sounds great does it have to be a current girlfriend or can I use this for whatever kind of criminal activity I want you know spy on an ex the girl your stalking from the grocery store maybe a senator just spitballing ideas here, is this a good app to use to anonymously stalk and ruin the lives and track and maybe locate victims?
I'm not an astronomer, but I'm guessing the _average_ density of a nebula cloud isn't at all constant. It might have regions (towards the center?) which are more dense, which could even have particle density comparable to our atmosphere. It might even contain "native" or "foreign" matter/objects which would be difficult to detect until you "stumble" upon them at close range. I would think flying a starship through a nebula would be less like hitting a space pillow than like trying to carefully drive through a busy intersection.
Some smaller nebulae could be pretty dense, but something similar to Earth's atmosphere is bullcrap. There is no such thing as a nebula dense enough that you could actually feel its wind brushing against you.
Fair enough, I was trying to offer at least a feeble pretense of "realism" for this starship-submarine-warfare dueling-battle scene. The upper atmosphere of a gas giant would've been more plausible.
Yeah... If a cloud of interstellar dust was dense enough, it would clump together and form into either a gas giant or star, rather than remain a nebula.
The space clouds are pretty much so we can have Our naval shenanigans in the void, “submarine battles” and “encountering chance storms” are Kind of hard in the in the endless vacuum. Starships duking it out in a nebula Is the equivalent of two battleships fighting each other, with me running between the two spraying deodorant.
I mean, the chance storm can always be realized as solar flares. Those present actual problems for space travel. Most Sci-Fi encounters happen within solar systems anyway.
Yeah. Jump to a nebula and it's just another star system only now everything is pink or blue or (in the case of the Pleiades) chock full of killer flower-ships who want you to die.
Stellaris also does nebulae well, the only effect they have at all is you can mine the space dust with the right tech from a space station but it's really not very efficient or worth the time and money to do so.
actually, they also "hide stuff" nowadays as well, though, they only hide stuff from long range sensors outside of the system. anything entering it can see full well what's in there. which could feasibly make sense, givenyou might be able to, say, fine-tune sensors that're going dozens if not hundreds of light years to spot stuff as small as ships or space stations.
Point of order: the outer layers of res giant stars near the end of their lives are cool enough and poorly defined enough that they behave EXACTLY like the nebulas on Star Trek. If you headcanon the Mutara Nebula as being literally just an old main sequence star well into its expansion pulse phase, then you have a relatively small and hot core surrounded by a diffuse cloud of churning plasma that is only barely confined by gravity and is about as dense as the earth's thermosphere.
@@Brickooine Yes. In fact, if you had good enough radiation shielding, you could fly inside the Sun, with all your other tech being what is available today. 99.9%+ of the heat transfer from stars is through radiation, so touching them does very little.
@@Brickooine Yup. Even the "surface" of the sun has a density barely higher than vacuum. But it looks opaque to us because the gas particles at that layer are just dense enough to scatter light. That's also why the corona is so much hotter than the photosphere; ambient luminosity is actually lower BENEATH the sun's visible surface than above it, because beneath the photosphere a photon can only travel a couple thousand km before it gets absorbed by a gas particle.
steelgreyed, except they also get them wrong. Quite a lot of space photos, are from telescopes that don't operate in visible light. So the photos are actually not what they really look like, and are more artistic then reality.
Considering they’ve chosen for reasons of style to include a few sci-fi trope techs like grav plating, they may also use the sci-fi trope of “We have absolutely no idea what most of the Galaxy looks like for some reason” to explain the sudden nebula away. Seriously though, an ISD or a Galaxy Class has more advanced and powerful sensors than everything on Earth put together, and yet everything past their borders might as well just be labeled “Here there be dragons”.
Nah dude, the nebula literally just popped into existence for them. Like, that's canon. 400 light-years away, which means that 400 years before The Expanse takes place, something happened that deposited a fuckload of space dust into a nebula-shaped cloud nearly instantly. If it's aliens, that means 400 years of technological improvements, on top of the ability to just drop a nebula into space.
So a battle in a nebula would just be a regular space battle but everything would be flying in radiant blues and purples? That actually sounds pretty cool
Sorry to disappoint, but nebulae are so empty that you wouldn't see anything at all. Photographs of nebulae are taken through a process called exposure photography where a computer interprets the light coming from one, often in non visible spectrum, to then put together an image of what the structure would look like were it significantly denser. Colors are usually used to outline the different structures.
Yeah, though the accuracy of laser and projectile weapons would be very extremely slightly less than normal, but you'd get pretty coloured lasers if they used the right frequency (they won't, but it's fun to dream).
tesnacloud In part. There are some nebulae visible to the naked eye. E.g., this is a photo taken with absolutely no false colour: www.physicsforums.com/attachments/attachment-php-attachmentid-35158-d-1304495278-jpg.148057/ They are still quite dim, so you need either long exposure while taking a picture or some other kind of tech enhancing light for you to see it.
Of course you have to be lucky, that you have radiation in the visible light. But you should see it with the naked I, you have to keep in mind that you will be a lot closer to this nebula so the intensity is much much higher. For example you can see Jupiter with your own eyes. But if you where just in the next star system you would never will.
That's very interesting. I suppose we can chalk this up to Sci-Fi following another tenant in the Rule of Cool, "Thou shall make nebula small, dense obstacles and not colorful voids."
2:48 Just a note: that reaction was from the effect the nebulae had on the ships systems, like shields and sensors and engine efficiency, rather then drag on the hull. This does not really affect your larger point though.
One thing that I’m surprised you didn’t mention: they’re almost entirely invisible in the visible wavelengths. At most they appear as faint wisps of smoke against the black of space. All of the pretty colors we associate with nebula are false colors mapped to wavelengths we can’t see.
The Hubble Space Telescope produces images from the visible spectrum of light. And hubble has a lot, like a lot a lot, images of nebulae. They just consit of dust reflecting light, a Human can see that. Also: a lot of known nebulae in our "vicinity" are known for hundrets of years. I don't think Gallileo had a IR-Telescope at his disposal.
@@NineSun001 They're visible but only barely. That's why they're called "nebula", they're nebulous to the eye. They're like smudges in the night sky. Telescopes help by gathering more light, but even then nebula are ill defined and practically colorless, like a smoke lit by moonlight. Pictures that you see with lots of color and detail are usually long exposures, or as the person above said pictures featuring non-visible wavelengths.
Humans hundreds of years ago: This is a nebula. I can see it by zooming in a magnifying lens and nothing else but my own eye. It's colorful and beautiful, like a rainbow in space. I will write poetry about it being a flower in the sky. Humans on TH-cam today: They're basically invisible. Like smoke at night. They only have color because it's added in post. Colorful nebulas are fake news. Nothing is real.
@@chrismanuel9768 "It's colorful and beautiful, like a rainbow in space" yeaaaaah Im gonna need a source for that. The problem is that the "Humans on TH-cam today" are absolutely right. The colourful pictures of nebulae are composites of multiple long exposures, and yeah the colours ARE mapped to wavelengths that are invisible to us. To scientists it lets them know what part is emitting what energy. It kinda sucks to know that if you took an FTL spaceship out there, there won't be pretty cosmic tapestry we can marvel at. But there's a LOT of other things at which you can.
Stumbling across something in space is unlikely? Sir I don't think you quite understand just how intoxicated helmsmen have to be to brave the sheer amount of interstellar or pandimensional boredom the universe(s) is/are ladden with.
Considering the fact that observations here are literally years/decades/centuries after the fact, stumbling across something in space is quite likely if your FTL doesn't allow for observation of the universe at large and it happened within the observable time at your point of origin and your time of arrival. For example, if we used Star Wars or Stargate's Hyperspace to travel to Polaris (est 346 ly away), and it blew up (for whatever reason) at the signing of the Declaration of the Independence, Earth wouldn't know till approximately 2122, but the hyperspace travelers would find the remnants of a star that blew up over 200 years ago. So, yeah, it is quite possible to stumble across something in space, especially if you are the first person there.
