this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
701 points (98.1% liked)
196
3035 readers
1610 users here now
Community Rules
You must post before you leave
Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
Bigotry is not allowed, this includes (but is not limited to): Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, Classism, or discrimination based on things like Ethnicity, Nationality, Language, or Religion.
Avoid shilling for corporations, posting advertisements, or promoting exploitation of workers.
Proselytization, support, or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome. This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc.
Avoid AI generated content.
Avoid misinformation.
Avoid incomprehensible posts.
No threats or personal attacks.
No spam.
Moderator Guidelines
Moderator Guidelines
- Don’t be mean to users. Be gentle or neutral.
- Most moderator actions which have a modlog message should include your username.
- When in doubt about whether or not a user is problematic, send them a DM.
- Don’t waste time debating/arguing with problematic users.
- Assume the best, but don’t tolerate sealioning/just asking questions/concern trolling.
- Ask another mod to take over cases you struggle with, if you get tired, or when things get personal.
- Ask the other mods for advice when things get complicated.
- Share everything you do in the mod matrix, both so several mods aren't unknowingly handling the same issues, but also so you can receive feedback on what you intend to do.
- Don't rush mod actions. If a case doesn't need to be handled right away, consider taking a short break before getting to it. This is to say, cool down and make room for feedback.
- Don’t perform too much moderation in the comments, except if you want a verdict to be public or to ask people to dial a convo down/stop. Single comment warnings are okay.
- Send users concise DMs about verdicts about them, such as bans etc, except in cases where it is clear we don’t want them at all, such as obvious transphobes. No need to notify someone they haven’t been banned of course.
- Explain to a user why their behavior is problematic and how it is distressing others rather than engage with whatever they are saying. Ask them to avoid this in the future and send them packing if they do not comply.
- First warn users, then temp ban them, then finally perma ban them when they break the rules or act inappropriately. Skip steps if necessary.
- Use neutral statements like “this statement can be considered transphobic” rather than “you are being transphobic”.
- No large decisions or actions without community input (polls or meta posts f.ex.).
- Large internal decisions (such as ousting a mod) might require a vote, needing more than 50% of the votes to pass. Also consider asking the community for feedback.
- Remember you are a voluntary moderator. You don’t get paid. Take a break when you need one. Perhaps ask another moderator to step in if necessary.
founded 3 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"but Stephen, there are no fixed points in space. Space is relative, meaning you can only define positions relative to other things. You demand the fundamentally physically impossible of me, Stephen."
Ah, but using the cosmic microwave background we actually can determine a universal coordinate system to fix a point in space.
that sounds like you're relating your position to something else 😏
Why cosmic microwave background radiation? Is that any less arbitrary than e.g. the sun?
Well, it's the only thing we know of that can be used in the whole universe.
Use it how? I've never heard about this, and I can't seem to find anything about it by searching
In the sense that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is visible from every point in space. No matter where you are you can determine your position relative to the CMB, making it a common reference point for the entire universe.
i mean if we were to communicate with aliens in another galaxy it would be the "least arbitrary" one
Wouldn't the conversations go like this?
Me: I'm about 2/3rds out the longest arm of my galaxy
Alien: OK
vs
Me: I'm at the place where the CMBR is evenly redshifted in all directions.
Alien: Huh, me too?
Oh, so that's why Earth is spinning!
Life is naught but a warm burrito on the rotating microwave plate of Earth.
Yeah, and some asshole thought it'd be cool to put fish in it.
But only related to the cosmic microwave background, which, while more universal than most other reference frames, is ultimately still arbitrary
North is arbitrary as well, that doesn't mean you can't use it for spatial referencing.
Yes, for practical purposes, absolutely! But you're always just aligning with something else moving through space, not space itself
It can be as arbitrary as it wants it still allows you to use relative positioning to determine a fixed point.
