Secondly, would it even be possible to know in that the sun has exploded?
The meme says “in the 8 minutes it takes for the light to reach us” but that would also be the precise moment in which we learn of the explosion leaving us with no time to make memes.
Which leads me back to my initial question, how, if at all possible, could we setup an early (seconds/minutes) warning system for such an event?
Possibly some kind of quantum entangled alarm system in a lower orbit around the sun?
Completely tossing around BS of course, just an interesting thought experiment.
Quantum entanglement can’t actually transmit information, it just looks like it can sometimes due to how quantum mechanics can get weird.
Get a red ball and a blue ball, and two boxes. Close your eyes and out one ball in each box. These box-balls are now “entangled”, in that you know that the contents of one is not the content of the other.
Send a box to a different country, and open yours. You instantly know that the other ball is red, since yours is blue, but the holder of the other box knows nothing new.
With the QM, it the same basic setup except both particles are in an indeterminate state, and when you look you’re making it “pick” which state it’s in, and it also makes the other one “pick”.
You can’t force it to collapse one way or the other without breaking the entanglement either, so it’d be like red-blue ball, and when you force it to be red, the other ball now has a 50/50 chance of also being red.
My guess for the only way to get some warning would be if the supernova had some form of initial, not-cataclysmic flash or outgassing shortly beforehand.
Superposition is just the “it’s in multiple states at once” part. Entanglement is the property of making how one particle comes out of superposition interrelated with how another one does.
No and yes.
If it happened instantaneously then no.
However, scientists are capable of predicting solar flares well in advance. They can do that by looking at what is happening on the surface of the sun. If it was about to explode, there’d likely be some kind of unusual activity there for several days prior to the explosion.
The sun is also rather big. So even if aliens decided to blow it up unexpectedly, it’d probably take more than a few minutes for the explosion to engulf the entire sun, meaning that you would have time to send a meme before lights went out.
I’m not really sure what other purpose a warning system could have. There’s no good place to hide if the sun goes out.
it’d probably take more than a few minutes for the explosion to engulf the entire sun, meaning that you would have time to send a meme before lights went out.
Secondly, would it even be possible to know in that the sun has exploded?
The meme says “in the 8 minutes it takes for the light to reach us” but that would also be the precise moment in which we learn of the explosion leaving us with no time to make memes.
Which leads me back to my initial question, how, if at all possible, could we setup an early (seconds/minutes) warning system for such an event?
Possibly some kind of quantum entangled alarm system in a lower orbit around the sun?
Completely tossing around BS of course, just an interesting thought experiment.
Quantum entanglement can’t actually transmit information, it just looks like it can sometimes due to how quantum mechanics can get weird.
Get a red ball and a blue ball, and two boxes. Close your eyes and out one ball in each box. These box-balls are now “entangled”, in that you know that the contents of one is not the content of the other.
Send a box to a different country, and open yours. You instantly know that the other ball is red, since yours is blue, but the holder of the other box knows nothing new.
With the QM, it the same basic setup except both particles are in an indeterminate state, and when you look you’re making it “pick” which state it’s in, and it also makes the other one “pick”.
You can’t force it to collapse one way or the other without breaking the entanglement either, so it’d be like red-blue ball, and when you force it to be red, the other ball now has a 50/50 chance of also being red.
My guess for the only way to get some warning would be if the supernova had some form of initial, not-cataclysmic flash or outgassing shortly beforehand.
Is that not just quantum superpositioning, which I thought was technically a separate, though possibly intertwined, concept?
Superposition is just the “it’s in multiple states at once” part. Entanglement is the property of making how one particle comes out of superposition interrelated with how another one does.
Neutrino burst typically precedes a supernova, at least I remember reading that somewhere… Don’t ask me where…
No and yes. If it happened instantaneously then no.
However, scientists are capable of predicting solar flares well in advance. They can do that by looking at what is happening on the surface of the sun. If it was about to explode, there’d likely be some kind of unusual activity there for several days prior to the explosion. The sun is also rather big. So even if aliens decided to blow it up unexpectedly, it’d probably take more than a few minutes for the explosion to engulf the entire sun, meaning that you would have time to send a meme before lights went out.
I’m not really sure what other purpose a warning system could have. There’s no good place to hide if the sun goes out.
What if it happened at night? Then we’d be fine, right?
Okay, good. That makes me feel better.