diameter of hydrogen atom: 6.479 x 10^-14 nautical miles.

In football pitches please

130,000ly is about the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to the Milky Way. Did you mean to teleport to the nearest galaxy, rather than the nearest star?

In its own words, rather than whatever the heck this headline is; https://www.tio2project.com/about

The eccentricity of C/2022 E3's orbit is listed here as 1.0003290, which, since it's just barely bigger than 1, and if accurate, means it's on a hyperbolic escape trajectory.

Hi ChatGPT 👋

I'm pretty sure this answer was written by ChatGPT.

Edit: I can't find any evidence to back up this claim. I don't think such a system has actually been used

I think some radioisotope-powered probes had something like that, in response to worries about a launch failure releasing radioactive materials into the atmosphere.

I've been keeping an eye out for bot accounts using ChatGPT here on Reddit. I caught one the other day confidently claiming there were 'aluminum lounge bars' where you could be served a range of aluminum based drinks.

There is a point between earth and moon with no net gravity. It's one of the Lagrange points (L1 I think). In this scenario, the bit of rope exactly at L1 would be under tension from the weight of rope extending to the moon on one end, and the greater weight of rope extending to earth on the other end.

The earth rotates once every 24 hrs, whilst the moon takes about 28 days to make a full circle. Your rope would wrap around the earth until it snapped.

If you let the earth end just dangle freely, it would move a little slower than the rotational speed of the earth 465m/s (1040mph or Mach 1.5), and alternate between dragging along the ground and being hoisted up into space, as the Moon moved in its orbit from perigee to apogee

If this was feasible (it isn't), you could grab the cable when the Moon is at it's closest, then hold on and let it pull you into space. Timed right, you'd get a maximum altitude of 42,200km, which is enough to get to geostationary orbit and then some

Remember remember the 5th of November

You can see a plane at the end of it

IIRC, the local supermassive black hole is smaller than you'd typically get in a galaxy of our size. That also might not be a coincidence - bigger & more active black holes may be troublesome for the formation of life.

The oligarchy already isn't really people. Yeah, your billionaires might be the public face, but the true form of the oligarchy is institutions. Which are not that far from AIs already. ChatGPT (for example) leverages human intelligence by extrapolating trends in human produced texts. Goldman Sachs (for example) leverages human intelligence by employing humans to perform tasks for it.

Institutional Intelligence already has little compunction to align its goals with human wellbeing. Pair it with machine intelligence and what happens? Do we just get a more efficient version of our current mess? Or do they take human will out of the loop entirely?

Some people experience some or all of their thoughts as being spoken by a voice in their head. Some people don't. Generally, people of either group are surprised to learn of the other's existence.

And then if such machines are given important decision making roles, as seems likely, what does that mean for us? We've ceded control of our civilisation to the results of a linear algebra problem. Maybe it doesn't even matter - if we can't tell it apart from a genuine conscious being then for practical purposes it is one - but it feels like it should matter. Maybe we already ceded control to institutions and this is all academic. I don't know. I don't know if I can really articulate my thoughts about this

At least I'm willing to believe they still have a subjective experience of their own existence.

Neural network AI, at least as I understand it, performs matrix operations on vectors. We're seeing systems of matrices that are pretty well optimized to their applications, but I'm sceptical you could ever meaningfully describe such a system as sentient. What is weirding me out, however, is that they don't seem to need it. Is sentience even necessary for human level intelligence? If no, what does that mean?

According to this article modern hunter-gatherers have much lower incidence of acne than industrial peoples, although the causes are not known. I can't vouch for the article, but it's thoroughly referenced

Edit to actually address the question: it's a reasonable inference from this that prehistoric people would also have less acne than modern industrialised people

Once you've got some basics down, watching film and TV in that language, with subtitles in the same language. It almost feels like cheating for how effective it can be for how little effort

Okay, not parallel lines but parallel geodesic curves. I don't know if I can ELI5 geodesics, but I'll have a go

Okay, you can't take a straight line on a sphere, obviously. But if you walked around the equator, most people would a agree you'd walked pretty much a straight path. However, if you walked a 1 meter circle around the North pole, no-one would recognise that as a straight path, even though they're both lines of latitude and they're both parallel

What's the difference? Pick any two points on the equator. The shortest path between them (staying on the sphere), also follows the equator. For the small circle you don't have that property - you can find a shorter curve that cuts through the interior of the circle. Curves that have this shortest distance property are called geodesics

So the statement about flatness should be; two geodesics - that is, two shortest distance curves - that are parallel at some point, stay parallel their whole lengths

Flat doesn't mean 2-dimensional. Things can be 2-dimensional and not flat (the surface of a sphere, for example), or 3-dimensional and flat (like the space we live in appears to be). In a flat space, parallel lines stay parallel. In a non-flat space, they don't