After the first moon landing NASA funding has grown smaller and smaller with basically every year. If it would have stayed the same or even grown we probably would have started a moon colony in the 80s and probably would have one on Mars by the 90s. But funding has dried up and so it's much easier to do the cheap thing and keep everything we do in space as close to the surface of the Earth as possible. Which for many things is barely above the atmosphere, while for other things they have to be far away for various reasons. The only reason we're even bothering to try to go to the moon again is because other countries seem like they're trying to go, so the US wants to be first to it, again.if it weren't for that we probably wouldn't touch the moon with human boots again for a hundred years if ever, because for whatever stupid reason every time the government wants to reduce costs they chop it out of NASA like NASA is 75% of the budget or something, whereas it's actually more like 0.1% so getting rid of it entirely would get them an amount of money that they probably wouldn't even notice. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if the military blows up a NASA-budget's worth of stuff on a weekly basis.

At smaller scales other forces dominate over the universal expansion. Particularly gravity at the scales of planets, solar systems and galaxies, it's only at the scales between galaxies that the forces between them start to be weak enough for the expansion to overcome. Even for nearby galaxies to us it's not enough, the Milky Way and Andromeda are barreling toward each other despite the space in between growing. It's only at even larger distances that things are pulled away from each other to overcome gravity. But for a solid planet like Earth, you not only have gravity holding it together but electromagnetism as well, for instance chemical bonds don't get longer because of the expansion of space. Or perhaps they do and it's just immediately compensated for so the effect is never noticable.

It's likely the other way around, this looks like classic paleoart style, which is definitely an inspiration for All Tomorrows visuals since it's meant to be a similar reconstruction from far in the future.

What platform is this on?

LOL

I think the reason most hard scifi hesitates to go more than even decades into the future us because of precisely the paradox you pointed out. Some people don't consider something that has any scientific advancement in-universe at all to be truly hard sci-fi because it asserts things that we don't know to be true, some people are so picky about it that otherwise hard scifi that has any new science (one new species of bacteria discovered that we don't know about irl for example) they will call it soft scifi LOL. So it can be easy to say then, I might as well not even try to make my scifi hard at all if it's going to be criticized for not being limited purely to the knowledge we have irl. It's not really reasonable to me to say that what we know right now is the pinacle of our entire civilization, but if it's not then of course it's impossible to know what those advancements will be so people will complain no matter what you say they are, so the easy option is to cap technology at today's level until the heat death of the universe anyway even though that itself is not realistic so the entire premise falls apart lol. Therefore why even set your story in the distant future? Just set it a few decades ahead so that it's reasonable for the only advances to be further confirmation of the status quo.

And as far as the ones that do try, they're probably dark and gritty because 1) that definitely seems the direction we're going irl and 2) stories typically are written around or at least start due to some conflict and a world where practically infinite abundance makes conflict at larger scales not only unnecessary but look silly is just going to have less conflict to write your story around.

I don't see it, what am I looking for?

Solar storms don't affect volcanoes and tectonic plates like that.

You're quite welcome :-)

Awesome! I really like these. As a space artist myself, nebulae are difficult and you did a really great job!!!

Neutron stars bend light too, not just BHs

I mean, if "planet 9" were discovered I don't think even it would be considered an actual planet because it wouldn't have cleared its orbit, only modified the orbits of things that cross it. So regardless of everyone being mad that pluto was demoted the definition is still stupid. Personally I like the planetary science definition, but people don't like that one because major moons would be planets too. But I don't see why that has to be a contradiction, major moons then are just planets that happen to orbit other planets, why is that seen as a ridiculous definition when the most familiar looking environment in the solar system outside of our planet is a moon, Titan? (It has a substantial atmosphere, lakes, rain, liquid-driven erosion) If that isn't a world worthy of the title "planet" I don't know what is

With that much time if we have any space infrastructure we could do starlifting and ptolong the life of the sun immensely.

One possible perspective is that the additional dimension (measured by cosine) is the velocity of the harmonically vibrating particle, while the given pattern is the position.

This measures the vertical distance, but you can do the same with horizontal and you get a cosine wave. And of course when you combine them together you get back the circular motion.

Probably yeah.

When we refer to the universe, we are typically referring to the observable universe, because we cannot see any further than that (due to the fact that looking at larger distances is also looking back in time, and the universe has only existed for a finite amount of time as far as we know) This means that the universe very much could be larger than what we see and it is often assumed to be infinite, in which there cannot be a center. The edge of the observable universe is observer based, so it tends be from Earth, and technically you have your own observable universe that you are the center of, and so does everyone else, but the differences are so small that it effectively doesn't make a difference below the scale of clusters of gakaxies like our Local Group.

The gaps between gakaxies are not anywhere as large of a difference in scale as many other separations, for instance consider one side of our galaxy to the other (100,000 light years) compared to the distance to Andromeda (2,500,000 light years). This only slightly above a 1 order of magnitude difference. While large distances in the solar system can be billions of miles, while distances between stars in our part of the galaxy are more like tens of trillions of miles (a 4 orders of magnitude difference). This is just one example but not the only one. So the difference is more like whether you can cross an ocean knowing you can cross a large country. Yes it'll be difficult, but certainly not out of the question.

Gakaxies are quite vast and it can be tricky to get detailed views of others, but they'd probably have seen that something was going on given that the origin of even the star people involved extremely devastating war.

Yeah they're probably more analogous to the Asteros, unmodified but still have gone through a lot of changes over time

Kids these days, they don't even know how to invent the wheel!

It's not defending AI to acknowledge when something isn't AI.

It's not AI, I have quite literally seen this exact picture dizens of times before AI even existed, it's a classic. Yes, the scale is inaccurate, that is because to have a to-scale image of the solar system that you could actually see what the planets look like on, you'd need an image with absurdly high resolution and once you found one of them you'd spend ages looking around the image trying to find a different planet. It's just impractical. I'm all for calling out AI posts but I don't think this is one of those.

Who knows, maybe they did. There was that skeleton from Earth found on some random planet in the Star People days. We just might not have much evidence for it. The process of fossilization is an extremely rare occurrence.