• Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Just one small hitch: if there was an atmosphere in space dense enough to carry sound, the earth would burn up in minutes.

      • Rose Thorne(She/Her)@lemm.ee
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        9 days ago

        Oh hey, thanks! Been hearing it for years, turns out I just never look left!

        I wish they’d give me my driver’s license back…

      • saltesc@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Nah. It starts out like THUD! THUD! and then slowly after a couple minutes of warming up, that goes all muffled and it becomes that familiar high-pitched ringing noise.

  • Samsy@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    Evolution would say: nope. And the surviving class would be deaf. No one is able to accept a permanent jackhammer.

  • leadore@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    If the sun were to go out it would take 8 minutes for the light to stop but 13 years for the sound to stop.

    Kind of like when you kill an enderman. 🤔

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    On the plus side, if we evolved on Planet Sunblaster then our hearing would have evolved to either dial down the volume or filter it out completely.

    • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      I mean we hear the sound of our blood rushing through the veins of our ears at all times, but our brain filters it out. That the “sound of the ocean” you hear when listening into a conch, it just amplifies the bloodwaves. Other fun stuff our brain does: Our eyes are actually perceiving the world upside down and with a blind spot right in the middle.

      • filcuk@lemmy.zip
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        8 days ago

        The way senses are processed is almost unbelievable.

        When your eyesight is partially damaged (by a laser, for example), your brain will fill in the spots, so you won’t even realise there’s a problem until it’s too late (too much damage to cover up).
        As the above stated, there’s a blind spot (although I don’t think it’s smack in the middle) - there are tests online you can try to ‘see’ it.
        Your sight also automatically enhances objects it thinks are important, and will predict movementsand patterns, e.g. a baseball you’re trying to hit.
        There’s also no colour in peripheral vision, although the brain does colour it in.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Or perhaps we’d use the reflected soundwaves to navigate with echolocation much like we use reflected light waves to see.

  • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    You wouldn’t, of course. Hearing, the way we hear, in such an environment would be useless. We wouldn’t have evolved that. This is like saying “ultraviolet radiation from the sun would be everywhere, all the time, can you imagine?” It is everywhere all the time, but as such it isn’t a useful sense to possess, so we don’t.

    This also makes some very weird assumptions about what the sound would be like. If space were a medium sound could travel through then it would–like all mediums capable of carrying a sound wave–alter the wave in many ways. Intensity, frequency, etc. But since we don’t know what kind of medium that would be, and since the comment doesn’t posit any particular medium, we don’t know what the sound would sound like or even how loud it would be.

    • CeruleanRuin@lemmings.world
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      9 days ago

      I assume that this thought experiment posits a space filled with the same average density of particles found at ground level on Earth. Obviously such a thing is nonsensical, but it serves to illuminate one aspect of the raw power of the Sun that we ignore, because we’re insulated from it by 93 million miles of vacuum.

    • stephen01king@lemmy.zip
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      9 days ago

      By your logic, light isn’t a useful sense to possess since it’s everywhere all the time thanks to sunlight and moonlight, is that correct?

      Actually, since ultraviolet radiation and light are both electromagnetic waves, they should be treated the same, shouldn’t they? It’s as if there could be a different reason why we can detect one but not the other.

      • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 days ago

        Yes, and some animals (mostly birds iirc) do see UV. Boring brown/black birds aren’t so boring in UV. I don’t know the evolutionary pressure necessary for UV, but it could have developed. Red, for instance, is believed to have been useful for us to pick out berries. Wolves, being carnivorous, wouldn’t necessarily need it, so see in yellow blue… or so I read as a theory a while ago.

    • SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      If the sound is more of a loud hiss, you might find that echolocation can work very well. Much like our eyes collect available light bouncing off surfaces, similar techniques can be used with sound.

    • degen@midwest.social
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      9 days ago

      Well, I think technically it doesn’t. There’s no medium to propagate pressure waves, so at no point would the mechanics of sound actually exist, I would think.

      • prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        The sun itself is a medium that can propogate sound waves. Someone standing on the Moon could equally well make the case that there is no medium to propagate pressure waves from the Earth, so the Earth must not make a sound.

        • degen@midwest.social
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          9 days ago

          Aye, true. Though I would consider that case different (slightly, but not fundamentally wrt waves existing) from the sun because on earth there are atmospheric sound waves that just don’t reach out to the moon. But I hadn’t thought of the possibility of waves going into the sun, so there would be existing waves there too. More akin to making a sound on the moon by vibrating the moon itself I suppose.

          Edit: and really, I’m talking out of my ass lol. There could very well be gases or some such to vibrate around the sun, even coming out of the sun and carrying vibrations, but I don’t know enough.

          • Bumblefumble@lemm.ee
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            9 days ago

            The sun has an atmosphere so there are soundwaves coming out of it. It’s actually all one big atmosphere getting thinner and thinner as you go out just like ours.

              • Bumblefumble@lemm.ee
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                9 days ago

                Technically there is no boundary, it’s atmosphere all the way in. But what we might call the “surface” is the photosphere. That is where the density becomes “low” (read not insanely high) enough that light can escape in a free path.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    imagine … hearing the jackhammer scream of our star

    Sounds are a form of energy. If we were bombarded by sound waves for the entire existence of the planet, I assume life would have adapted to harness this abundant power source and made it instrumental to how we survive and thrive.

    • Samsy@lemmy.ml
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      9 days ago

      Okay just to be clear. The sun not only went out. The sun will explode and we too.

      • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 days ago

        A lot of the suppositions are done with impossible to happen stuff, like the sun literally disappearing, or collapsing into a blackhole with no added mass (a sun mass blackhole would be stable, but I don’t know how one could be created).

        If it disappeared, then we’d still feel even gravity for those 8 mins, as the effect of gravity propagated at the speed of light. If it somehow magically became a black hole, we’d still orbit it the same even after 8 mins, but losing all the head would eventually kill us.

        The expected explosion wouldn’t be what makes the earth uninhabitable either. The sun increases in luminosity by ~1% every 100 million years, and it’s estimated that between 700 million and 1.5 billion years the surface of the planet will be too hot for liquid water. An astronomer also says photosynthesis would be impossible in 500-600 million years.

  • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    A bullet fired from a gun goes more or less at Mach 1, correct?
    It’s thirteen years to the sun at the speed of a bullet?

    Spacecraft towards Mercury, or the Parker Solar Probe go much faster than that, take a few years to make it there, but they are doing so picking up speed in flybys of first Earth, then Venus, then Mercury, in several, ever tighter orbits.

    It’s both fun and illuminating to try and visualize these things in new ways. In this case, from the viewpoint of a bullet.

  • gmtom@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    This seems like bullshit to me. I don’t think the noise level of the sun is something we have solid data on