• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Diacetyl hasn’t been used in any reputable vape juice brand in like a decade(and is banned in EU), and there’s also absolutely no evidence that the juices that did contained enough to cause popcorn lung. There’s a reason it’s called popcorn lung, because the most likely person to get it is one who works in a popcorn factory and is exposed to industrial quantities of Diacetyl, day after day for likely 10-12 hour shifts. The difference in dosage is astronomical. If you’ve ever worked in a kitchen, you’ll know how grease vapors in the air will absolutely coat you in a film of yuck. Imagine that same idea but instead of grease it’s Diacetyl coating everyone and everything in the factory.








  • Sure, that’s an option. It doesn’t really change my overall point though that anything beyond galactic colonization is unrealistic on any time scale. Our next nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, is over 2.5 MILLION light years away, over 10 times farther than my “crossing the milky way” example, with nothing in-between to make a pit stop if needed, you have to cross the true void of space to get there.

    And that’s just to get the next nearest galaxy. Current estimates suggest the observable universe contains 2 TRILLION galaxies.


  • There doesn’t need to be more to it than that. The observable universe is over 93 billion light years in diameter. That means even at the speed of light, it would take over 6.5x longer than the universe has even existed for anything to cross that distance… except the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, so actually you need to go significantly faster than light to make it across. FTL is, sadly, still firmly in the realm of science fiction, so to the best of our current knowledge most of the universe is permanently inaccessible.


  • Not really, no. Generational ships might make colonizing the nearest star systems possible, but even colonizing our own galaxy would require some kind of suspended animation. The milky way is between 100,000-200,000 light years in diameter so even at the speed of light, you’re looking at a travel time that is ~33-66% of the time that humanity has even existed(homo sapiens are currently estimated to have become a distinct species 200,000-300,000 years ago)… just to go to ONE star system out of the hundreds of BILLIONS that exist in our galaxy. You’re gonna need generational ships so self-sustaining and capable that the generation that actually arrives at the destination will have long forgotten the point of the trip and might not want to leave the comfort of the ship.

    Still, colonizing our own galaxy is at least theoretically possible, given enough time. The real filter is just how unimaginably large the universe is. The vast, VAST majority of the observable universe is FOREVER out of our reach, as it is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. Then there’s the unobservable universe, which could literally be infinitely bigger than the observable universe for all we actually know.