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What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

162 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.

Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either "alive" or "dead". Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.

For example, if a cell is "alive" but has less than 2 "alive" neighbors it "dies" by under-population. If the cell is "alive" and has more than three "alive" neighbors it "dies" from over-population, etc.

Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.

It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles... life.

There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Galaxies are not evenly distributed in space. Instead, when you look at the universe, galaxies are grouped in giant strings that look like a neural connections in a brain.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It blew my mind when I learned that we're in a relatively dark, empty part of space compared to what's out there. It really put into perspective for me how difficult space travel will be for us as we continue to advance.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Space is incomprehensibly big and its getting larger over time. We will never have meaningful travel outside the solar system. If humanity started traveling in space from the moment we evolved, we would be able to travel the length of the milky way around two times. Space is basically a boondoggle. Our solar system still contains lots of resources though, so its not totally worthless.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yea ... like Star Trek, with warp speed and everything, is basically all limited to our single Galaxy ... and that's not unrealistic given their technology.

Like in that space-faring future, the galaxy is basically the new continent and the inter-galactic divide the new great ocean that no one has ever crossed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Tom Paris and the Cochrane have entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Yea because gra-- woahhh

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

And here's the other thing I try to visualize:
Matter - both dark and "normal" - falling like water into these gravitational canyons that we see as giant strings, while the empty spaces in between expand and accelerate. The dynamics of this thing are mind-breaking.