Something is happening
Ummm…the emoji is a pink worm
Earlier today he RT these
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Sean’s late night shenanigans. Fishing?
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Woah… could those be rivers?! 
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. But honestly I’m with the river folk, and if Team Mercury pulls it off, I know someone who will gloat-laugh his head off for twenty-four hours. At least.
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Probably be able to scan Giant Worms.
Preferable to getting giant worms 
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Oh, man. Geks can get worms! We will be getting a Vet for settlements.
Then we can raise our Gek faction standing by deworming them!
ROFL
Or … Nasty River Snakes … A new predator type.
But then again, it’s cryptic Sean teasing us!
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That base and location are gorgeous!
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I was thinking either “worm hole” or “bugs”. Lol.
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We will always be what we were going to be, wound tight in the love of the Worm.
On a more serious note, has Sean always been posting screenshot as actively as in the last couple days?
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Tequila update confirmed…
New saloon NPC dance moves, and drunk dialling teleportation…
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Actually that topic has kind of bugged me for a bit regarding the NMS Black Holes…*(& I’m quite ok if what I say next is corrected by those nerdier than I )*
Shouldn’t they be called Worm Holes in the way they appear just as a ‘gateway’ randomly opening/existing in a system? They are much like a natural teleporter & don’t swallow the environment around them.
My impression of a ‘Black Hole’ has always been that they are an all mighty gravity well central to everything around it & that beyond the event horizon is nothing more than an atomic squeezy death.
I’m a bit confused really…
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He has been posting Last Campfire or nothing at all lately. Then 2 screenshots and the worm.
And I agree with @Mad-Hatter , wormholes would be more correct.
Now, all the tiny updates and many reverifications of my copy of NMS has got me wondering what is going on. My game has been acting so strangely. Waypoints popping around, the ground vanishing, an overall feeling that the ground under my feet was going thru a transformation…something is happening. Experimental is so fun… 
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And I shall happily oblige 
In relation to their size, that’s correct. However, black holes come in many sizes, from microscopic to the supermassive monstrosity that is keeping our galaxy together.
Microscopic black holes live only for a few nanoseconds. The (extremely remote) possibility of a black hole forming when using the LHC was referring to these, and it would have been a very interesting, but completely harmless occurrence. They could pass right through a human body without causing any damage. Heavy cosmic particles carry a lot more oomph in comparison (up to a baseball pitched by a professional at close range, like the “oh-my-god-particle”, the most energetic cosmic particle ever measured. No relation to the “god-particle” which the LHC was built to find, by the way, that’s something completely different).
What might be slightly unhealthy about microscopic black holes is the amounts of hawking radiation they give off, which is also the reason for their short livespan. The more massive a black hole, the less it actually radiates, and thus lives a lot longer. Like, a lot lot. Massive black holes will be around trillions of years after the last star in the universe died, like the embers of once glorious bonfire, possibly warming the last remnants of civilisation with the little radiation they give off.
Black holes are really not dangerous, unless they happen to be freeballing through your solar system.
As for the matter of transportation, there is a hypothesis to have black holes while upholding conservation of energy, which states that if stuff goes into a hole, it has to come back out somewhere, which for lack of a better term was called a white hole. From that hypothesis, classic science fiction spun the idea that a black hole could also be used as what is nowadays more commonly known as a wormhole, a term that wasn’t so widespread back in the days. There are a couple of classic SF settings that use black holes for FTL travel, from the top of my head I can remember Haldemanns “forever war” (it calls them “collapsars”, as the term of a black hole wasn’t even strictly defined yet, it took Hawking and Penrose first to nail down their true characteristics), and of course it was the premise for Disneys extremely atypical, but rather good 80s scify-thriller “the black hole”. I’m pretty sure this kind of use in classic SF is what HG leaned on when deciding to make black holes random teleporters.
There are by now other hypothesises to reconcilliate black holes with conservation of energy, given that a white hole would be a thing much more easy to spot than a black hole, and we’ve found tons and tons of evidence of the later, but exactly zero for the former. For one, the discovery of hawking radiation in itself is already some of that, as it showed that while a black hole does suck in all matter unlucky enough to cross its path, it does give off energy.
My favourite model for black holes is that they are in fact supernovae in extreme bullet time: Giant explosions, that within the event horizon take only fractions of seconds, but since gravity causes time dilation, for an observer outside a couple billion or even trillion of years can pass by until the darn thing finally finishes. That toois only a hypothesis at this point, but it employs the kind of out-of-the-box thinking to turn something unknown and complex into something known and simple that I just like it a lot.
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Wormsign.
Since no one else mentioned it, it is one week until the new Dune move is released. Since before the game came out it has been reported that Sean is a fan of that story. So this could be about the game, he did use an emoji, or it could be about the movie, or both.
