Quote from: Biodom on Today at 07:40:05 PM

Sunday OT:

One day (during the latest partial solar eclipse) I suddenly realized that the fact that Moon exactly blots out the sun is somewhat weird and is highly unlikely.
We just happen to live at the time when angular diameter of both the moon and the Sun are virtually identical.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-solar-eclipse-coincidence/
Although it is exactly what is happening, the event itself has microscopic probability from all possible arrangements between the size of the planet satellites, the star, distances, etc, etc.
That made me think about other "unique" features of the realm about "right now":

1. First off, all universe parameters had to be just right to make stable atoms, galaxies, etc-that's a given. Our Universe is just one out of roughly 10^500 chances. Good enough!
2. The 'strange' triple alpha process that forms carbon in the stars (Hoyle state).
3. Sun had to be formed after heavy elements already accumulated...almost 8 bil years after the Big bang...basically, we are 'late".
4. Humans appear on earth 4.7 bil years after the planet was born and the planet has a maximum of another 1 bil years to go before the biosphere is bound to be destroyed by the expanding Sun that would be transitioning to a red giant. So, we appeared within the last 20% of the planet's life.."late" again.
5. The Moon is larger that the satellite of the earth size planet should be theoretically with astronomers proposing (and basically proving) that the Moon was formed by the collision of the "initial" earth with a body the size of mars, roughly.
6. That collision probably evaporated the original water on the planet and resulted in Earth being drier that it would have been otherwise, with most water being brought by comets and asteroids.
7. It is entirely possible that the core rotation and magnetic field plus tectonic plates movement was also caused by that collision, which ought to be a very rare event.
8. We are here during the time when we can still see galaxies. Some time later...in fact, much later, other galaxies will be invisible to us.
9. We live at the age when computing became widespread. Being born a hundred years early and we would have missed it.
10. Being born as "you"-that's a biggie. Each human mating pair is capable of generating at least several dozen trillions genetic combinations, but here you are. Chances of winning a lottery are at least 100 thou times larger than that. Add to that your unique personal history that added to you being you.
11. We live during the age of bitcoin "discovery", so we could participate early, which is almost like having a golden ticket and/or winning a lottery (again).

TL;DR Sometimes I wonder about all this 'selection' mechanisms that resulted in "now", but then, it all depends on the number of "rolls".

Biodom peeking
into pandoras lil box
on a sunday eve

But it's not that unlikely that the shadow of earth hits the moon: On every full moon the sun is almost directly behind the earth, when viewed from the moon. It just needs a little bit to cross the two ecliptic angles (moon-earth and earth-sun) and voila, the moon is hit by the core shadow of the earth, 154 times a century. There is also peripheral shadow (an "almost" hit), which hits the moon 88 times a century, and the dimensions are so big and the dynamics so static - remember that dyncamics had trillions of years to balance out within the dance of gravity - that this is working as precise as clockwork.

Going through your list above, there are more recent discoveries that take this some steps further, from omitting the real existence of time, which indeed fixed some unsolvable problems, to yet unexplored "particles" that flood the universe, even maybe multiverses, to form energy and matter, as well as interconnecting them and exchanging "information" between them - at timeless "speeds". The problem is granularity and how to detect these yet undefined "entities" - which mostly consists of guessing (modeling) and simulating, mainly based on data from CERN and HST/JWST.
Our reality is mainly a snapshot of the local result of universal (or multiversal) events, starting from day 0. Light (vision) is energy, sent across space. What we observe with telescopes is only the energy that was emitted from remote events (past realities) - so we don't look at things, we are looking at information which is forming a visual abstraction of what is (aka "god" - following more recent translations of "JHW").

I won't get on, because it always blows my mind doing so, too complex to be expressed using so little words. Anyway, we seem not to be made to decode universal being, since we are a subsidiary part of it all, so we should just try to live our lives, knowing - or assuming- there are a lot things going on out there which are too complex and hideous to be explored. We're just a grain of sand in the desert, and every time i take a telescope out in the backyard and capture photons originating from events so insanely big and far away, i remind myself of how small we are, and everything that seemed somehow "important" to me before - just disappears.

And yes, we are lucky as fuck to be here in this now in this place. Likely less than a once-in-a-universe coincidence.