I think they mean it would be "Stay at this exact point in the CMB rest frame" but not "in space" because the "space rest frame" is nonexistent
Is it tho? Assuming there was a big bang, isnt it fair to call that origin point 0 0 0 in 3D space? Subjective space is relative, but that doesnt mean space itself is relative.
the big bang wasn't an explosion from a point, it was an explosion of a point in space. That one point is still expanding to this day. Everything is moving away from everything else, which wouldn't be the case in an "ordinary" explosion. We are all still in that one point, it's just that that point has expanded. The center of the universe is, in the literal sense of the word "literally", everywhere.
Like one of those pills you put in water and it turns into a sponge TRex!
Based and T-Rexpilled.
I am the center of the universe. Got it.
Wait until you hear about quantum immortality...
Objectively based solipsism
Im kinda trollin at this point, but in an ordinary explosion, in a vacuum without external gravity, everything would indeed have a different initial velocity and direction, so everything would be moving away from everything else.
imagine standing at the side of the explosion looking towards it. some debris will be blown way from you, but some will be coming towards you. You are something, and not everything is moving away from you, some debris hits you in the face. That's an explosion in space.
An explosion of space is defferent. Everything will be moving away from you, regardless of where you are or which side you're facing.
Something wasn't in space and it exploded. Space itself exploded. your argument only holds if you are exactly in the explosion source.
In space, we're still inside the explosion
I've given up trying to explain it to people as an explosion. Media and innate biases make people view that word as a "kaboom" and form a mental picture.
I tell people that the universe was likely always infinite. In the beginning it was infinitely dense and essentially a singularity, but that singularity wasn't a point in space like a black hole, it was a everything and everywhere. The universe was ultra dense, infinite energy, then all at once, the whole thing got bigger like the infinite hotel paradox, an infinite space can get bigger. So all the whole infinite space just stretched out in all directions, making space open up and the energy less dense.
that's not how the big bang works, the whole thing about the big bang is that it was a singularity containing all of space in a single point.
The standard analog is to take a small balloon with dots painted on it, then inflating it. The surface of the balloon is spacetime, and as it shows there is no origin, everything just gets more distant from everything else.
That's absolutely right; there's no special origin point in space where the Big Bang began. However, there is a specific reference frame that the Big Bang occured in, which we can measure by looking at the redshift of the cosmic microwave background left over from it. The solar system is currently moving at around 600km/s relative to that.
Interestingly, this is actually an expanding reference frame due to the universe's expansion, so two observers locally at rest relative to it will each see the other moving away.
Doesn't the balloon have a centre of mass that we can adjust coordinates to.... all the time.... at millions of km per second.
Okay, I see your point.
They are only talking about the surface of the balloon. For the purpose of the metaphor only the surface exists. Imagine infinite space. Now imagine we divide infinite space into a grid of 1 meter cubes. Now imagine we double the size of every cube. That's more or less how expansion works, it is an expansion of space everywhere, not outwards like an explosion.
I've been struggling to not see it as explosion/outward expansion. This really helped!
So from wherever you look, the universe is expanding away from you (I.e., other things in it move away from you).
Therefore, you can see that the universe doesn't have a centre. From this and some other a bit more complicated things, one can see that the Big Bang never had a single point but rather expanded everywhere at once when it happend. Although often called expansion from one point that is wrong.
Also technically you would need to give a time dimension as we live in 4D space.
Wouldn't that be the case even with a center?
Yes indeed, you could see every point as the universe as its centre (or none of them).
When everything is center, nothing is.
No. The only logical explanation is that I am the center of the universe!
I'm so glad you asked that.
Never had that many comments in my inbox
the 0 0 0 0 (spacetime) orientation system would be possible if the universe was a minkowski space and thus flat, but spacetime is curvy due to relativistic effects, which prevents any sort of flat orientation like that
Think of a balloon expanding. All the dots on the surface are moving away from one another. No dot is the centre.
If they are all moving away from each other, that means if you reverse time they will all converge at a single point, which would be the center.
Every point is that point. Every point would see the whole universe converge on them simultaneously.