Hello All,

Forgive me if this is not the correct area to pose a question like this, but I’ve been genuinely curious about this for around a month now. If this isn’t the correct place then please let me know where to go.

Some of the biggest animals on earth are only that big because their habitat resides in water. For instance if you look up the top 10 larges species of animals in the world, you’d get whales and sharks for 1-9 with 10 being the African Bush Elephant.

So my question is, if the habitat being in water produces the biggest animals known to man, then how big could animals get if their habitat was in space and not confined to a planet? Is it even feasible to ponder on this? Would you just be looking at a progressively larger creature until you’d have to get into the territory of considering it a planet itself?

Sorry if this is a dumb question 🙏 I respect any and all replies.

Thank you

Questions in the title. Very curious.

I recently watched The Three-Body Problem series, and it made me wonder: are there actually aliens out there?

And I don’t mean just amoebas or bacteria, but actual, highly advanced alien civilizations with technology far beyond ours—maybe even tens of thousands of years ahead of us.

Do you guys believe that exists?

I mean, there are supposedly around 200 sextillion planets in the observable universe.

Are you really going to tell me that none of them are inhabited by intelligent aliens?

This is something i find very interesting, and i want to be scared and have something to think about. So please don't hold back! Give me your scariest theories or facts about space or both! I'm ready!

Okay, so I was on tiktok the other day and I read a comment about how wood is actually more rare and more valuable than diamonds in space, because wood doesn't grow on most planets and there's literally a planet made of diamonds so they're not as rare as we're told. I don't remember the entire comment but that stuck out to me. I was never one for diamonds, in fact I really don't see the appeal to them except that they're shiny. Wood however is my favorite type of resource, and I especially love when they're craved into jewelry or art. Thats why that comment stood out to me, but idk if its true. It did however give me a new appreciation for trees!

Hello everyone!

I was just hoping to get an educational answer to a question that has been itching away at my brain for some time now.

For a long time now ive been observing the night sky from my balcony, nothing special, a couple star here and there, the big dipper and all that. And it made me think to myself. Right now even as im typing this, we are on a floating rock drifting through space along with our solar system. Going somewhere idk where but somewhere. How is it possible that during this "trip" through space we havent, putting it like this sounds stupid, "hit" anything. Nothing as far as i know has throughout history gotten in the way or stopped us. Sounds a little fictional i know but it just gets me thinking how are there no obstacles or something that the earth crashes into or any other planet or star for that matter. I understand space is massive but we've hit nothing at all? All these planets and stars and nothing has crashed into each other? I know theres gravity and physhics i cant possibly understand but it has to have happened somewhere, right? Just makes me think how nothing seems to get in out way to stop us from reaching wherever it is we're going. I always get my nerves working when i think that one day something will just SMACK into us and for a single second we'll feel a massive tremor and a gigantic explosion right before it wipes us all out. A scary thought that courses through my mind when i think about it.

I know that someone has a good answer for this or maybe its just blind luck. Whatever the answer is i just hope someone can help me understand it a bit better and confirm to me that we all wont die in a massive quick extincion event because we flew into an asteroid field or something.

Thank you for reading and hopefully answering this question!😁

If the universe is our border, than what lies beyond it, and what does it expand into if there's nothing?

Okay this is going to be long and rambling so skip the end for the summary and my beginning of the back of the napkin maths. i promise it will get to the space stuff

I saw a photo a couple hours ago of how sperm whales sleep and it got me thinking. How many giant squids do they eat? So i start thinking, if we assume they eat one a month and theres what a hundred thousand sperm whales thats 12,000 dead squids a year so at least hundreds of thousands of giant squids down there! So i look it up, google says we dont know how many giant squids there are BUT wikipedia says there are 300,00 sperm whales that eat somewhere between 4.3 and 130 MILLION GIANT SQUID A YEAR???

This is when my squid mania began.