I suppose that you might stumble onto a newly created nebula before the light from the cataclysm arrived to your homeworld, if you assume that one cannot scan their vicinity during FTL space travel. I don't know much about Star Wars or other franchises, but at least in Star Trek this isn't the case. But even if it was, I think it's unlikely for nebulae to form at the rate in which they are "stumbled onto" in sci-fi, which is all the time.
And to be fair, in most cases, they are not "stumbling upon them", but traveling to them because they are so near and their exotic affects are known. I don't know of a single instance where they come out of FTL going, "where the %@#$! did this nebula come from?", more they scan their navigation archives for a nearby nebula and head for it.
Daniel, i have to level with you, i'm really happy that your videos have lightened up; i liked your videos before, but now, your new ones are even more entertaining and enjoyable. thanks my guy. ps thanks to you i picked up ' Leviathan Wakes' and its really good.
Unfortuantely it received no attention from the uploader. A note perhaps would clear up the confusion. I mean for those who are not viewing this video solely for the colorful images :D
In Stargate SG-1 season 7 episode 13, The Prometheus manages to hide from an enemy ship in a strange gas formation, that is specifically mentioned that is not a nebula, but somehow different.
Just spotted a small error in the graphics: When you compare the particle density of Nebulae to that of Earth's atmosphere, the Nebula's density should read "3 x10^-19" -- In the video it is lacking the minus signal.
In the last season of Enterprise, there was a conflict brewing between the Vulcans and the Andorians, and Enterprise helped track down the Andorian fleet, hiding in a nebula. Vulcan is known to be 16 light-years from Earth, and Andorian space is bordering on Vulcan space. So there'd have to be a big blue nebula within less than a hundred light years of Earth. A nebula that we've never seen before, which is surprising since it's practically on top of us cosmically speaking. I hope it's named "Plot Convenience Nebula". Bablylon 5 is the show that started all that. They could render any background they wanted, and to spruce up their visuals and make the ships stand out more against a black sky they threw in nebulae everywhere. Even their images of Earth had a milky kind of wispiness in the background. It made the ships really "pop" against the bright backdrops, and now every sci-fi show and movie uses the technique. Babylon 5 let the genie out of the bottle, and it'll never go back in again.
I even think even in reality with our own eyes, we can't really see nebula since they mostly not even the visible spectrum. It has to be so dense for us to see and if that's the case, probably we already stumble upon a forming star.
if I'm not wrong planetary nebula could be bright enough for you to see a dim veil in a clear night sky without moon, like we can see the milk way. I mean, hubble do take pictures at the visible spectrum, its just extremely high exposition pictures. but most nebulas would just block the view of the stars behind it, you would see them as a diffuse black cloud in space instead.
Even at that level of density you would still be able to see it because of how large it is, think of a nebulae like space fog, except the distance you can see is huge, the nebulae is still bigger. It would take a while on entering one though to actually get enough particulate behind you to have a view that way look anything nebulae-eque
You are correct. Nebula (except some planatery ones) are usually detected with infrared telescopes, and then have the colours added after so NASA can hand out pretty screen savers (among other uses).
One thing about Nebula is that crossing through them may mean not just "sublight speeds" but "much much slower than light speed. The amount of heat generated by colliding with the interstellar medium is actually pretty problematic for a regular spacecraft moving at a robust fraction of C. Going into areas of space that are dramatically denser will likely overheat the ship and will probably pose an exceptionally high collision hazard as well.
Something tells me space stock is going to make it abundantly clear that nebula don’t mean squat in Sojourn, lol. I have to say space stack, for being a sci-fi based channel, you certainly are focusing a lot more on the science these days, I like it. You willing to tackle black holes and cosmic strings next?
Marco Lu nope. Legally blind with crappy speech to text software. It’s sometimes really gone off the map, typing while sentiences I never said. So yeah.
William Tracy Yeah, I listen to my text before I hit send, sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don’t. That one I did but thought it was so funny that I’d leave it. The software is not very good at adjusting for accents and if you hold on to a syllable for a bit too long then what the software is looking for that’s typically where the biggest issues come from. I’ve noticed with devices that come equipped with GEN two AI, like the echo dots, the error rate is far smaller though, so I imagine by the GEN three or GEN four AI it won’t even be an issue if you have a heavy accent Or are slurring your words so badly because you’re drunk. A perfect example of science fiction becoming science fact.
Mandatory comment about nebulae being more realistic in the Star Wars Expanded Universe rather than in TCW and Rebels. Additional mandatory comment about nebulae in Empire at War being the most unrealistically small nebulae to ever exist
Comment actually containing logic about how how the old EU was a hell of a train wreck, and actually had Ewok Adventures and the Christmas Special as canon, as well as pointing out that the Death Star plans apparently were on public holonet terminals because 40 different people in 30 different locations somehow got their hands on them at the same time. that said, i do agree with the Nebulae part. it's pretty much one of the few things the old EU did semi-right (and don't get me wrong, i loved the old EU for the most part, but dear GOD did a lot of it not make any sense)
pendraco2000 Ewok Adventures was a semi-canon kids show and Christmas special is not exactly treated as canon either by most fans. As for Death Star plans, the Empire were smart and didn't keep all the plans in one place and I'm fairly sure they were not on the holonet, neiter were 40 different people involved. One fragment was given to the Alliance by Moff Kalast, another was stolen by Kyle Katarn, one was stolen from the Death Star itself during a prison break and a fourth fragment was aquired by rebels on Toprawa
Mandatory comment about how our observational data is of events that have been diffused over centuries of travel (one of the nearest nebulae is 1344 ly distant) across an interstellar medium that may or may not have been influenced by intervening objects like stars or singularities. In other words, try seeing lightning on Earth from Alpha Centauri. We don't know what events are happening in such a medium because we have no sufficiently detailed observations. The Mutara Nebula may have been a recent enough event that it could not be identified from Earth and still have interesting energy interactions to foul up Federation sensors. It certainly dense enough to be caught up in the Genesis wave and create an entire planet. Any medium sufficiently dense enough to hinder hyper-travel will be of sufficient density to interfere with visual scanning. Nor do we know how much of the nebula the Balmorra Run actually transited through. As it is, the fight with the Tie Defender in Rebels was definitely only on the outskirts of a recognized cloud with a sufficiently dense medium to influence space craft. There is so much we don't know about our star system, much less our galaxy and the rest of the universe, because we lack the capacity to make close observations for any significant period of time. There is so much we don't know about our own world because we lack the "eyes" to see it. Scientists are working all the time to improve our "sight", and I enjoy all the new discoveries they make.
You meanie, you have destroyed my scifi immersion when it comes to TWOK!!!! But you are right ofc. Okay what about a planetary nebula of a very recently exploded star or nova?
My bet is you would be totally fine, hot gas is not that scary if its so thin that you can try to count how many atoms touch you per second. The radiation of the supernova shock-wave (or whatever its the term for it) or the radiation from the neutron star or the hungry black hole eating gas left in the center... that might be unhealthy.
Recently-exploded won't do it - anything powerful enough to fling out that much gaseous debris will send it out at very high velocity. If you were close enough to the epicentre for it to still be highly concentrated, it'd be like flying into a sand-blaster - or, in fact, an explosion. A better candidate might be the accretion disc around a black hole, especially one that's in the process of drawing material from a nearby star or gas giant. The combination of concentrated ionised gas, strong radiation and high gravity might just be enough to seriously interfere with systems like shields and sensors. However, that radiation would roast an unshielded vessel and crew.
