Unsolved Space Mysteries

This video is #sponsored by Keeps.

[kingnaga]

Kudos to Keeps for consistently going to the baldest man they could find for the sponsorship.

[kevinb]

It's always nice to find an actual person narrating

[ignitionfrn]

0:55 - Mid roll ads
2:35 - Chapter 1 - What is dark matter
10:20 - Chapter 2 - What is the great attractor
13:30 - Chapter 3 - What was oumuamua
17:30 - Chapter 4 - Is humanity unique ?

[matthewmerchant]

For me personally, the Great Attractor is a notifiction that Simon has uploaded a new video to the Whistlerverse. I always gravitate to his channels. Almost naturally.

[Bubbaist]

When people ask why we haven’t found life outside the Earth, I imagine pre-contact Easter Islanders wondering why they haven’t encountered life from beyond their island. When you consider the unfathomable enormity of the universe, it’s downright silly to think we can make conclusions about it based on the tiny speck of the universe we have been able to examine. It’s like those Easter Islanders concluding that there is no intelligent life beyond their island because they hadn’t found any in the entire area they had explored.

[MisterCuddlez]

The marketing team at Keeps must be high out of their minds if they think that a completely bald guy is going to help sell their hair loss prevention snake oil.

[kaseyboles]

The great filter theory is why discovering primitive life is scary. It moves the likely timeframe of a great filter forward and thus more likely to be in our future. If we find zero planets with life then odds are we got lucky and got past the great filter. If we start finding crude radio transmissions, especially from multiple sources, but nothing more advanced, well that would truly be scary.

[arianamaria_]

The existential dread that the Fermi paradox gives me is crazy. There’s a famous quote that goes “we are either alone in the universe or we are not, both of which are equally terrifying” and that pretty much sums up the dread I feel when thinking about alien life.

[williamhardes]

Niel Degrass Tyson summed up his take on the fermi paradox with one with one question. "if you were to take a cup of water from the ocean, and it contained no whales, should we instantly assume there are no whales?" sheer fact that there is a virtual horizon beyond which we know nothing about, only makes this more poignant.

[aneonfoxtribute]

I've always thought the idea that "life can only flourish in a similar type of planet to Earth" to be odd. For instance, this statement:
"Most planets aren't in the habitable zone of their host star, and that many of the planet that do live in this safe distance aren't even rocky, but instead gaseous"
This is a true problem, but only if we look at it from a human perspective. But humans have evolved specifically for life on the planet Earth. Life didn't form on Earth because it had the perfect conditions for life to form. It's the other way around. Life formed on Earth in such a way that it can survive on the planet. We breath oxygen BECAUSE Earth has plentiful oxygen to breath. Earth's gravity is perfect for us BECAUSE we formed and evolved with the force of Earth's gravity. There is zero reason to believe that if life formed on a different planet, those lifeforms wouldn't be adapted for life on their planet. Like, for instance, Jupiter. Jupiter is not inhabitable for humans because it's too far away from the sun and its atmosphere is mostly hydrogen. But any life that forms on Jupiter would have formed under those conditions, so they would have evolved to breath hydrogen and with the colder heat as their natural heat. There's no reason to believe that Jupiter is unsustainable for intelligent life just because it's unsustainable for HUMAN life.

[unthawedwater]

The biggest flaw with the Fermi paradox is the assumption that alien life would have our technology or better otherwise we're alone when radio is only about 150 years old and has only gotten good enough for long distance communication within the last 30 years or so. There's probably hundreds of thousands of stone-age-esk civilizations we just have to wait for.

[toddparker]

Your humility to advertise for keeps was awesome

[ssokolow]

Re: MoND and Dark Matter, I highly recommend watching some of Angela Collier's videos. For example, she explains that dark matter isn't an explanation, it's a somewhat misleading name for a collection of OBSERVATIONS... and that we're still trying to pin down the explanation.

[DungeonDragon]

Combine the rare earth theory with the possibility that faster than light travel is truly impossible, and it might be that there is life out there, but we’ll never find it.

[ItsHyomoto]

I don't think the Fermi paradox and Copernican principle are so incompatible. To me it just says we have a low sample size, and that makes it hard to figure out what the common elements are.

[callabeth]

Do i think there is extraterrestrial life out there somewhere? Yes. Do i think we will ever find them? No, at least not in our lifetimes and perhaps not ever.

[infidelcastro]

10:18 Dude, did someone fall asleep at the keyboard? 😂

[corey]

I’ve been watching too much decoding the unknown cuz it’s weird to hear Simon read more than one sentence without going off on some tangent…

[JBrd]

(10:18) "WHAT IS THE GREAT ATTRTACTOR?" 😂🤣😂🤣😂


Lmao @ 'Attrtactor'. From now on, I'm going to pronounce the word 'attractor' as "attrtactor" (pronounced: atter-tack-ter) 😂

[samgordon]

5:15 "This particle would interact with mass, and therefore gravity, but not with light. A behavior that we've yet to see elsewhere."

I see what you did there writer