zarmin
Terrible job, guys.
That we have to guess at this is by far the worst part of the AI era. It feels like a dark cloud over my productivity. It makes my body tense for the entire day when it happens. Not healthy.
Thank you for your time this evening.
They would say you can do that. Right click and choose "hide on this page" from the 1P menu.
But does it work?
No. It does not fucking work, because this company and their software is FUCKING SHIT.
Here, the math doesn't check out. That's my point.
I'm not saying "it seems like stars should be invisible but they're not", Im showing that inverse square law - which we can verify at human scales - predicts invisibility at stellar distances, and the proposed compensation (25x more luminosity) is insufficient by orders of magnitude.
Sirius is "billions of times dimmer" than the sun to our eyes IF you mean the Sun as seen from Earth versus Sirius as seen from Earth. But that's not the comparison. The comparison is:
Sun moved to 544,000 AU (Sirius's distance): 296 billion times dimmer than Sun at 1 AU Sirius at 544,000 AU: 25x brighter than that
25x doesn't bridge a 296-billion-fold gap, plus the eye's dynamic range is irrelevant; we're comparing what brightness should reach the eye versus what compensation the model claims.
If your claim is "the eye can see across many orders of magnitude, so even though the Sun would be invisible at stellar distances, Sirius being slightly brighter makes it visible," then do the actual calculation. Show that 25x more luminosity produces enough photons to cross the detection threshold. Because the math I'm showing says it doesn't.
You're assuming the model works and looking for why my intuition is wrong. I'm showing the model's numbers are internally inconsistent. Those aren't the same thing.
>I've found that when I have a thought that seems to contradict the "established" model of the world, I tend to just be missing some critical factor.
Does it bother you that to make relativity work, they had to invent dark matter and dark energy - 96% of the universe's mass-energy - as fudge factors? At what point does "missing a critical factor" become "the model requires constant patching to match observations"?
You're comparing the Sun's illuminance at Earth (10^5 lux at 1 AU) to all starlight combined (10^-4 lux), then trying to work backward to what a single star should provide. That's not how this works.
The question isn't "what's the ratio between sunlight and all starlight." The question is: what happens when you move the Sun to stellar distances using inverse square law?
At 1 AU: ~10^5 lux
At 544,000 AU: 10^5 / (544,000)^2 = 10^5 / 3×10^11 ≈ 3×10^-7 lux
That's the Sun at Sirius's distance. Multiply by 25 for Sirius's actual luminosity: ~7.5×10^-6 lux.
Your own Wikipedia source says the faintest stars visible to naked eye are around 10^-5 to 10^-4 lux. So we're borderline at best, and that's with the 25× boost.
But moreover, you said "the difference between all starlight and just Sirius would be around 10^2." There are ~5,000-9,000 stars visible to the naked eye. If Sirius provides 1/100th of all visible starlight, and there are thousands of other stars, the math doesn't work. You can't have one star be 1% of the total while thousands of others make up the rest - unless most stars are providing almost nothing, which contradicts the "slightly brighter" compensation model.
Address the core issue: inverse square law predicts invisibility. The 25× luminosity factor is insufficient compensation. Citing aggregate starlight illuminance doesn't resolve this.