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The moon was formed far before humans ever walked the planet and will likely stick around long after we’re gone, but what if the Moon just disappeared?

If the moon could disappear, it would do so in either two ways. The first is turn into a black hole. The black hole that would be left would obviously have different physical characteristics, but its effect on the planet Earth would would remain constant, including the tides and any gravitational effects. So how big would this black hole be? The radius would be significantly smaller than you’d probably expect. The Schwarzschild radius is the radius of the resultant sphere if all the mass of an object were to be compressed to the point the escape velocity from the surface of the sphere would equal the speed of light. For the earth, this radius would be about 8.7 mm, but for the moon the radius would be only 0.11 mm. Basically the moon would become the most dangerous spec of dust in earth's orbit.

The moon could never turn into a black hole. That’s just not how it works. But what if the moon just vanished? The tidal bulge is like a big rubber band. When let go, it would ripple back and forth around the globe flooding coastal regions but ultimately balancing out returning the coastline sea level to a somewhat normal level. Plus, the sun is responsible for about 30% of the tides anyways so at least the surfers will be happy. Some nocturnal animals would have trouble. Although the moon only reflects about 12% of the sunlight that hits it, without the moon the next brightest object in the night sky would be Venus. But if you asked the sun or any of the other planets, they wouldn’t notice a change at all and after a few thousand years, life on Earth wouldn’t either.

The interesting part about the moon disappearing, in contrast to the sun disappearing, is that life would continue. If the sun disappeared, Earth would be launched into the darkness that is space and we’d freeze to death within days. But if the moon disappeared, scientists would have a pretty big question on their hands. It’s been theorized and partially proven that subatomic particles could evaporate and reappear instantaneously across vast distances, but when you take objects on the macroscopic level, these theories don’t mesh well with the theory of relativity. If the moon vanished, it could possibly provide clues to bridge the gap between the world of the tiny and the world of the large.

#moon #space #aerospace #tech #technology #motion graphics #after effects #the moon

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma4eQ3GNXBc)

#minecraft #video games #youtube #youtube creators

In the game Minecraft, you can explore a procedurally generated world unlike any other before it. There are caves, mountains, forests, and even deserts. But the places you can go are only limited by the world in which they inhabit. So how big is Minecraft? Minecraft on PC features the largest world possible of any version of minecraft. In practical terms, the terrain generation engine can can generate infinite number of blocks in any direction, but the game itself limits the world with a boarder 60 million by 60 million blocks. The world is limited to this size due to hard drive constraints. With each block assigning 4 bits of information, Minecraft is technically about 410,000 terabytes at it’s largest. With each Minecraft block being 1 meter by 1 meter by 1 meter, Minecraft’s overworld surface area tops out at 3.6 billion square kilometers (1.4 billion miles). To put this into perspective, the Minecraft overworld has about 7.1x more surface area than the Earth itself. Every person who has ever lived, who is alive today, and who will ever live could have been contained in only a small portion of a Minecraft world which is pretty amazing. In Minecraft, the overworld isn’t the only place you can visit. The nether is an alternate reality filled with lava and strange creatures. The nether shares the same coordinate system as the overworld but with a scaling factor of 1 to 8, meaning 1 block distance is equal to 8 blocks in the overworld. With this reduction, the nether is about 53 million square kilometers which is still about 5.7x larger than the United States and 40% the landmass of Earth. So let’s say Minecraft with the overworld acting as the surface and the nether acting as a moon. The planet would be about 2 and a half times wider than Earth and 5 times wider than Mars. The nether on the other hand would be somewhere between Mercury and Io. With these comparisons it becomes pretty clear just how much real estate there is in Minecraft. If the entire size of Minecraft Overworld and Nether were to be maxed out and stored on hard drives, it would require a facility that only companies like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft could support. To put this into perspective, 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second which accounts for about 1.1 terabytes per second of video. The minecraft world would require the same space as 297 days worth of YouTube uploads. Judging from the Google mega facilities, this would be very expensive to maintain. But let’s assume Minecraft was not limited by the language in which it was written or the hardware that was running on. Assuming an infinitely large hard drive fueling the infinitely generating world, what would this mean? If the nether is only ⅛th the size of the overworld and the overworld is infinite, wouldn’t that mean the nether was infinite? Infinite isn’t big, it isn’t enormous, it isn’t tremendous, infinity just is… Infinity is not a number, it’s an idea. It’s an idea that instils adventure, but also complacency. When you know you can’t see everything, sometimes you begin to feel as if you want to do nothing. Without boundaries some people lack the ability to function because either deciding what they want to do prevents them from doing anything. This is why Minecraft is such a great tool. It allows people to be in a world where anything is possible, without boundaries, expectations, or goals. In this world, you can gain experience in building wonderful things for the internal enjoyment alone even if you know nobody will ever see it. This experience is intrinsic to that of an infinite world of infinite possibilities. Because of this, Minecraft is much bigger than anyone could ever have imagined.