You might also want to give planetary accretion disks and stellar nurseries a wide berth as well. Planetary accretion disks, because there's lots more loose matter to crash into, and the densities could be unpredictable. Stellar nurseries, because you might not know when that cloud will become a star, or whether its accretion disk is safe enough to pass through.
No Celebrity I read somewhere recently, can't remember where, but astronomers are said to have found a 'newborn' planet, which if actually true is really cool.
Hey, have you ever read or listened to Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson? It's definitely on the hard sci-fi side of things when it comes to warfare or ship movement. Most of the galaxy is unexplored, species have incredibly different scales of technology (some have physical space elevators, some have more advanced energy ones with artificial gravity, others use railgun cargo launchers), and ship combat is very deadly while also taking a relatively long time thanks to the painfully slow speed of light. Ship FTL is performed with typical jump drives, but a jump isn't point-to-point over between departure and destination points (star to star). It's instead a consistent distance, so ships jump, spool up their drives, and jump again, over and over to get anywhere. There's a whole lot of other scenarios and details that make it worth reading, like how pointless ground, or even air fighter combat is when ships are in orbit with lasers and railguns.
It impresses me to no end how many people in Sci-fi fuck up real science. It's part of why many shows annoy the piss out of me with their pseudo science jargon, while failing to comprehend the sheer vastness of space. Thank you for posting this. It's a much needed breath of fresh air that few seem to get or have anymore.
If the gas is ionized to a larger extent than the interstellar medium, this might confuse certain sensors, so it is conceivable that longer wave radio frequencies and very narrow bands at the short end of the spectrum would be disrupted, but you're correct that at visual wavelengths it would be no different to the interstellar medium at any other point in the galaxy
1:11 Its not a nebulae, its a rip, tear is reality, showing us what the other alternate reality looks like, or it could be an alternate dimension. ooooohhhhh.
I like to think only the experience Starfleet Officers know its a soft lurch, and everyone else who is not use to inertia dampening and space travel get shocked by it... like how a kid overacts to a speed bump.
Much like the way cartoon characters can walk over a bottomless abyss as long as they're blissfully unaware of it, yet instantly succomb to gravity and fall into a minute-long plummet once they happen to look down.
Kirk was the only guy on the ship with a real chair that's actually bolted down. Everybody else uses those wheeled spinny office chairs, lol, seatbelts wouldn't work for them.
Thank you! This has become one of my pet peeves with interstellar sci fi. The vacuumiest vacuum we can make on earth is still less vacuumy than a nebula.
Would you even have a backdrop? I was under the impression that the pictures of Nebula we see are false colour or colour exaggerated to look that way. Would you see anything at all?
Agreed, I think most nebulae would visually look like dark dusty smoke clouds, hardly visible at all aside from how they might obscure light emitted by radiant objects behind them. They're not proximate enough to stars to be brilliantly lit up, if they were then they'd get sucked in or burned away rather "quickly". And our visual spectrum isn't capable of seeing minute temperature changes in lofty wisps of base molecules floating around in space, lol. The images we see are all from segments of the EM spectrum beyond our vision, photographically translated and computer enhanced into a colourful form we can readily see.
I agree with you on all but the sensor, starships would not use radars to scan for anything except mapping the surface of a space body, planets, moons or asteroids. They would use different types of cameras to detect heat and visual cues. So hiding in a nebula would cloud these sensors.
I enjoyed flying through a nebula in Freespace 2 but definitely know it's not accurate. I think Elite: Dangerous does a great job of it. (It also doesn't gussy up nebula to look like their false-color-photography counterparts.)
YESSSSSSS. I'm always grateful for someone covering nebulae in SF. It's not a fog cloud, it's a slightly-different mostly-vacuum. I *am* very curious to know if you'd actually *see* a nebula if you inside it, though. Those images of nebulae are from a great distance away, and the images have been enhanced.
fulcrum 29 the Mongols capture china when it was already in two pieces, the song and Jin. The wall actually did slow the Mongols down as it forced them through mountain passes rather than open ground, however due to the incompetence of their enemies, they got through without harrasment. In no cases did the wall ever fail, it had always done its job it was always the humans that failed, in the second time china fell, the Manchurians were let through the gates, they actually couldn't get through before. Heck in ww2 the great Wall was even used with some success in moving troops, though the Chinese forces at the time simply did not have the firepower to stop the Japanese.
I love how in DS9 'Rocks and Shoals' they turn this up to 11. Not only do they hide inside a convenient nebula, but then accidentally hit a _planet_ that is hiding _inside_ the nebula. All at sublight.
Unfortunately the "having a space battle in front of a prettier backdrop" is also dispelled, because the scattered light from a nebula is much less impressive if it is distributed (almost) equally in all directions around you. With the naked eye you would not be able to spot the difference if you were sitting inside a nebula or not.
What's cool is in Star Wars: Empire at war, when entering a nebula your starfighter pilots will say things like "switching to scanners" since their visibility is gone but their scanners still work perfectly.
When you think of it... Its actually quite ankward that real life space exploration has explored significant parts of the universe on par, or even more in some aspects, with many exploration reaches in sf. Using only various kinds of telescopes ( primitive electromagnetic radiation sensors from many sf works standpoint, i mean thats only one type of info..gravitational waves sensors are centuries away from being practical and even now are something ground-breaking... and lets not mention all those theoretical types of information that you can detect that sf is full of and some of those theories may yet show true ) and mathematical techniques for crunching the data. I mean, what if humanity had a ftl capable spaceship... i think most of the galaxy would be on wikipedia in 100 or so years. And 5g everywhere... XD Edit: when on topic of sensors.. rl exploration ship as enterprise or something would have hubble sized telescopes covering all angles, several large radiotelescope dishes ( or grid of smaller ones like very large array in new mexico, even better lanch smaller ones as probes and make solar system sized array ), long tubed chambers cris-crossing the ship at angles as a advenced version of LIGO... it wouldnt look sleek and stylish thats for sure XD
How quick does your car degrade while driving? And I'm only talking about the air eroding it, not everything else like rust etc. That effect is probably hardly noticeable. And now imagine that, but a quadrillion times slower for a nebula. So not noticeable...
Another one is that it's a new, temporary nebula resulting from something strange, like a collision of two gas giants at high enough velocity to mass-scatter them, or that it's some as-yet-unknown phenomenon that is called a nebula in the future because it is also cloud-like.
"That is except for Kirk who uncharacteristically seems to be the only one aware that they did not just fly into a giant space pillow" earned u a like from me. Both for the imagery it invokes and for the idea that Kirk is the only one aboard the Enterprise that understand Nebulas, thereby suggesting the rest of the crews reaction is psychological.
Phil Lewis reading science fiction is so stupid. The genre is all about effects and visuals. it was literally invented for film making and books came afterwards. Watch real science fiction movies like John Carter to really understand what it's all about
Excellent explanation! This does raise the next logical question; "Is there anything that could realistically offer what we see in these fantasy nebula, but in real life?" Your comment about how easy it is to spot nebulae reminded me of one of my major gripes I had with the BSG episode, "The Passage"; space is big, they should have seen this a loooooooong way off, so why didn't they change their course by a fraction of a degree, skirt it, then come around to where they wanted to go? Or just jump? They weren't cruising to Earth via sublight drive...
Idea: the Wrath of Khan nebula battle but it takes place in a gas giant instead of a nebula Dense atmosphere? check! Lightning? check! Significant air resistance? check! Interferes with censors? check! Pretty much that whole battle could be replicated if you just changed the setting a little.
That also means that Janeway's whole "There's coffee in that nebula!" quote is entirely inaccurate. Not enough material to gather for the replicators to make coffee...
Nebulas in Sci-Fi are used more as a trope than an actual scientific phenomena. Notice they often fight space battles near or in nebulas. That's so the audience can better identify the scattering of so many ships against the backdrop of space! That's really the main reason why we see them so often. Outer space looks visually boring without a few of them.