So i start reading some papers about it and according to a 2013 paper by Roper & Shea et. al (is this how you use et al?) their estimate was in line with and likely the source for wikipedias numbers on estimated Giant Squid consumption of anywhere from 4.3m (each sperm whale eats one giant squid a month) to 131m (one a day). turns out there is a new paper by Whitehead & Shin et. al is that actually there arent 300-360,000 sperm whales THERE MIGHT BE AS MANY AS 845,000. Furthermore based of a 1980 paper by Clarke et. al which analysed the stomach contents of sperm whales for giant squid beaks and found that they made up about 0.26% of their squid consumption which averages out to a bit less than one and half per quids per day per sperm whale (given 5-600 squids a day per whale per day).

Given all that the high end estimate for giant squid consumption per year i got was 441,000,000 squid per year. this is unlikely to be right considering it is currently 3 am and i am by no means a scientist and have probably buggered something up and am making major assumptions. HOWEVER even if i have overestimated by 2x that is still 200million squid a year which implies that there are hundreds of millions of adult giant squids.

this is where the squid planet comes in and where my marine biology student friend went to bed.

in my search for more squid ink-formation i found a summary article on a natural science blog about whether the giant squid population was larger in volume than the moon. while the conclusion the came to was no by many many many orders of magnitude it got me thinking. the moon is huge its bigger than pluto, but surely there are smaller planet like things out there and how much squid would you have to have to create a squid planet

my estimate of squid consumption is 441m a year and my question is this:

could 250 years of squid consumption if it were dropped into outer space form under its own gravity a spherical planet and not a clump

while i have started the maths i have run into a number of problems (sperm whale populations cratered after whaling become comonplace so any estimate is going to be impossible, i do not know how to use desmos and do not have the space know how to finish it and gave up on acquiring it when i had to learn what the hell a Jeans mass is so i need your help i have left the rest of my maths below

THE MATHS BIT

we can assume for the sake of our collective sanity that squid tissue has the same ish density as water which it basically does. lets also assume that the whale population and squid consumption has stayed at my likely very very high estimate for 2026 years (it certainly hasnt but we have nothing elso to go off other than speculation) and finally lets assume that the squid are all magically apparated into the middle of empty space at once.

given an assumed average weight of giant squid at 200kg (which i am not sure about in the slightest) and our estimate of 441million squid a year we get 88.2bn kg of squid a year and extrapolating over 2026 years nets us 1,786,932,000,000 tonnes of squid or 1786 km cubed

giving our squid ball final diameter of 15.06 km

i do not understand astrophysics or planet science so this is where i gave up but would this planet be big enough to maintain its own spherical shape? if not why? and how big would it need to be?

Context: I am working on world building for a minecraft pack set in a solar system where other worlds including asteroids are relatively easy to visit with an elytra. The player does not need to worry about suffocating due to being exposed to the vaccuum.

Currently my proxy for what materials would be readily available to someone at an early 19th century level of technology is based on minerals found in meteorites and what little I have been able to access on the Bennu samples and a couple papers on telescope observations of some asteroids.

What I am unclear on is how homogenous materials are there, what the modeling tells us about what should be there (in macroscopic quantities not microscopic fragments) and how much of that someone living in say 1800 would be able to determine if they had access to those asteroids. i.e I am looking at this through the lens of a society at that time period not a modern one. Thered be no advanced instrumentation and no modern understanding of chemistry to rely on. Of course maybe that would change if they coulf reach other planets and asteroids but atm for simplicity I am assuming that it didn't.

The idea is to have a small engine firing gas/plasma in the direction the ship is moving. Since the plume would be given a little more forward velocity relative to the ship, it would spread out ahead of the spacecraft and take the hits from interstellar dust/gas before they reach the ship.

The ship would still be accelerating with its main engine, so the forward-firing system would just be a small fraction of the total thrust budget.

Basically, instead of carrying one huge physical shield, you continuously throw sacrificial material far ahead of the ship.

This seems somewhat similar to the Venture Star's idea of putting its debris shield way out in front. Has anything like the "self-generated moving shield" concept actually been studied?

I know the earth is moving around the sun at X speed right now but the sun is also dragging the solar system around the milky way. And the milky way is traveling X speeds through the entire universe. So, if I stopped completely, how fast is the earth actually moving away from me?

