• gon [he]@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    115
    ·
    2 days ago

    Holy shit.

    I’ve never been alive in a time when every human has been on Earth. That’s crazy to think about…

  • bollybing@lemmynsfw.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 day ago

    What about Bogdan, who was catapulted into space in 1377 in a freak trebuchet accident which was never recorded?

                • bstix@feddit.dk
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  ·
                  2 days ago

                  The Milky Way is in a sort of orbit around the center of the Local Group which is the name for the local group of galaxies. It’s not a clean circular orbit and it’s not possible to calculate the rotation time, because the pull from other galaxies is stronger than their collective centre of point of gravity, but sure, it rotates overall on that scale too.

                  The next levels are different. The Local Group is part of a larger supercluster of galaxies that do not seem to rotate. It’s more like flows of galaxy clusters. Depending on the point and scale we look at, it may be shrinking or expanding. Perhaps there is some rotation to it, but the scale of both distance and time is so incredibly large that it’s meaningless.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 day ago

        unfortunately i feel you can’t call yourself spacefaring unless you actually control the ship, and we have about as much control over our trajectory as a mosquito has control over the amount of blood inside a blue whale

    • SippyCup@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 day ago

      It’s the year 3250. Two harsh desert planets are in a bitter dispute over mineral and water mining rights over the asteroid belt. The Mars coalition insists that Earth may lay claim only to those rocky bodies that fall past her orbit. Earth insists that anything beyond their respective atmospheres is fair game. They use loaded language and plan to argue that an ‘atmosphere’ is one that sustains life, meaning she plans to mine uninhabited stretches or Martian soil too. There is serious debate on Earth of the inhabitants of Mars are even human anymore, cross breeding has become exceptionally difficult. Martians have a lower natural fertility rate and often need IVF to reproduce. Earth gravity is too strong for martians to safely return to the home planet, and so few Earthlings have ever seen one in person.

      The dispute, unresolved, leads to the second interplanetary war. A billion people will die on both planets. Mars will lose precious irreplaceable atmosphere. Earth will lose access to much needed water. The conflict only ends when neither can keep up the fight any longer.

  • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    41
    ·
    2 days ago

    Hmm, I think this logic kinda fails because if astronauts are “not on earth”, then neither are air travelers.

    Astronauts orbiting earth are just couple kilometers higher altitude

    • Dave@lemmy.nz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      88
      ·
      2 days ago

      I mean 30,000 feet is 9km. The Kármán line is 100km. The ISS is at an average altitude of 400km.

      It’s a bit like saying people in planes don’t count as flying because then people on trampolines should count.

        • arrow74@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          15
          ·
          2 days ago

          They’re clearly not “jumping” they’re pushing the earth away

        • Dave@lemmy.nz
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 days ago

          Are there enough trampolines on earth that we could reasonably expect that at any time there is at least one person in the upper part of their jump on a trampoline?

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        2 days ago

        Also people who live in a basement, or cave, or underground complex of some kind, or who are currently caving, … they also aren’t ‘on’ Earth, they’re ‘in the Earth’, … and people currently in submersibles, under the water line, well they’re not on the surface, they’re in or under the ocean or w/e, by this grammatical level of pedantry.

    • vithigar@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      2 days ago

      Spent a moment thinking about this and I think there’s an implied definition for what “on earth” means that we intuitively accept but don’t ever really need to state.

      If your projected free-fall trajectory both forward and backward in time intersects with the surface of the earth then you are “on earth”.

      Standing on the ground? Intersects twice. Thrown rock? Intersects twice. Person in an airplane? Intersects twice. ISS? No intersection. Incoming impact meteor? One intersection.

      • can_you_change_your_username@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 days ago

        The ISS was launched from Earth, in pieces but still it’s of Earth origin, and will eventually fall back to Earth. It’s inside the Earth’s atmosphere and experiences drag. It’s orbit has to be adjusted and maintained.

        • vithigar@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          2 days ago

          Yes, that’s all true, but none of that describes its free-fall trajectory. Drag causes it to deviate from free-fall very slightly, and it definitely wasn’t in free-fall when the pieces were launched from Earth

    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      2 days ago

      Unless you define “on earth” to be "below the Kármán line. The Earth’s atmosphere is probably to be considered part of the planet, else gas planet like Jupiter get difficult to talk about consistently. Atmospheres don’t have a proper “cutoff”, they just get thinner and thinner until they gradually become insignificant, so some cutoff is going to have to be arbitrarily defined to make the distinction useful.

      • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 days ago

        Karman line could be a good limit sure, but I think the orbit still kinda makes sense to include “on the planet”.

        Say for example if the apartheid baby gets his Mars colony thing going, from Earth’s perspective it wouldn’t make much difference if a person is standing on Mars surface or on the orbit - we could say that the person is on Mars.

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 day ago

          i’d say being in orbit is arguably the least on a planet can be, since an orbit is specifically continuing to miss falling onto the planet.

  • kungen@feddit.nu
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    2 days ago

    By 2030, everyone will most likely be back on Earth again when the ISS gets decommissioned :(

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 day ago

      Long term occupancy of the ISS started in November 2nd, 2000. Since then there has always been at least one person Manning the ISS.

      So at least one human has not been on earth for every day since then, thus, all of humanity was last on earth on November 1st 2000. The statement is factually correct.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    Space is a priority so we can ignore climate change. Rockets put our many many plane flights worth of pollution, elon musk has done over 30,000 of them (mostly for StarLink). Quite a few ended up just dumping raw pollution and parts into the ocean.

    No price is paid but by the environment.

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      2 days ago

      Rockets are launched so infrequently that their effect is negligible compared to other sources of pollution. They’re definitely still a problem (debris falling on populated areas is a concern), but the aviation industry burns a rocket launch worth of fuel a few times per minute.

      • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        263 rockets in 2024 alone. A 747 carries 10 tonnes of fuel to burn, a rocket carries 1,500 tonnes of fuel to burn.

        Seems like they’re both bad, but rockets don’t have as much of a point to them.

    • throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      2 days ago

      Space is a priority so we can ignore climate change.

      I have a teacher that once said that even if we nuked the entire planet and gave 100 years to terraform Mars. Mars would still be less habitable than Earth. Colonization of space in the near future is a pipedream.