i think we need to start saying "same hat" again. weve forgotten the yaoi

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

thinking about how like. as a kid growing up in the light-polluted suburbs, space was always somewhere else. it was in the eyepiece of a telescope, star clusters and the andromeda galaxy and the orion nebula (good luck seeing any other galaxies or nebulae from suburbia) all faint and fuzzy, and outside the eyepiece, nothing. just a handful of stars in a not-that-dark sky. it was either that or look up hubble pics

i knew, in theory, that the night sky was space. but in practice i found that hard to believe since the sky i could see barely resembled the wonders of the cosmos described to me in documentaries or books. that telescope eyepiece was like a gateway into another world where faint hints of these things really did exist, because they didn't exist in my sky

and then i started going to dark sky sites, and it's all just. there. it's real. you can just see the plane of our galaxy with its star clouds and dust lanes

one time, a friend and i stopped in the middle of nowhere in kansas on the way back from a road trip. it was the darkest and most remote night sky i've ever seen. she pointed to a fuzzy little cloud fairly close to the horizon, like a puff of steam rising from the spout of the teapot of sagittarius. it was the lagoon nebula. she also pointed out the andromeda galaxy, a distinct smear on the sky

not with a telescope, but with the naked eye. everything was just there! sure, it didn't lookk like hubble pics, but it wasn't just the night sky anymore - it really was space

i think one of the saddest things about light pollution is that we live in a time where humans have unprecedented knowledge about the universe and our place in it. we can look at features of the night sky and understand the immensity and significance of it all. you can look at the puff of steam in sagittarius and know that suns are being born there

but for most people, these facts are distant and irrelevant, because they can't see them in the sky above their heads, and i think that's a tragic loss for our species

I’m going to unlearn shame *bursts into tears and beats my head against a brick wall*

when you're nonbinary but your jewish girlfriend doesn't like the word partner

In 1977 NASA compiled 116 images to represent Earth and put them on a gold record and put it on the Voyager space probe and due to it not being aimed at anything this record will probably outlast Humanity. Unless we catch up to it one day its unlikely this record will never be viewed in the next thousand if not million years. And yet you can't look at all of these images on NASA's website because of copyright. Yup this isn't an existential post anymore it's anti-copyright. It's been 60 years, time to let these pictures enter the public domain.

Jupiter, observed by Voyager 1 on March 1, 1979.

"Calculate your carbon footprint and use your yard to undo the damage you do ^_^" the term carbon footprint was invented by fossil fuel companies to shift the blame of climate change and environmental destruction from them onto people just trying to survive, stop falling for their propaganda

her biggest fan and she didn’t even started playing

I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

Saturn and its rings in visible/ultraviolet

god if there was a book of forbidden spells I wouldn’t even hesitate