mindbleach

It is buck wild that these networks can generate shitty English by sight alone. These aren't the robots that scanned all the books in the library. This is purely visual.

Or PTSD from that dam.

It almost sounds wrong without the hit markers and low-health beeps.

Thumbnail looks like a horny cacodemon.

Gradually gliding into a gaseous cloud that the sun lights up would be genuinely fascinating, but still probably kill everyone. Pros and cons.

... would it affect the northern hemisphere first? I have no idea which direction the solar system actually proceeds.

Does this count?

They look fine. Maybe some rosemary? Decently browned, too. All I'd worry about is "new potatoes" getting gummy when slow-cooked.

Garlic powder and salt when they come out, spritz of lemon, she'll be right.

"Why do you want that?"

Incorrect. Next.

I’d guess that we’d probably wind up turning ourselves into the largest explosion that humanity has ever observed in the universe.

With front-row seats.

perhaps some would be wise enough to realize that the sudden dimming of the sun - eight minutes as it turns to a dull, occluded, sky-colored haze, as if it had just melted away -

Huh. If it all snapped into existence, it'd catch the light traveling through space, at that moment. So Earth might briefly get brighter? The dark side obviously would, as Rayleigh scattering turns our penumbra blue... all the way out to fucking Neptune. On the bright side, at first, it would genuinely be more sky, but-- I don't-- I just cannot wrap my head around how to even model that. The entire solar system would flash as bright as the daytime sky, give or take a couple AU, for like a billisecond. And then that energy would bounce around until it's mostly absorbed, surely. The image of the sun might vanish instantly. Even on Earth I expect most photons do not arrive having dodged the entire atmosphere.

Thinking about modeling this ridiculous hypothetical is going to keep me up tonight.

Science values independent discovery of exactly how fucked we are.

I hadn't considered foreign asteroids. If this ridiculous setup was somehow stable, bits of it would routinely light up from space rocks plunging through at terrifying speed. Hailey's comet is coming back to stay.

Yeah, this question kinda undersells how it's sprinkling a couple aspirational rocks into an enormous cosmic gas cloud, rather than providing those rocks with a quaint environment. Even the provolone-slice model that's 1 AU thick is only lighter by two orders of magnitude. It's one million times the total mass of everything else in the solar system. Spreading it on as thickly as our soupy atmosphere, where even certain mammals can flap hard enough to hunt in midair, would have an impact on world events the way a period impacts a sentence.

Larry Niven has a setting that's vaguely like this, called the Smoke Ring.