My telescope, set up for astrophotography in my light-polluted San Diego backyard, was pointed at a galaxy unfathomably far from Earth. My wife, Cristina, walked up just as the first space photo streamed to my tablet. It sparkled on the screen in front of us.
“That’s the Pinwheel galaxy,” I said. The name is derived from its shape—albeit this pinwheel contains about a trillion stars.
The light from the Pinwheel traveled for 25 million years across the universe—about 150 quintillion miles—to get to my telescope.
WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic says production of its new suborbital spaceplanes remains on track to allow commercial flights to begin in the middle of next year as it contemplates restarting ticket sales.
The company spent much of a May 15 earnings call talking about the technical progress it has made in the assembly of its first Delta-class vehicles, or SpaceShips, in areas such as structures, propulsion and avionics.
“An enormous amount of work is taking place across our company as well as our key suppliers,” said Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, in the call. Earlier in the day, the company released a video highlighting current progress on the vehicle, and Colglazier said the company would start a regular series of updates on assembly in June.
WASHINGTON — Norway signed the Artemis Accords May 15, a sign that the new administration continues to advance the document outlining best practices for responsible space exploration.
Cecilie Myrseth, Norway’s minister for trade and industry, signed the Accords during an event at the headquarters of the Norwegian Space Agency in Oslo, attended by the head of the agency as well as the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. embassy there.
“This is an important step for enabling Norway to contribute to broader international cooperation to ensure the peaceful exploration and use of outer space,” Myrseth said in a statement.
There is a curious tension between the notion of information as zero dimensional and the very fabric of the universe that is measured in finite increments such as the Planck length, often considered the smallest meaningful unit of space (10⁻³⁵ m). From the day our earliest models of communication were formalized, theorists have wrestled with the idea that information might be weightless, formless, and without dimensional extension, even as all signals we use to transmit and store it require tangible, measurable structures. As a matter of conceptual elegance, zero-dimensional descriptions of information promise simplicity and universality, yet collide with the physical reality of a world that consists of definite quantum-scale granularity. While Gregory Bateson alluded to information as a “difference that makes a difference” (Bateson, 1972, p. 459), the question remains whether this difference is truly independent of spatial and temporal constraints, or forever bound to them in ways that challenge the zero-dimensional ideal.
When the classic figures of communication theory described the fundamentals of information, there was a sense that the symbol or “bit” itself was neither physical nor extended in space. Claude Shannon (1948) famously called the problem of communication one of “reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point” (p. 379). Such an abstract conceptualization pushed any question of dimensional extension into the background, because the focus rested on logical patterns rather than the medium. Yet, even in these logical patterns, one finds references to signals, channels, and potential distortions that are inseparable from physical processes. A memory device — whether neural or silicon-based — still requires a physically instantiated substrate to encode these abstract messages. Norbert Wiener (1954), whose work helped launch cybernetics, was strikingly prescient when he declared, “Information is information, not matter or energy.
Tesla is developing a terawatt-level supercomputer at Giga Texas to enhance its self-driving technology and AI capabilities, positioning the company as a leader in the automotive and renewable energy sectors despite current challenges ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.
Tesla’s Supercomputers.
💡 Q: What is the scale of Tesla’s new supercomputer project?
A: Tesla’s Cortex 2 supercomputer at Giga Texas aims for 1 terawatt of compute with 1.4 billion GPUs, making it 3,300x bigger than today’s top system.
💡 Q: How does Tesla’s compute power compare to Chinese competitors?
A: Tesla’s FSD uses 3x more compute than Huawei, Xpeng, Xiaomi, and Li Auto combined, with BYD not yet a significant competitor. Full Self-Driving (FSD)
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have revived a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft that had been considered inoperable since 2004. Fixing the thrusters required creativity and risk, but the team wants to have them available as a backup to a set of active thrusters whose fuel tubes are experiencing a buildup of residue that could cause them to stop working as early as this fall.
In addition, the mission needed to ensure the availability of the long-dormant thrusters before May 4, when the Earth-bound antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 went offline for months of upgrades.
Our Universe is vast, ancient, and mysterious. It’s no surprise that in our quest to explore and explain it, many misconceptions have arisen.
The first 1,000 people to use the link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare https://skl.sh/isaacarthur05231 Join this channel to get access to perks: / @isaacarthursfia. Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net. Join Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur. Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 Reddit: / isaacarthur Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord Listen or Download the audio of this episode from Soundcloud: Episode’s Audio-only version: / misconceptions-about-space-time-the-universe Episode’s Narration-only version: / misconceptions-about-space-time-the-univer… ▬ Common Misconceptions ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ 0:00 Intro 2:34 Space is Huge 3:58 Space has no gravity 6:29 Space is not Dark 7:57 Space is Cold 12:14 Space is Empty 14:49 Explosive Decompression 16:31 No Noise in Space 17:48 Black Holes Suck 18:51 You can’t escape a Black Hole 22:37 Nothing goes faster than light 24:23 The Edge of The Universe is 13 Billion Light Years Away 27:23 The Universe has no Edge 29:31The Universe has no Center 30:13 We aren’t the Center of the Universe 32:48 Earth Orbits the Sun 35:34 The Sun is a fiery Yellow Dwarf 38:29 Time on Spaceships runs very slow 40:17 The Universe ends with the last stars Credits: Misconceptions About Space, Time & The Universe Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur Episode 394, May 11, 2023 Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur Editors: Briana Brownell David McFarlane Graphics: Jeremy Jozwik Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator. Facebook Group: / 1583992725237264 Reddit: / isaacarthur. Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord.
Listen or Download the audio of this episode from Soundcloud: Episode’s Audio-only version: / misconceptions-about-space-time-the-universe. Episode’s Narration-only version: / misconceptions-about-space-time-the-univer…
▬ Common Misconceptions ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ 0:00 Intro. 2:34 Space is Huge. 3:58 Space has no gravity. 6:29 Space is not Dark. 7:57 Space is Cold. 12:14 Space is Empty. 14:49 Explosive Decompression. 16:31 No Noise in Space. 17:48 Black Holes Suck. 18:51 You can’t escape a Black Hole. 22:37 Nothing goes faster than light. 24:23 The Edge of The Universe is 13 Billion Light Years Away. 27:23 The Universe has no Edge. 29:31The Universe has no Center. 30:13 We aren’t the Center of the Universe. 32:48 Earth Orbits the Sun. 35:34 The Sun is a fiery Yellow Dwarf. 38:29 Time on Spaceships runs very slow. 40:17 The Universe ends with the last stars.
Credits: Misconceptions About Space, Time & The Universe. Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur. Episode 394, May 11, 2023 Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur.