#minecraft #minecon #gaming #games #gamer #youtube #youtube gaming

Hi, it's Mike, I post videos about things I find interesting. This might include games, technology, and culture. I have opinions on things but I try and be a...

In Halo, plasma weapons are used by the alien forced called the covenant and come in both hand held, stationary, and shoulder mounted variants with a devastating effect on soft targets and shields alike, but what if plasma weapons were real? Plasma usually is only present in very low pressures such as florescent light bulbs and in very high pressures, such as the sun. Plasma is a ionized gas constituting of positive ions and free flowing electrons. Because of it’s intrinsic properties, harnessing plasma for military applications would be very difficult.

The covenant have a couple different plasma weapons, but first let’s look at projectile class plasma rifles. This includes the plasma rifle, plasma pistol, and plasma turrets. The problem with plasma is the low density and mass. Due to air resistance, the plasma shot would expand, increasing its surface area, and cool off. When plasma cools, the electrons are pulled back to the nucleus and the plasma transforms back to a gas state. The device would essentially be a glorified air launcher. In the game, the plasma pistol shoots at a low velocity of XYZ. Assuming the heat transfer and expansion issues were neglected, at that speed, the plasma would only go about XYZ. That’d be like getting hit by a really really hot baseball made of gas.

From a high level review, it’s pretty evident that the rifle ammunition tanks would be bulky, the magnetic gas energizer would be expensive, and the performance would be underwhelming. This is likely why the covenant developed weapons such as the carbine and needler. Solid projectiles are not only easier to produce, but they perform better in environments with atmospheres.

Moving over to another covenant weapon utilizing plasma technology is none other than the plasma grenade. The plasma grenade is an interesting idea because it utilizes plasma technology at all of its strengths. A solid outer shell holding the high pressure plasma inside. With a magnetic field or heat generated from a forced chemical reaction inside, the grenade would generate large pressures, ultimately causing it to explode and spray magnetically charged plasma to the surrounding areas. The outside of the grenade would get very very hot, causing the outer paint and materials to catch on fire and glow. On impact with flesh or composite armor, it would be hot enough to melt and potentially stick to the recipient. With temperatures ranging from a few hundred degrees upwards to a few hundred thousand degrees, you wouldn’t want to a plasma grenade if it went off. It’s devastation continues as combustible materials nearby would burst into flames. If one of these went off in a residential area or near an ammunition dump, the effects would be devastating.

Although plasma weapons do lack some of the properties that define an effective weapon system, when harnessed in the proper fashion, they can be quite devastating. One attribute of plasma that wasn’t explored were the magnetic properties of plasma. It’s likely that plasma weapon’s effectiveness on energy based shields is attributed by it’s magnetic charge, leaving room for some interesting research on energy shields. But that was just a quick look at plasma weapons and if they could actually exist.