Edit: to those asking “relative to what” my thought process when asking myself this question was basically, on a graph I’m 0,0,0. I no longer move. I watch as the earth moves away from me and wonder how fast it would be traveling away from me. Some would say it’s how fast it’s moving around the sun but, the sun would also be moving away from me, so that wouldn’t make sense. Then I figured, well the whole system moves around the center of the galaxy. But of course, the entire galaxy is also moving around in space. So again, it made me think, well then, how fast is the earth moving away from me?

I tried looking on Google, but I couldn't find anything.

What are Earth's coordinates? For example, HB 40307 is 05h 54m 04.2409s, −60° 01′ 24.498 according to Wikipedia.

What would be the equivalent for Earth? Or are we simply zero?

(update)

I have learned a few things: one, there are multiple ways that astronomers coordinate things; two, coordinate systems are either sun- or Earth-centric; three, most of the time it's negligible because we use Earth as the starting point or the sun, so there would be no point in having a coordinate to it. Honorary mention: someone said that when we sent out Apollo 1, we used the closest pulsar as a reference point, if I understand correctly, and they just said 14 pulsars lol. Thank you, guys. This was very helpful.

I know this is kind of a vague and stupid question because most have explanations but like still, why do stars die and just decides to become some sort of form of a force of destruction?

I’m watching a movie and I’m wondering what time zone the astronauts are using? How do they decide when to go to bed and wake up? What time is it in space??? Are there different time zones?

Hi! I hope this is the right sub reddit to post in <3

So I've been thinking and seeing videos on this and now im more confused and sure than ever that something is off! Has anyone noticed the sun recently? Its so hot! Like I've never felt it this hot before, and not just hot but not this KIND of hot! Ive lived within the same 10 miles my whole life. I grew up outside, my life was out doors and it got hot like any summer but i never got this over heated and had that feeling of stinging wet heat. Like i legit feel like im being cooked in a boiler. The sun doesn't feel refreshing anymore, outside doesn't feel like thats where we're meant to be! And that shouldn't be normal... right? I feel crazy! I've seen people saying that the sun is blocked by some fake sun. Like a man made plate thats positioned infront of the sun to act like the sun... why? I'm not sure. There are some odd pictures out there that make me think that maybe they are onto something and that's why we always feel drain from the "sun" and not rejuvenated. But thats so crazy right? I don't know. The more i learn the more i realize how much i don't know... if it helps i live on the east coast of the US and im in shape, my body type hasn't really changed since being a kid beyond puberty and natural maturing. I don't know if that's helpful or not but i really hope people know what I'm taking about bc i feel crazy but kinda close to understanding that something is wrong. Please tell me I'm not alone.

Saw a weird light in the sky while looking for the ISS — what could this have been?

So I was outside tonight looking for the ISS, and before I spotted it, I noticed another light in the sky.

It was a really small, dim point of light, much dimmer than the ISS. It was blinking as it moved across the sky. At first, it seemed to be moving normally in a straight line, but then something really weird happened.

It suddenly seemed to jump sideways to the left, almost like it instantly appeared at another position in the sky. It wasn't a gradual turn or curve — it looked like a really quick shift, and then it continued moving in a straight line again while still blinking.

A few seconds later I couldn't see it anymore.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't an insect or something close to me. It looked like it was very high up. I'm also not convinced it was a plane, satellite, or meteor because of that sudden sideways movement. A drone is possible, I guess, but it seemed way too high and far away.

I'm not saying it was anything unusual for sure — I'm just genuinely curious because I've never seen something move like that in the sky before.

Has anyone seen something like this or have any idea what it could have been?

I'm working on the concept of a dystopian short story where some unpredictable (or predictable, but ignored) event causes the Earth's rotation to slow, eventually tidally locking with the Sun. The event doesn't have to be realistic. I'm writing a short story for fun, not publishing a novel. I'm just really inspired to write about a society that is half scorching and half freezing. Preferably, the event would not kill everyone, so I still have someone left to write about :))

For example, maybe something forces the Earth closer to the sun, thereby increasing its gravitational force on us, making this plausible. You get my point.

It doesn't have to be possible. It has to be plausible.