Climate change is just one of six planetary boundaries that we’ve crossed, out of a total of nine. The choice of rocket fuel is largely inconsequential compared to the effects of maintaining the industrial capacity necessary for such endeavours.

#1: I doubt there would ever be a situation where those same resources wouldn’t be better used to make things slightly less unbearable on the home world. In our case, even if we covered the world in poison and had an endless nuclear winter, Mars would still look like the worse planet to live on. It’s doubtful whether or not a better one exists within any “practical” distance. If the aliens happened to have a lucky spawn in a star system with multiple habitable planets, good for them. They have another chance to figure things out. But interstellar flight (not to mention colonization) is still vastly more difficult.

#2: Exploiting the resources of the solar system is orders and orders of magnitude simpler than establishing self-sufficient colonies in uninhabitable space or planets. The show For All Mankind threw out most of any believability it had a while ago, but even there the entire fourth season revolved around the subject of how even a single asteroid full of rare earth metals would sate our hunger for such a long time as to effectively kill any initiatives to expand in space.

Space exploration necessitates a technological industrial civilization. So they/we would somehow have to figure out how to first do #2 (so as to not die), while still maintaining the industrial capacity to spread out into space. That sounds like an even more improbable subset of the already improbable scenario #2.

That distance exists not only in space, but most likely time as well. Extrapolating from our singular data point, it would seem that the lifespan of a technological civilization is quite short. The odds of two of those being around at the right times for even one of them to detect the passing emission shell of the other is diminishingly small.

My thinking is that a technological species either goes into ecological overshoot so badly that it kills itself (or at least its capacity to conquer space) ((this is what we’re doing currently)), or then it learns to live harmoniously as a functioning part of the wider planetary system, and thus has no need to spread into space.

Not an arcus, but what looks to be a series of Stratocumulus volutus. Nice find nonetheless!

Arcus is a supplementary feature attached to a strong convective cloud (Cumulonimbus or possibly a strong Cumulus). This isn’t the case here.

A per capita map would also be nice.

They’re right on this one. This picture here is pretty illuminating about the sizes of the views that Hubble captures:

Image source with additional reading. Zooming into an object a couple of meters in size on the surface of the Moon is in a completely different ballpark.

I’m no astronomer or astrophotographer, but this picture of the moon clocks in at around 320 meter angular resolution. That being said, a lot of post-processing goes into a shot like that, so some detail may be lost due to that. The atmosphere of the Earth is pretty difficult to deal with as its disturbances cause fuzziness and shimmering. Stacking multiple frames can help, but it’s still never perfect. Earth based telescopes sometimes shoot a laser up along their line of sight to get an idea of how the atmosphere is messing with them.

For comparison, The Hubble space telescope gets around 90 m angular resolution for objects at the distance of the Moon.

To build on this: The technology to fake it didn’t exist back then.

You’d need either the biggest space telescope ever that doesn’t yet exist, or a lunar orbiter. The latter is how other space agencies have taken pictures of the landing sites.

I did a two minute internet search and every result says that the Hubble doesn’t have the angular resolution for this. It could resolve a football field on the moon, but not anything smaller.

It was made to look at nebulae and galaxies, and those are a lot bigger, even in apparent size.

Focal distance doesn’t matter when the aperture is so infinitesimally small compared to the distances. All space telescopes are focused to infinity no matter what they’re observing up there.

I’d say the correlation is pretty good even when accounting for population densities.

That is a good point.

Except that that might explain the slightly different alias on that line. Maybe it’s a message just like the rest, sent for the sake of the meme, and the alias just happened to get typed incorrectly…

The twitter user is an actual commercial pilot, and ACARS messages do look like that. Not sure what’s up with SKW2438/SKY2438 but otherwise it seems legit. I think faking it would be harder than actually doing this.

Edit: Here’s a picture of a much longer message in a more professional, non furry rp context:

Close, but this is in fact the circumhorizontal arc. It’s very similar to the cza, but the refractions happen in the opposite order. The cha occurs below the sun when the sun is high, the cza occurs high above the sun (near the zenith) when the sun is low.

Nice pictures!

Pseudopupils

How’s he being an ally here? He’s just talking about some people who supposedly pulled themselves up by the bootstraps. Most likely in an attempt to prove that others in similar situations have only themselves to blame for not doing the same.

Yes, but was this the bullet that hit him (so picture taken after he was hit), or a previous shot that missed?

Spectacular crepuscular rays!