Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2024 May 1

= May 1 =

Sub-brown dwarf detection (in a way)
If a copy of Jupiter (with a copy of all the moons) was a rogue planet freely floating in space, how close would it have to be to the Solar System for us to be able to detect it? And how close would it have to be for us to be able to detect the Galilean moons? Double sharp (talk) 05:58, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
 * There was one such search using WISE satellite. Its conclusion is that there is no Jupiter-like body closer than 82,000 au to Sun, no Saturn-like body closer than 28,000 au. Ruslik_ Zero 20:40, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
 * It is possible of course to use a bigger telescope but they are usually have quite a narrow field of view. Ruslik_ Zero 20:42, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Exoplanets are being detected throughout our Milky Way galaxy whose center is about 27,000 lightyears distant and potentially in other galaxies using Gravitational microlensing. Some physical parameters of exoplanets can be estimated but not whether they have moons. Philvoids (talk) 23:50, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Dinosaurs and the future
Did dinosaurs know the future? In particular, did they know that they will eventually be killed millions of years later? They probably did not know that there will be humans in the future. But perhaps, they could already know what will happen to them in the next few million years. GTrang (talk) 16:22, 1 May 2024 (UTC)


 * There's no evidence that dinosaurs ever developed human-like intelligence and intellect, to the point of being able to go beyond the mere needs of immediate survival (find food, hunt prey, escape from predators) and make more existential questions like that. Cambalachero (talk) 17:24, 1 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Gary Larson postulated the possibility: ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:30, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Humans do not know what will happen to humankind in the next one hundred years. --Lambiam 06:13, 2 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Lemmings do. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 14:30, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * In a thousand years we might have Idiocracy or might be starting to expand to the stars. Who can say. I think this comes under crystal ball speculation. NadVolum (talk) 17:15, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * These kinds of comments always make me laugh. Do you read the professional literature at all?  Aside from a fringe group of hyper-captialists, most scientists don't believe we will survive another thousand years, let alone another few centuries.  Civilization itself, which is just a way to describe an orderly, structured form of functional human society, could devolve into chaos and strife at any moment, and in some countries, that has already happened. Dinosaurs and humans appear to share a lot in common. Viriditas (talk) 20:09, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Dinosaurs lasted a pretty long time. We'd have to go extinct to not recover within a short time whether that's a hundred years or ten thousand. I view both those futures I outlined as easily possible ones and extinction as a less likely one. NadVolum (talk) 20:47, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I honestly don't see the longevity of dinosaurs in the past having anything whatsoever to do with the longevity of humans in the present. There's literally no connection. As you already know, 99.9% of all species that ever existed are gone, and humanity is unlikely to reach half of its average lifespan in relation to other species.  This optimism for the future has always seemed like a fantasy to me and distraction from our most basic reality here on Earth, which is that we are unable to live harmoniously with other members of our own species as well as all the rest, and our trajectory is downward, not upward.  In fact, you and I are only having this conversation right now because our species eliminated all the other competing species that posed a threat to us.  That tendency and behavior has remained unchanged since the beginning, and is unlikely to change in the future.  Furthermore, this behavior is entrenched in our culture at a very deep level, and any attempt to escape or break out of it is met with social sanctions at the highest levels.  We are, at the end of the day, prisoners of our own biology. Viriditas (talk) 21:14, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Comparing dinosaurs with humans is kind of apples-and-oranges. A better comparison would be dinosaurs and mammals. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:36, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I did have a look for extinction humans on the web and they all seemed to talk about half a billion years or so. They woudn't be humans by that time of course but let's say descendants. I don't see where you got 'most scientists don't believe we will survive another thousand years' from. And people are better off in practically every way nowadays. A search for "are we worse of or better of in the world" gives as its first rentry  which shows people think things are getting worse but they're wrong. I go by evidence and the numbers. As to getting on harmoniously homicide rates have been going down for ages worldwide - you definitely don't want to have to live in the past! And as to being a prisoner of our biology see Modern times causing human evolution to accelerate (though take New Scientist with a little pinch of salt!)  NadVolum (talk) 23:42, 6 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Half a billion years? Not quite. I've been repeatedly informed that this popular idea that "things are getting better" is a modern form of Whig history.  It is not reflected by reality.  But hey, it keeps the rubes buying stuff they don't need, which is the point. Viriditas (talk) 00:02, 7 May 2024 (UTC)
 * We humans are already better for the arms-race survival game than any dinosaur species (than any other species, period) because of our intelligence and intellect. It is such a game-breaking advantage that it allowed us to step aside of Darwinian evolution altogether. Think for example that if any other species want to hunt deer, they would slowly develop body features that make them better at hunting deer, and deer in turn develop ways to escape from their predators. But us? We can create a weapon and mass-produce it in just a couple of generations, and deer have no way to evolve defenses so quickly. We are the apex predators of the whole world, nobody comes even close, and our future is a blank slate unlike that of any other biological species of this world. That's not "Whig history". That's the order of things. Cambalachero (talk) 13:39, 7 May 2024 (UTC)