To be fair, Wrath of Khan made it seem as though space travelers weren’t all that bright. The Enterprise crew outsmarts Khan because they suddenly realize you don’t have to fly in space on a single flat plane.
It would make more sense if the ships were to use pulsars or magnetars to evade detection, using the radiation or magnetic fields to somehow dissipate their ion plume or scatter sensor beams with interference. Though realistically with ships as advanced as Treks they could possibly compensate for even that.
2:22 1x10³ is thirty quintillion and 3x10¹⁹ is a few thousand? Hmmm. 3:42 "[...] run to the Great Wall of China and hide behind that" from someone in orbit who can not only scan through it and see you anyway but could also just fly /over/ it to make concerned faces at you for thinking that would be a useful recourse.
Excellent end scene with Kahn's ship crashing into a concrete wall, and him looking confused as to why. Kahn - Who the hell put on the brakes, and why did you guys act like we hit something? Crew - It's in the script. The law of our universe. Thou shall act like thy hit a wall when entering thin dispersed gas. Kahn - So it is. So it is. I bet my old friend Kirk would not obey this 'law'.
Kirk during Wrath of Kahn: sure would have been cool if they hadn't done away with bridge windows! Wait! Why DID we do away with bridge windows! I'm definitely filing a complaint with starfleet engineering! Starfleet engineer, 75 years later: sir, why exactly are they making up put a skylight in this new ship design?
I am aware that the nebula battle in Wrath of Khan is portrayed incorrectly, but it’s one of my favorite movies ever made. I remember going to see it in the theater when it first released. It was great!
Actually, they wouldn't even be doing battle against a prettier backdrop...because nebulae are mostly invisible to the naked eye. Every image ever seen has been artificially colorized to show detail. They're otherwise slightly darker patches of space, sparsely illuminated from the inside by stars.
FTL had entire sectors, many star systems across, dedicated to a single nebula, though they were essentially fog banks. The chance to run into an ion storm in a nebula was always interesting.
On of the few things that Elite Dangerous go right: I spent hours if not days reaching my first nebula in the game, only to find out that I didn't even notice entering it... So yeah, it's only pretty as long as the particles can stack before reaching your vision, if you're inside them, there's nothing left of them to see.
There's another thing: you likely wouldn't even have the pretty backdrop. Most nebulae, as you'd expect from the diffuseness, are pretty dim. The gorgeous pictures you see from astronomical telescopes are taken by concentrating light from the wide aperture of the telescope and photographing it with a long exposure. Your unaided eye wouldn't see that much, even if you were close up or inside of them--as you can see by just looking at them directly: the ones that are close enough to cover an appreciable area of sky can be seen with the unaided eye if you have a nice dark sky, but they tend to look like dim smudges at best. If you were closer, that same angular area brightness would just cover more of the sky.
Kirk's balls create their own gravity and held him in place in his captain's chair.
They weigh him down keeping him from jumping forwards.
sounds great does it have to be a current girlfriend or can I use this for whatever kind of criminal activity I want you know spy on an ex the girl your stalking from the grocery store maybe a senator just spitballing ideas here, is this a good app to use to anonymously stalk and ruin the lives and track and maybe locate victims?
And then of course using their hacked account maybe fake that they're still alive you know to hypothetically mislead the family and the authorities
Though just using it to spy on your girlfriend is pretty shity if you suspect something and don't love her just f****** break up be an adult about it
Damn son didn’t know the captain has balls made of neutron stars
Nebulae: slightly denser areas of space. Still a vacuum.
I'm not an astronomer, but I'm guessing the _average_ density of a nebula cloud isn't at all constant. It might have regions (towards the center?) which are more dense, which could even have particle density comparable to our atmosphere. It might even contain "native" or "foreign" matter/objects which would be difficult to detect until you "stumble" upon them at close range.
I would think flying a starship through a nebula would be less like hitting a space pillow than like trying to carefully drive through a busy intersection.
Some smaller nebulae could be pretty dense, but something similar to Earth's atmosphere is bullcrap. There is no such thing as a nebula dense enough that you could actually feel its wind brushing against you.
Fair enough, I was trying to offer at least a feeble pretense of "realism" for this starship-submarine-warfare dueling-battle scene.
The upper atmosphere of a gas giant would've been more plausible.
Yeah... If a cloud of interstellar dust was dense enough, it would clump together and form into either a gas giant or star, rather than remain a nebula.
@@xxfalconarasxx5659 exactly, flying through a nebula would be no different to flying through a cloud
The space clouds are pretty much so we can have Our naval shenanigans in the void, “submarine battles” and “encountering chance storms” are Kind of hard in the in the endless vacuum.
Starships duking it out in a nebula Is the equivalent of two battleships fighting each other, with me running between the two spraying deodorant.
Nice description
But what if you were using Old Spice?
@@clonezero_RR it would block all shots cause its too POWERFUL
If it's AXE, the victor would probably be you rather than either of the two ships. That stuff is deadly in sufficient concentrations.
I mean, the chance storm can always be realized as solar flares. Those present actual problems for space travel. Most Sci-Fi encounters happen within solar systems anyway.
If anything, Elite Dangerous is one of the few SciFi I know where this is accurate. Nebula do nothing to your sensors. They're just backdrops
Also Eve online
Yeah. Jump to a nebula and it's just another star system only now everything is pink or blue or (in the case of the Pleiades) chock full of killer flower-ships who want you to die.
Stellaris also does nebulae well, the only effect they have at all is you can mine the space dust with the right tech from a space station but it's really not very efficient or worth the time and money to do so.
actually, they also "hide stuff" nowadays as well, though, they only hide stuff from long range sensors outside of the system. anything entering it can see full well what's in there. which could feasibly make sense, givenyou might be able to, say, fine-tune sensors that're going dozens if not hundreds of light years to spot stuff as small as ships or space stations.
Actually in Stellaris ships are slower and outside sensors are blocked (unless they changed it).
Point of order: the outer layers of res giant stars near the end of their lives are cool enough and poorly defined enough that they behave EXACTLY like the nebulas on Star Trek. If you headcanon the Mutara Nebula as being literally just an old main sequence star well into its expansion pulse phase, then you have a relatively small and hot core surrounded by a diffuse cloud of churning plasma that is only barely confined by gravity and is about as dense as the earth's thermosphere.
You're telling me I can build a spaceship and fly inside a *star* ?
@@Brickooine Yes. In fact, if you had good enough radiation shielding, you could fly inside the Sun, with all your other tech being what is available today. 99.9%+ of the heat transfer from stars is through radiation, so touching them does very little.
@@Brickooine Yup. Even the "surface" of the sun has a density barely higher than vacuum. But it looks opaque to us because the gas particles at that layer are just dense enough to scatter light. That's also why the corona is so much hotter than the photosphere; ambient luminosity is actually lower BENEATH the sun's visible surface than above it, because beneath the photosphere a photon can only travel a couple thousand km before it gets absorbed by a gas particle.
Everything Sci-Fi Gets Wrong about Nebulae: basically everything
Next, an Asteroid field.
Maldus Alver
Sci-Fi Asteroid Field: Giant rocks everywhere!
Real Asteroid Field: Basically same boring blackness everywhere....oh look Jupiter!
Maldus Alver It's just like in the movies!!
...except the asteroids are thousands(or even millions) of miles away from each other.
steelgreyed, except they also get them wrong. Quite a lot of space photos, are from telescopes that don't operate in visible light. So the photos are actually not what they really look like, and are more artistic then reality.
I like your picture. What is it supposed to be?
I don't know why, but now the Soujourn's came-out-of-nowhere nebula is scaring me.
