Timeline for How can the stars be wrong, so that an observer realises they're not in our world anymore?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| Apr 2 at 4:44 | comment | added | Robert Rapplean | @sh4dow, I was just thinking "not clumpy." Some parts of our sky have clusters, others are devoid. it's like looking at clouds. Imagine, instead, the stellar equivalent of being hazy and overcast. | |
| Apr 1 at 21:58 | comment | added | sh4dow | That's fair - I'd consider such an arrangement about as special as the rectilinear one; my thinking went more into the direction of deciding between "not obvious, but statistically quite significant patterns" (eg. significantly higher density in 4 tetrahedrally aligned directions vs the rest of the sky) vs "just imagining patterns" (like seeing astrological signs in the stars) | |
| Mar 29 at 19:02 | comment | added | Robert Rapplean | @sh4dow, I think we'd have to generate images to actually test this. My supposition is that there's an uncanny valley to the pattern of stars in the sky, where an artificial arrangement looks unaccountably wrong. If you were to adjust physics so that the stars arranged themselves similarly to how atomic nuclii spaced themselves via electromagnetic repulsion in a non-crystaline structure, I think people would notice. | |
| Mar 27 at 23:40 | comment | added | sh4dow | @RobertRapplean not every galaxy necessarily has satellite galaxies, and whether you are located in an isolated galaxy or some more unusual collection of stars (perhaps the remains of a galactic collision, with the original galaxies indistinguishable from stars?), not seeing any non pointlike object doesn't immediately preclude being in this reality. Also, while there is certainly some amount of homogeneity that effectively precludes a natural (or at least random) origin, I think most people would have difficulty making remotely accurate judgements about that (unless you literally have a grid) | |
| Mar 26 at 20:45 | comment | added | LarsH | I kinda like the idea of giant black tendrils blocking out stars. They could be subtle at first, especially if not too wide, and if they move slowly. | |
| Mar 26 at 19:44 | comment | added | Robert Rapplean | @sh4dow, Andromeda has an apparent brightness of 3.4, so it's well within naked eye visibility. The Large Magellanic Cloud is even brighter, and is clearly not a star. Although notable homogeny could be accomplished through artificial means, it would clearly violate most people's intuition. | |
| Mar 26 at 14:05 | comment | added | sh4dow | You couldn't distinguish stars from galaxies with the naked eye, and a more homogeneous distribution of stars wouldn't necessarily preclude you being in some other place in our universe - the distribution might not fit any place we know of/can think of, but that's difficult to judge for a layman. And even the most stunning arrangement (eg. rectilinear) might be explained by the existence of type 3 civilizations creating artificial structures of multiple stars, eg. for travel (a 100x100x100 grid of stars might be a comfortable "generation ship")... | |
| Mar 25 at 16:20 | history | edited | Robert Rapplean | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 132 characters in body
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| Mar 25 at 16:05 | history | answered | Robert Rapplean | CC BY-SA 4.0 |