Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Space | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Discover The Oldest, Largest Body Of Water In Space

fastcompany.com

46 pointsjordanchan21 comments

This article (like the discovery it reports) is from July 2011. The NASA press release can be found here: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/universe2011072... and it contains all the actual information in the article.

(And: what a terrible article! On two occasions it simply says the exact same thing twice in succession in almost the same words. And it says this: "NASA’s water discovery should be a reminder that if we have the sophistication to discover galaxies full of water 12 billion light years away, we should be able to save people just an ocean away from drought-induced starvation." ... which makes as much sense as saying that if we have the sophistication to discover enormous black holes at the centres of galaxies, we ought to be able to make our own black holes in the laboratory, or that if we have the sophistication to accelerate protons to 0.999999991c in the LHC, we ought to be able to make cars go at at least 0.9c.)

This would make an awesome premise for a sci-fi book. A plot along the lines of "Humanity must stop This Bad Thing but to do so they need Lots of Water but they have used up all the water so they have to Pull Together in Time of Crisis in order to retrieve all the water while contending with the fact that the water is around a black hole." Maybe throw in some serendipitously discovered alien technology that makes it all possible.

I think that it would make for a truly epic space opera if written by the right author.

So the original Total Recall, then? :)

Ice Pirates? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087451/

They just started YC research. Maybe its time for YC Movies...

Can we predict based on what we see the current status of the "cloud of water". Shouldn't it collapse into stars ?

Or does the blackhole consume the entire cloud of water !

So many questions.

Imagine if life existed within it. They must be wondering if life outside a "cloud of water" is even possible ? A planet ?

I recall (from the last time this was posted) that its like a few molecules of H2O per cubic meter. So more like a 'cloud of water vapor' or even 'a cloud of water plasma'.

It was made by the expanding shock wave from a supernova, through a gas cloud of mostly hydrogen. Lots got fused to oxygen, and then they combined. The tremendous amount of water is because its a vast expanding volume of space.

I'm not sure I would apply superlatives when talking about a possibly infinite domain.

Then again, it's not that I could claim this is the most pretentious headline produced by an intelligent human either.

Meh... some alien civilization probably used it all on irrigation by now.

Hydroponics using atmospheric humidity maybe?

...but does the black hole have rights to that water? Answer: NO!

...four years ago. This has been discussed here before?

so would it be safe to assume every planet/moon should have some amount of water? In one form or another. Should it be less of a surprise?

I bet Nestle has already bought it.

Maybe we could bring some to California.

It's amazing how many words he spends saying "this large body of water is really quite large." I mean:

> The official NASA news release describes the amount of water as "140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans," which isn’t particularly helpful, except if you think about it like this.

> That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is.

Oh, so that's what that means! Gosh!

I think the line underneath was better

"The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water."

Replacing "140 trillion times the total water on Earth" with "enough to supply an entire planet's worth of water for every person on earth, 20,000 times over." wasn't a particularly good idea.

I like 140 trillion earths figure, that's pretty unimaginable. 20,000 not so much.

I'm not satisfied till I see it measured in toilet flushes.

That number would be too large to fit in an ordinary person's brain. Let's instead continually flush all the toilets in Yankee Stadium twice per minute, to see how many years you could continue to do that. Still too big. Continually flush all the toilets on Earth twice a minute instead.

So let's see... 1.335e21 L per ocean, 1.4e14 oceans per space cloud, ~6 L per flush, 1051898.4 flushes per toilet per Gregorian year, ~1.4e9 toilets on Earth.

You could flush all the flush toilets currently installed on Earth, continuously, twice per minute, for 2.1e19 years.

Still too big. That's 1.5 billion times the age of the universe. No one can truly grasp that magnitude. Let's multiply the number of Earths and try to fix the time at the approximate age of the Earth. So, divide by 4.5e9 years... There we go.

You could continually flush all the currently installed flush toilets on Earth twice a minute over the entire history of the planet, on 4.7 billion identical Earths!

Finally! A completely meaningless number that everyone can understand! ~

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