And with that like I'm totally terrified lol
It's a trap
WARP STORM
GOD EMPRAH PROTECC US
Considering they’ve chosen for reasons of style to include a few sci-fi trope techs like grav plating, they may also use the sci-fi trope of “We have absolutely no idea what most of the Galaxy looks like for some reason” to explain the sudden nebula away. Seriously though, an ISD or a Galaxy Class has more advanced and powerful sensors than everything on Earth put together, and yet everything past their borders might as well just be labeled “Here there be dragons”.
Nah dude, the nebula literally just popped into existence for them. Like, that's canon. 400 light-years away, which means that 400 years before The Expanse takes place, something happened that deposited a fuckload of space dust into a nebula-shaped cloud nearly instantly. If it's aliens, that means 400 years of technological improvements, on top of the ability to just drop a nebula into space.
I would just like to say that that last clip made me laugh. Thank you.
Praise be to the hilarious space pillow. XD
Don't make me pull out the space pillow and smack you with it!!! OH WAIT!! That would do anything! OH DAMN IT! I'm out of ideas!
It was a good joke, Thomas.
And well done in both placing and timing.
This video was 79% more sarcastic than other Spacedock videos.
At least Khan bounced forward on cue! Jim Kirk, well ... LOL!!!
He was pre-occupied pulling in the belly, Neil!
This short alternatively titled "Nebula Schmebula"
So the reasoning behind said depictions are at best....nebulous ?
get out
You're just a Gas.
Ba dumm Tsss
I'm guessing you didn't like it....just a shot in the dark
XD
So a battle in a nebula would just be a regular space battle but everything would be flying in radiant blues and purples? That actually sounds pretty cool
JosephTaylorBass If you play Elite Dangerous, then you've already done this at least once. They're nothing more than backdrops
Sorry to disappoint, but nebulae are so empty that you wouldn't see anything at all. Photographs of nebulae are taken through a process called exposure photography where a computer interprets the light coming from one, often in non visible spectrum, to then put together an image of what the structure would look like were it significantly denser. Colors are usually used to outline the different structures.
Yeah, though the accuracy of laser and projectile weapons would be very extremely slightly less than normal, but you'd get pretty coloured lasers if they used the right frequency (they won't, but it's fun to dream).
tesnacloud
In part. There are some nebulae visible to the naked eye.
E.g., this is a photo taken with absolutely no false colour: www.physicsforums.com/attachments/attachment-php-attachmentid-35158-d-1304495278-jpg.148057/
They are still quite dim, so you need either long exposure while taking a picture or some other kind of tech enhancing light for you to see it.
Of course you have to be lucky, that you have radiation in the visible light. But you should see it with the naked I, you have to keep in mind that you will be a lot closer to this nebula so the intensity is much much higher.
For example you can see Jupiter with your own eyes. But if you where just in the next star system you would never will.
That's very interesting. I suppose we can chalk this up to Sci-Fi following another tenant in the Rule of Cool, "Thou shall make nebula small, dense obstacles and not colorful voids."
I'd like a space pillow... could be a merch option.
there was a space pillow..but then Grif stole it
Lol, Grif...that orange coloured, LAZY, sonna of a beech XDXDXDXD
Spaceballs, the pillow?
space pillow or bag of nothing
I'd buy a set of officially licensed Spacedock bed sheets if they sold them.
2:48 Just a note: that reaction was from the effect the nebulae had on the ships systems, like shields and sensors and engine efficiency, rather then drag on the hull. This does not really affect your larger point though.
One thing that I’m surprised you didn’t mention: they’re almost entirely invisible in the visible wavelengths. At most they appear as faint wisps of smoke against the black of space. All of the pretty colors we associate with nebula are false colors mapped to wavelengths we can’t see.
The Hubble Space Telescope produces images from the visible spectrum of light. And hubble has a lot, like a lot a lot, images of nebulae. They just consit of dust reflecting light, a Human can see that. Also: a lot of known nebulae in our "vicinity" are known for hundrets of years. I don't think Gallileo had a IR-Telescope at his disposal.
@@NineSun001 They're visible but only barely. That's why they're called "nebula", they're nebulous to the eye. They're like smudges in the night sky. Telescopes help by gathering more light, but even then nebula are ill defined and practically colorless, like a smoke lit by moonlight. Pictures that you see with lots of color and detail are usually long exposures, or as the person above said pictures featuring non-visible wavelengths.
Humans hundreds of years ago: This is a nebula. I can see it by zooming in a magnifying lens and nothing else but my own eye. It's colorful and beautiful, like a rainbow in space. I will write poetry about it being a flower in the sky.
Humans on TH-cam today: They're basically invisible. Like smoke at night. They only have color because it's added in post. Colorful nebulas are fake news. Nothing is real.
Jacob Furrow theyre called nebula because they look misty dude
@@chrismanuel9768 "It's colorful and beautiful, like a rainbow in space" yeaaaaah Im gonna need a source for that.
The problem is that the "Humans on TH-cam today" are absolutely right. The colourful pictures of nebulae are composites of multiple long exposures, and yeah the colours ARE mapped to wavelengths that are invisible to us. To scientists it lets them know what part is emitting what energy.
It kinda sucks to know that if you took an FTL spaceship out there, there won't be pretty cosmic tapestry we can marvel at. But there's a LOT of other things at which you can.
Stumbling across something in space is unlikely? Sir I don't think you quite understand just how intoxicated helmsmen have to be to brave the sheer amount of interstellar or pandimensional boredom the universe(s) is/are ladden with.
Never tell me the odds!
Considering the fact that observations here are literally years/decades/centuries after the fact, stumbling across something in space is quite likely if your FTL doesn't allow for observation of the universe at large and it happened within the observable time at your point of origin and your time of arrival.
For example, if we used Star Wars or Stargate's Hyperspace to travel to Polaris (est 346 ly away), and it blew up (for whatever reason) at the signing of the Declaration of the Independence, Earth wouldn't know till approximately 2122, but the hyperspace travelers would find the remnants of a star that blew up over 200 years ago.
So, yeah, it is quite possible to stumble across something in space, especially if you are the first person there.
I suppose that you might stumble onto a newly created nebula before the light from the cataclysm arrived to your homeworld, if you assume that one cannot scan their vicinity during FTL space travel. I don't know much about Star Wars or other franchises, but at least in Star Trek this isn't the case. But even if it was, I think it's unlikely for nebulae to form at the rate in which they are "stumbled onto" in sci-fi, which is all the time.
And to be fair, in most cases, they are not "stumbling upon them", but traveling to them because they are so near and their exotic affects are known. I don't know of a single instance where they come out of FTL going, "where the %@#$! did this nebula come from?", more they scan their navigation archives for a nearby nebula and head for it.
Go with 40k.
Every trip has the potential to be life changing with just a subtle flicker of the Gellar field....
"Something's very wrong here, and yet a little bit right."
-Zapp Brannigan
Daniel, i have to level with you, i'm really happy that your videos have lightened up; i liked your videos before, but now, your new ones are even more entertaining and enjoyable. thanks my guy. ps thanks to you i picked up ' Leviathan Wakes' and its really good.
Thanks man! Really happy that people are enjoying the new direction for Shorts. Glad you're enjoying LW. Yam Seng!
speaking of Space Phenomena, you ever thought about pointing out what's potentially wrong with Stellar Megastructures being depicted in Sci-Fi?
I think you swapped the particulate density labels for Earth's atmosphere and a nebula at 2:25
You beat me to it so I deleted my comment, lol.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed that. I thought maybe I misunderstood somehow, they numbers didn't mean what I thought they did.
Yeah, that kind of jumped out at me too.
Unfortuantely it received no attention from the uploader. A note perhaps would clear up the confusion. I mean for those who are not viewing this video solely for the colorful images :D
-1 x 10cubed is -1000. So that’s bollocks too.
