Pub quiz tonight, they've already told us the bonus round will be Man in Space.

Already done a trawl of wikipedia but somehow don't think it's going to be that obvious.

STW knows everything about everything, right?

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Praise be to Douglas Adams.

Space has its own website;

http://www.space.com/

but I can't see a blog, facebook page or twitter account so I assume that space isn't really into social media.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

I was just trying to find that quote via Google 🙂 Love it 😆

"…the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."

– Carl Sagan

Absolutely mind-boggling and incredibly humbling when you think about it and a great response to anyone who doesn't believe that extra-terrestrial life is possible.

(the maths if you're interested)

What is a space man ?
Its where you park a car man.

Space is a vacuum apart from the things in it.

There are TWO, not three golf balls on the moon – a favorite pub quiz question that usually states three if they get their questions from a pack, rather than self research them.

the 'third' golf ball arose as one of the spacemen fluffed his second shot and the film shows three strokes, although only two balls were ever used 🙂

oh, wait a second, you said interesting…..delete and move on!

<edited the there their mistake!!>

In the late 70s kids were convinced that the simultaneous consumption of space dust and a soft drink would cause instant death.

lol @ mudhark.

it's true.

We were very disappointed when someone at school tried it and survived with nothing more than bad wind.

Pluto isn't classed as a planet any more. It's a dwarf planet, so I guess the number of planets in the solar system is 8 if you're gonna be pedantic (i.e pub quiz!)

Paul Davies is the scientist responsible for monitoring and replying to any extra terrestial messages received on earth.

You don't explode in a vacuum if your suit springs a leak/falls off etc.

Nasa say "exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.

Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly "the bends", certainly some [mild, reversible, painless] swelling of skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or so. At some point you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. Injuries accumulate. After perhaps one or two minutes, you're dying. The limits are not really known.

"You do not explode and your blood does not boil because of the containing effect of your skin and circulatory system. You do not instantly freeze because, although the space environment is typically very cold, heat does not transfer away from a body quickly. Loss of consciousness occurs only after the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood. If your skin is exposed to direct sunlight without any protection from its intense ultraviolet radiation, you can get a very bad sunburn."

A nasa guy had an accidental exposure in the mid 60's and passed out at about fifteen seconds and says the worst thing was feeling the water on his tongue beginning to boil.

It's good for storage.

A nasa guy had an accidental exposure in the mid 60's and passed out at about fifteen seconds and says the worst thing was feeling the water on his tongue beginning to boil.

😯

This is all good. Keep 'em coming.

hard interstellar vacuum still has 2 hydrogen atoms per cc!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/17/star_trek_scuppered

The really amazing and mind blowing thing about space is not how big it is but how small it was some 13 billion years ago. So small there was no space at all. And in that non space existed everything necessary to make a bicycle given enough time.

The temperature is 3 degrees (K) out there – that's blummin cold.

If you empty and then scrub the inside of St Paul's Cathedral completely clean and then place one speck of dust randomly inside it, proportionately there will be a billion billion billion billon to the power of a trillion times more matter inside the free space of St Paul's cathedral, than exists in the space of the entire universe.

Space is, indeed, really big.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field View

The smallest known star is the micro starlette called Recubo Ardus Incendia and is no bigger than a London bus. It was discovered in 1991 and in the Coma Berenices asterism. Or in laymen's terms near past the leo constellation if you are looking from earth.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/17/star_trek_scuppered

though I think they've missed the point of "warp drive" which gets around the speed of light by some means, by which, in real space the craft might always be more or less stationary…

If you empty and then scrub the inside of St Paul's Cathedral completely clean and then place one speck of dust randomly inside it, proportionately there will be a billion billion billion billon to the power of a trillion times more matter inside the free space of St Paul's cathedral, than exists in the space of the entire universe.

I don't think that's a true fact, and for that matter I cannot work out what it means 🙁

You need to focus on the word "proportionately".

Also: there is more space than matter in your body…

a teaspoonful of white dwarf star would weigh about 15 tonnes,

and a teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh 5.5×1012 kg, about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza. 😯

I read once that when you see models of the soloar system them are massively out of scale, for example…

'if the full stop at the end of this sentence is to scale of the planet Earth then Pluto would be 30 miles away.'

Something like that anyway

The temperature is 3 degrees (K) out there – that's blummin cold.

There is no "degree" prefix for Kelvin, just 3 Kelvin. That's still quite cold though.

The static on a de-tuned TV set is casued by the background microwave radiation left over from the big bang.

Also, dark matter and dark flow are clearly made up to explain the unxeplainable.*

*IMO

The Female of the Species was their biggest hit

No one can hear you scream there.

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

(Praise be, too, to the Monty Python team).

yoshimi – Member

Also, dark matter and dark flow are clearly made up to explain the unxeplainable.*

*IMO

Actually, they are hypotheses based on our existing knowledge of how a quantum universe works and are being looked for, so that they can be measured to provide evidence for development into a theory.

If you drove 24 hours a day at 60mph it would take you 155 days to get to the moon

Caveat: If there were a road to the moon, which there isn't

Actually, they are hypotheses based on our existing knowledge of how a quantum universe works and are being looked for, so that they can be measured to provide evidence for development into a theory.

I guess that is a galactic equivalent to using a random number to solve a mathematical equation?

I'm trying to find a poem that's up in the underground at the moment, about the space where heaven once was turning out to be barren beyond imagining and how from out there it is terribly obvious that Earth is the only paradise. But I can't. 🙁

They might ask this question:

How many ears does Captain Kirk have ?

The answer is of course 3, the left ear, the right ear, and the final front ear.

LA Galaxy is actually an American Football (or 'soccer' team) not a galaxy.

Based on living in an infinite universe, there's an exactly version of the STW forum out there, spouting the same shite with identical versions of all of us posting on it.

You can even calculate exactly how far away that it's statistically likely to be with quite a simple equation based on how many ways there are of combining atoms and how many of them existing in a given volume of space (IIRC)

You need to focus on the word "proportionately".

yeah but when I do that it seems to say that St. Paul's is bigger than the universe 🙁

Hardest pub quiz question ever:

Where exactly is the Higgs Boson particle?

The universe is 13.7 billion years old and nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So you would have thought the universe could not be more than 27.4 billion light years across.

But it doesn't work like that: space itself is expanding and without breaking Einstein's relativity theories the universe is thought to be 100 billion light years wide.

And every little bit of space is full of hot photons. Those pesky things get everywhere.