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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • The sun isn’t wet. It’s not going to dry out.

    Strictly speaking asking the weight of an astronomical body is nonsensical. Weight is a measure of force and only has meaning in relation to mass and acceleration (in this case due to gravity). The sun has a mass of 1,988,400×10^24kg.

    As to the question about turning it into a rock, let me put it to you this way, “Which weighs more, a pound of rocks or a pound of feathers?”

    Or think of it this way. I weigh about 200 pounds on the earth (pounds being a unit of force, not mass). That’s the force holding me down on the planet. That’s also how much the Earth weighs on me. My mass, about 91 kg, is the same on earth, the moon, outer space, the surface of the sun, etc. My weight however, depends entirely on whatever massive gravity well I happen to be standing on.

    Don’t ask “What is mass?”, there be dragons. You’ll either get trite over simplified to the point of being meaningless answers (like the reply below), you’ll just barely start to understand that learn more about the world around us leads to more questions than answers. That’s kind of the whole point though.





  • Yeah, I agree, the OPs reaction here is kinda surreal. I mean, I grew up watching astronauts answer dumb kiddy questions while floating in zero G. When the shuttle was regularly going up in was a regular thing for kids to see on TV. There was ALWAYS a poop/pee/fart question. ALWAYS. This joke in Enterprise is nothing more than a nod to that. I guess Gen Z didn’t ~~pay as much attention to space poop ~~ see as many of these interviews because the shuttle program ended before their time?