In Stargate SG-1 season 7 episode 13, The Prometheus manages to hide from an enemy ship in a strange gas formation, that is specifically mentioned that is not a nebula, but somehow different.
People outside of nebulae: It's a huge solid object that blocking light.
People inside of nebulae: nothing here...
“Plot a course, there’s coffee in that nebula.”
Is that from Jeanway? :D
@@Tremor244 indeed!
Enterprise flies to the top of a nebula: "It's over Klingon vessel, we have the high ground."
Fool, elevation doesn't exist in space. It is I who have the high ground!
@@chrismanuel9768 Don’t try it.
That last bit with the USS Reliant was spectacularly done Daniel, bravo old chap!
Just spotted a small error in the graphics: When you compare the particle density of Nebulae to that of Earth's atmosphere, the Nebula's density should read "3 x10^-19" -- In the video it is lacking the minus signal.
He also made the other one -1 * 10^3, which makes no sense at all.
and he got them the wrong way around, even if you assume sane numbers.
@@korenn9381 It's a tilde to signify an approximation, not a negative sign. But yeah the labels are reversed.
In the last season of Enterprise, there was a conflict brewing between the Vulcans and the Andorians, and Enterprise helped track down the Andorian fleet, hiding in a nebula. Vulcan is known to be 16 light-years from Earth, and Andorian space is bordering on Vulcan space. So there'd have to be a big blue nebula within less than a hundred light years of Earth. A nebula that we've never seen before, which is surprising since it's practically on top of us cosmically speaking. I hope it's named "Plot Convenience Nebula".
Bablylon 5 is the show that started all that. They could render any background they wanted, and to spruce up their visuals and make the ships stand out more against a black sky they threw in nebulae everywhere. Even their images of Earth had a milky kind of wispiness in the background. It made the ships really "pop" against the bright backdrops, and now every sci-fi show and movie uses the technique. Babylon 5 let the genie out of the bottle, and it'll never go back in again.
In awe at the size of these lads.
Astronomical units.
..but would it even be a prettier backdrop? If it is so diffused, I'd imagine you wouldn't notice ANY difference, especially with the human eye
I even think even in reality with our own eyes, we can't really see nebula since they mostly not even the visible spectrum. It has to be so dense for us to see and if that's the case, probably we already stumble upon a forming star.
if I'm not wrong planetary nebula could be bright enough for you to see a dim veil in a clear night sky without moon, like we can see the milk way. I mean, hubble do take pictures at the visible spectrum, its just extremely high exposition pictures. but most nebulas would just block the view of the stars behind it, you would see them as a diffuse black cloud in space instead.
Even at that level of density you would still be able to see it because of how large it is, think of a nebulae like space fog, except the distance you can see is huge, the nebulae is still bigger. It would take a while on entering one though to actually get enough particulate behind you to have a view that way look anything nebulae-eque
Your ships would look quite pretty battling it out in a nebulae...... to someone looking at you from several hundred light years away that is.
You are correct. Nebula (except some planatery ones) are usually detected with infrared telescopes, and then have the colours added after so NASA can hand out pretty screen savers (among other uses).
That's a scary looking Nebulae at 1:18. It looks like the eye of eldritch abomination or a comic horror!
There's a famous picture of it called the eye of god.
It's the Helix nebula (NGC 7293), in infrared. In visible light, it looks a lot more calming: red outher layer, blue inner core.
hamanu666 that's nothing, there's one that has been nicknamed the Eye of Sauron.
One thing about Nebula is that crossing through them may mean not just "sublight speeds" but "much much slower than light speed. The amount of heat generated by colliding with the interstellar medium is actually pretty problematic for a regular spacecraft moving at a robust fraction of C. Going into areas of space that are dramatically denser will likely overheat the ship and will probably pose an exceptionally high collision hazard as well.
Something tells me space stock is going to make it abundantly clear that nebula don’t mean squat in Sojourn, lol.
I have to say space stack, for being a sci-fi based channel, you certainly are focusing a lot more on the science these days, I like it.
You willing to tackle black holes and cosmic strings next?
Broken Eyes... Space Stock? Space Stack? It’s SpaceDOCK, ignorant succ!
Considering the many fantastical Depictions of Black holes in sci-fi, that wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Marco Lu nope. Legally blind with crappy speech to text software.
It’s sometimes really gone off the map, typing while sentiences I never said.
So yeah.
Broken Eyes "whole sentiences" is best typo I could imagine in this context.
William Tracy Yeah, I listen to my text before I hit send, sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don’t. That one I did but thought it was so funny that I’d leave it.
The software is not very good at adjusting for accents and if you hold on to a syllable for a bit too long then what the software is looking for that’s typically where the biggest issues come from.
I’ve noticed with devices that come equipped with GEN two AI, like the echo dots, the error rate is far smaller though, so I imagine by the GEN three or GEN four AI it won’t even be an issue if you have a heavy accent Or are slurring your words so badly because you’re drunk.
A perfect example of science fiction becoming science fact.
Space pillow! Brilliant. Great job as ever.
Well, dagnabbit! You just had to ruin it. You are the country boy asking where all the horse poop is when I'm watching a western.
that's horse shit.....wait.....lolz
meh, I'm not pointing out the obvious, I'm disagreeing.....O_o
[okay, seriously this was a joke]
Thanks Donald. Now I will keep looking for horses poop every time I watch Western movie.
Mandatory comment about nebulae being more realistic in the Star Wars Expanded Universe rather than in TCW and Rebels.
Additional mandatory comment about nebulae in Empire at War being the most unrealistically small nebulae to ever exist
Comment actually containing logic about how how the old EU was a hell of a train wreck, and actually had Ewok Adventures and the Christmas Special as canon, as well as pointing out that the Death Star plans apparently were on public holonet terminals because 40 different people in 30 different locations somehow got their hands on them at the same time.
that said, i do agree with the Nebulae part. it's pretty much one of the few things the old EU did semi-right (and don't get me wrong, i loved the old EU for the most part, but dear GOD did a lot of it not make any sense)
pendraco2000 Ewok Adventures was a semi-canon kids show and Christmas special is not exactly treated as canon either by most fans. As for Death Star plans, the Empire were smart and didn't keep all the plans in one place and I'm fairly sure they were not on the holonet, neiter were 40 different people involved. One fragment was given to the Alliance by Moff Kalast, another was stolen by Kyle Katarn, one was stolen from the Death Star itself during a prison break and a fourth fragment was aquired by rebels on Toprawa
Mandatory comment about how our observational data is of events that have been diffused over centuries of travel (one of the nearest nebulae is 1344 ly distant) across an interstellar medium that may or may not have been influenced by intervening objects like stars or singularities. In other words, try seeing lightning on Earth from Alpha Centauri. We don't know what events are happening in such a medium because we have no sufficiently detailed observations.
The Mutara Nebula may have been a recent enough event that it could not be identified from Earth and still have interesting energy interactions to foul up Federation sensors. It certainly dense enough to be caught up in the Genesis wave and create an entire planet.
Any medium sufficiently dense enough to hinder hyper-travel will be of sufficient density to interfere with visual scanning. Nor do we know how much of the nebula the Balmorra Run actually transited through. As it is, the fight with the Tie Defender in Rebels was definitely only on the outskirts of a recognized cloud with a sufficiently dense medium to influence space craft.
There is so much we don't know about our star system, much less our galaxy and the rest of the universe, because we lack the capacity to make close observations for any significant period of time. There is so much we don't know about our own world because we lack the "eyes" to see it. Scientists are working all the time to improve our "sight", and I enjoy all the new discoveries they make.
You meanie, you have destroyed my scifi immersion when it comes to TWOK!!!! But you are right ofc. Okay what about a planetary nebula of a very recently exploded star or nova?
My bet is you would be totally fine, hot gas is not that scary if its so thin that you can try to count how many atoms touch you per second.
The radiation of the supernova shock-wave (or whatever its the term for it) or the radiation from the neutron star or the hungry black hole eating gas left in the center... that might be unhealthy.
Recently-exploded won't do it - anything powerful enough to fling out that much gaseous debris will send it out at very high velocity. If you were close enough to the epicentre for it to still be highly concentrated, it'd be like flying into a sand-blaster - or, in fact, an explosion.
A better candidate might be the accretion disc around a black hole, especially one that's in the process of drawing material from a nearby star or gas giant. The combination of concentrated ionised gas, strong radiation and high gravity might just be enough to seriously interfere with systems like shields and sensors. However, that radiation would roast an unshielded vessel and crew.
You might also want to give planetary accretion disks and stellar nurseries a wide berth as well.
Planetary accretion disks, because there's lots more loose matter to crash into, and the densities could be unpredictable.
Stellar nurseries, because you might not know when that cloud will become a star, or whether its accretion disk is safe enough to pass through.
No Celebrity I read somewhere recently, can't remember where, but astronomers are said to have found a 'newborn' planet, which if actually true is really cool.
Its star trek.. its the least of its problems..
"Astronomically unlikely"
I see what you did there!
Hey, have you ever read or listened to Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson? It's definitely on the hard sci-fi side of things when it comes to warfare or ship movement.
Most of the galaxy is unexplored, species have incredibly different scales of technology (some have physical space elevators, some have more advanced energy ones with artificial gravity, others use railgun cargo launchers), and ship combat is very deadly while also taking a relatively long time thanks to the painfully slow speed of light.
Ship FTL is performed with typical jump drives, but a jump isn't point-to-point over between departure and destination points (star to star). It's instead a consistent distance, so ships jump, spool up their drives, and jump again, over and over to get anywhere.
There's a whole lot of other scenarios and details that make it worth reading, like how pointless ground, or even air fighter combat is when ships are in orbit with lasers and railguns.
It impresses me to no end how many people in Sci-fi fuck up real science. It's part of why many shows annoy the piss out of me with their pseudo science jargon, while failing to comprehend the sheer vastness of space. Thank you for posting this. It's a much needed breath of fresh air that few seem to get or have anymore.
but... but..
THERE'S COFFEE IN THAT CLOUD!
The screeching sound and car crash when Khan and the Reliant enters Mutara was just amazingly fun !
Thanks for the explanation.
If the gas is ionized to a larger extent than the interstellar medium, this might confuse certain sensors, so it is conceivable that longer wave radio frequencies and very narrow bands at the short end of the spectrum would be disrupted, but you're correct that at visual wavelengths it would be no different to the interstellar medium at any other point in the galaxy
I love it when the dry whit comes out when explaining the ridiculousness of sci-fi misunderstandings
Giant Space Pillow is the new name of my Starship.
I love the serious humour in this.
2:24 Looks like your measurements have been switched around.
1:11 Its not a nebulae, its a rip, tear is reality, showing us what the other alternate reality looks like, or it could be an alternate dimension. ooooohhhhh.
Gods I love this channel.
I love these types of videos. They help me develop my own sci-fi settings to be much more realistic.
Great video. I would like to see move videos comparing real world scientific ideas to their sci-fi depictions.
The depiction of sound in space films would be another. As far as I know only Firefly really got that right.
Oh my god this is the best episode you’ve made, I love that end clip! 😂😂
Kirk wore his seat belt
I like to think only the experience Starfleet Officers know its a soft lurch, and everyone else who is not use to inertia dampening and space travel get shocked by it... like how a kid overacts to a speed bump.
I guess it was just was it usually is: Shatner forgot to act.
Much like the way cartoon characters can walk over a bottomless abyss as long as they're blissfully unaware of it, yet instantly succomb to gravity and fall into a minute-long plummet once they happen to look down.
Kirk was rooted firmly to the deck plates by the weight of his giant steel balls.
Kirk was the only guy on the ship with a real chair that's actually bolted down.
Everybody else uses those wheeled spinny office chairs, lol, seatbelts wouldn't work for them.
Thank you!
This has become one of my pet peeves with interstellar sci fi.
The vacuumiest vacuum we can make on earth is still less vacuumy than a nebula.
“Nebula: Space Clouds” -Hollywood writer dictionary
Thank you Daniel for you consistent and correct usage of the word 'diffuse'.
Would you even have a backdrop? I was under the impression that the pictures of Nebula we see are false colour or colour exaggerated to look that way. Would you see anything at all?
IAmEvilTree you would see the nebula yes. The thing would Indeed look very pretty.
Agreed, I think most nebulae would visually look like dark dusty smoke clouds, hardly visible at all aside from how they might obscure light emitted by radiant objects behind them. They're not proximate enough to stars to be brilliantly lit up, if they were then they'd get sucked in or burned away rather "quickly". And our visual spectrum isn't capable of seeing minute temperature changes in lofty wisps of base molecules floating around in space, lol. The images we see are all from segments of the EM spectrum beyond our vision, photographically translated and computer enhanced into a colourful form we can readily see.
I agree with you on all but the sensor, starships would not use radars to scan for anything except mapping the surface of a space body, planets, moons or asteroids. They would use different types of cameras to detect heat and visual cues. So hiding in a nebula would cloud these sensors.
I enjoyed flying through a nebula in Freespace 2 but definitely know it's not accurate. I think Elite: Dangerous does a great job of it. (It also doesn't gussy up nebula to look like their false-color-photography counterparts.)
Same, but still fun. I would say the thing you fly in in Freespace 2 is rather a forming star.
YESSSSSSS. I'm always grateful for someone covering nebulae in SF. It's not a fog cloud, it's a slightly-different mostly-vacuum.
I *am* very curious to know if you'd actually *see* a nebula if you inside it, though. Those images of nebulae are from a great distance away, and the images have been enhanced.
Well to be fair, if you GO to the Great Wall of China that at least has SOME purpose and usage.
Are we really going to debate about the merits of hiding in the Great Wall over hiding in a Space Cloud?
Or that the mongols have already captured china so quickly
fulcrum 29 the Mongols capture china when it was already in two pieces, the song and Jin. The wall actually did slow the Mongols down as it forced them through mountain passes rather than open ground, however due to the incompetence of their enemies, they got through without harrasment. In no cases did the wall ever fail, it had always done its job it was always the humans that failed, in the second time china fell, the Manchurians were let through the gates, they actually couldn't get through before. Heck in ww2 the great Wall was even used with some success in moving troops, though the Chinese forces at the time simply did not have the firepower to stop the Japanese.
Yes, it's more like some-one who is hunted down by a predator (with normal and infrared vision) would benefit from switching off the lights in a room.
I love how in DS9 'Rocks and Shoals' they turn this up to 11. Not only do they hide inside a convenient nebula, but then accidentally hit a _planet_ that is hiding _inside_ the nebula. All at sublight.
Unfortunately the "having a space battle in front of a prettier backdrop" is also dispelled, because the scattered light from a nebula is much less impressive if it is distributed (almost) equally in all directions around you. With the naked eye you would not be able to spot the difference if you were sitting inside a nebula or not.
Isn't it theorized that our solar system has been passing through a nebula for a few thousand years, and it's just too hard to detect from the inside.
What's cool is in Star Wars: Empire at war, when entering a nebula your starfighter pilots will say things like "switching to scanners" since their visibility is gone but their scanners still work perfectly.
When you think of it...
Its actually quite ankward that real life space exploration has explored significant parts of the universe on par, or even more in some aspects, with many exploration reaches in sf. Using only various kinds of telescopes ( primitive electromagnetic radiation sensors from many sf works standpoint, i mean thats only one type of info..gravitational waves sensors are centuries away from being practical and even now are something ground-breaking... and lets not mention all those theoretical types of information that you can detect that sf is full of and some of those theories may yet show true ) and mathematical techniques for crunching the data.
I mean, what if humanity had a ftl capable spaceship... i think most of the galaxy would be on wikipedia in 100 or so years. And 5g everywhere... XD
Edit: when on topic of sensors.. rl exploration ship as enterprise or something would have hubble sized telescopes covering all angles, several large radiotelescope dishes ( or grid of smaller ones like very large array in new mexico, even better lanch smaller ones as probes and make solar system sized array ), long tubed chambers cris-crossing the ship at angles as a advenced version of LIGO... it wouldnt look sleek and stylish thats for sure XD
That last scene made me laugh out loud, thank you! ☺
though should flying fast and shieldless might corrode the outerskin of your ship faster?
If it was a really fresh nebula with plenty of ionisation, maybe, but it'd probably degrade it more if your crew farted on every inch of hull...
Great, so now you scratched the paint.
so aslong as we dont fart its all good
How quick does your car degrade while driving? And I'm only talking about the air eroding it, not everything else like rust etc. That effect is probably hardly noticeable.
And now imagine that, but a quadrillion times slower for a nebula.
So not noticeable...
I feel like the only explanation for nebulae doing really anything is just “we found some property of them that we didn’t know before” or something.
Another one is that it's a new, temporary nebula resulting from something strange, like a collision of two gas giants at high enough velocity to mass-scatter them, or that it's some as-yet-unknown phenomenon that is called a nebula in the future because it is also cloud-like.
Diffuse gases.... You mean farts?
"That is except for Kirk who uncharacteristically seems to be the only one aware that they did not just fly into a giant space pillow" earned u a like from me.
Both for the imagery it invokes and for the idea that Kirk is the only one aboard the Enterprise that understand Nebulas, thereby suggesting the rest of the crews reaction is psychological.
So sci-fi lies to us. That’s a new one. 🤭
if you dont appreciuate the genre then dont watch its supporting videos on youtube. bye felicia.
Depends what kind of sci-fi you've been reading. Some stories have been pretty prophetic so far.
Phil Lewis reading science fiction is so stupid. The genre is all about effects and visuals. it was literally invented for film making and books came afterwards. Watch real science fiction movies like John Carter to really understand what it's all about
+Richard Flacid so i take it you haven't ever read Foundation or Dune, i guess you should give them a try.
@@richardflacid6038 There's a whole website that is dedicated to putting the "science" into "science fiction." www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
Excellent explanation! This does raise the next logical question; "Is there anything that could realistically offer what we see in these fantasy nebula, but in real life?" Your comment about how easy it is to spot nebulae reminded me of one of my major gripes I had with the BSG episode, "The Passage"; space is big, they should have seen this a loooooooong way off, so why didn't they change their course by a fraction of a degree, skirt it, then come around to where they wanted to go? Or just jump? They weren't cruising to Earth via sublight drive...
kind of like walking into a fart
Efraim Yeah, if someone farted out glitter
go to a strip club, you'll see it eventually
walking into a fart done by a dinosaur that has spread out so far you dont even realise its there.
Idea: the Wrath of Khan nebula battle but it takes place in a gas giant instead of a nebula
Dense atmosphere? check!
Lightning? check!
Significant air resistance? check!
Interferes with censors? check!
Pretty much that whole battle could be replicated if you just changed the setting a little.
Yeah, but, *Rule of Cool.* Your argument is invalid. Please try again.
That also means that Janeway's whole "There's coffee in that nebula!" quote is entirely inaccurate. Not enough material to gather for the replicators to make coffee...
Think you so much for telling everyone that now I know a lot more than I did before.
"A giant space pillow". You had me rolling at that! Well done!
That was a nice edit at the end, really caught me off guard! 🤣👍
About that backdrop.. it's speculated WE'RE inside a nebula.
Nebulas in Sci-Fi are used more as a trope than an actual scientific phenomena. Notice they often fight space battles near or in nebulas. That's so the audience can better identify the scattering of so many ships against the backdrop of space! That's really the main reason why we see them so often. Outer space looks visually boring without a few of them.
0:37 "Stumbling across anything at all on an interstellar or interplanetary voyage is ASTRONOMICALLY unlikely." 😂😂😂
OMG this was so funny
I like how he pointed out that Kirk didn't move at all
And those bus breaking sound effects at the end LMFAO
LOVE this video! That is super interesting, and I had always guessed that nebulae were depicted in a ridiculous way in sci-fi. Thank you for sharing!
It's called 'space' because there's nothing in it for millions or billions of miles. "Oh no, an alien spaceship, oh look a convenient hiding place."
To be fair, Wrath of Khan made it seem as though space travelers weren’t all that bright. The Enterprise crew outsmarts Khan because they suddenly realize you don’t have to fly in space on a single flat plane.
It would make more sense if the ships were to use pulsars or magnetars to evade detection, using the radiation or magnetic fields to somehow dissipate their ion plume or scatter sensor beams with interference. Though realistically with ships as advanced as Treks they could possibly compensate for even that.
This whole video was pretty freakin great. That last clip... Priceless.
2:22 1x10³ is thirty quintillion and 3x10¹⁹ is a few thousand? Hmmm.
3:42 "[...] run to the Great Wall of China and hide behind that" from someone in orbit who can not only scan through it and see you anyway but could also just fly /over/ it to make concerned faces at you for thinking that would be a useful recourse.
Excellent end scene with Kahn's ship crashing into a concrete wall, and him looking confused as to why.
Kahn - Who the hell put on the brakes, and why did you guys act like we hit something?
Crew - It's in the script. The law of our universe. Thou shall act like thy hit a wall when entering thin dispersed gas.
Kahn - So it is. So it is. I bet my old friend Kirk would not obey this 'law'.
Kirk during Wrath of Kahn: sure would have been cool if they hadn't done away with bridge windows! Wait! Why DID we do away with bridge windows!
I'm definitely filing a complaint with starfleet engineering!
Starfleet engineer, 75 years later: sir, why exactly are they making up put a skylight in this new ship design?
I am aware that the nebula battle in Wrath of Khan is portrayed incorrectly, but it’s one of my favorite movies ever made. I remember going to see it in the theater when it first released. It was great!
Actually, they wouldn't even be doing battle against a prettier backdrop...because nebulae are mostly invisible to the naked eye. Every image ever seen has been artificially colorized to show detail. They're otherwise slightly darker patches of space, sparsely illuminated from the inside by stars.
FTL had entire sectors, many star systems across, dedicated to a single nebula, though they were essentially fog banks. The chance to run into an ion storm in a nebula was always interesting.
That last clip got me too! Stellar (pun intended) editing on that.
Thank you for putting a bit of Science into science-fiction.
On of the few things that Elite Dangerous go right:
I spent hours if not days reaching my first nebula in the game, only to find out that I didn't even notice entering it...
So yeah, it's only pretty as long as the particles can stack before reaching your vision, if you're inside them, there's nothing left of them to see.
There's another thing: you likely wouldn't even have the pretty backdrop. Most nebulae, as you'd expect from the diffuseness, are pretty dim. The gorgeous pictures you see from astronomical telescopes are taken by concentrating light from the wide aperture of the telescope and photographing it with a long exposure. Your unaided eye wouldn't see that much, even if you were close up or inside of them--as you can see by just looking at them directly: the ones that are close enough to cover an appreciable area of sky can be seen with the unaided eye if you have a nice dark sky, but they tend to look like dim smudges at best. If you were closer, that same angular area brightness would just cover more of the sky.
Have you done asteroid belts - you can get a real head of steam up for them.
Such is what you get when one creator wants to play WWII and the other wants to play Battleship.
I love how they used the Battlestar Pegasus and a Shadow ship against each other...