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Hmmmm…that is correct and since we have already had one crossover, I wonder if there could be another. We already have giant sandworms.
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Wait, that has released a while ago… Oh, americans get to see it late, it appears. I’ll have to get my schedule together to still be able to catch it here in Switzerland…
And get what… giant sandworm pets?
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Maybe not pets, but riding one would be pretty amazing…
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I know just enough science to be dangerous, as many people have experienced, so I’m going to pontificate a bit on this.
First off, the “discovery” of Hawking radiation isn’t quite accepted by the scientific community, though the radiation itself is, which I find quite puzzling. For that matter, I had to do a lot of reading to even get to the essence of what Hawking radiation was, and why it supposedly was the mechanism for black hole “evaporation.”
For one, the whole idea of radiation indicating that black holes are evaporating sounds dumb to me. First, I have to explain why scientists like Stephen Hawking say this is happening. It has to do with “virtual particles.” In totally empty space, it is still full of various energy fields in some state of flux, so space has an energy state, even far from galactic clusters, above zero. Fluctuations occur, because energy is never the same strength over time in our universe. Something should happen from this. Scientists hypothesize that this is expressed by particles and anti-particles springing into existence as a result of these fluctuations, and then promptly annihilate each other, continuing to perturb to one extent or another the ripples of energies. Clear so far?
So this should be happening even, maybe especially, in the vicinity of black holes as they severely warp the fabric of spacetime. And Hawking radiation is actually caused by the event horizon, as when these virtual particles pop into existence somehow, one is too close to the event horizon and falls in, leaving the other virtual particle to continue on briefly as a newborn real particle, and enjoy its new life of whatever duration in the accretion disc. And this, class, is why black holes shrink, or evaporate.
Why? Beats the carp out of me. Now some of this is discussed in a marvelous article on Forbes, Stephen Hawking fudged the truth - not actual title. But let me poke a few holes of my own in this theory.
First, virtual particles are basically a math trick, like an engineering tool like the square root of -1, to help make certain aspects of… I think the field theory is Quantum Chromodynamics, work. I believe we’ve all played with chromatic metal in our beloved alternate universe. But these virtual particles have never been observed, as the linked article points out. These virtual particles should happen in every field, perhaps most often in the presence of any gravity source that bends spacetime, such as you and me. We warp spacetime around us ever so slightly because we have mass. Or the Earth, which has a strong gravity well, which sucks us to it and keeps everything from flying out into space. Darn it - oh, wait…
Now supposedly in 2010, an experiment was done by some clever folk who shot a strong infrared laser into a chunk of silica crystal, chosen because the irregularities and impurities cause light passing through it to travel at various slower speeds, impeded by the irregular crystal matrix. Funny how The Matrix is all over the place in our universe, but I digress. Hypothetically, these photons can even slow to the point they stop, causing a bowshock / anti-bowshock or singularity itself. Virtual particles forming nearby, supposedly, will have the same chance of one of them being sucked into this Planck-scale singularity, leaving the other to bounce along as a real newborn particle, and this should cause its own Hawking radiation. They were sure they detected it as a shift in light frequencies. The scientific community shrugged, not all that sold on the idea, and the whole thing slid off the edge of scholarly reality into the void of obscurity, from what I can tell.
But, scientists are sure that Hawking radiation exists, and causes black holes to dissipate. Somehow. As if the mass of the black hole itself is leaking out into the universe. Or is being sucked through a wormhole into another place in the universe, causing a white hole, which has never been observed. Though I will bring up the possibility of quasars, which no one yet has taken seriously, since quasars are supposed to be super Seyfert galaxies, or specifically their cores, born in the early age of the universe shortly after galaxies formed. Or, its mass could be sucked out into another universe, but that drags the whole scary subject of information loss into the discussion, and scientists don’t want to face that paradox.
Now all of this is very fascinating to me, a hopelessly addicted science nerd, but I detect just a bit of fudge in this subject.
To start with, the whole virtual particle thing. It’s just a hypothesis, meaning basically a thought experiment, or imagination study thing. No one knows if it’s a legitimate thing or not. No one knows for sure how much space is “polluted” with matter in any region of space, or if physics “requires” these virtual particles to handle the consequence of field perturbances in relatively empty space. It’s just a notion, perhaps left over from Steady State adherents who clung to their pet notion, where field fluctuations filled space with matter springing from them, and kept an expanding universe filled and perpetual, rather than dying in heat death.
Second, the evaporating black hole idea, at least from Hawking radiation, sounds ludicrous to me. Because a black hole is gaining one particle instead of two… it’s shrinking? And the bazillions of tons of actual accretion disc it’s swallowing every second don’t add to it’s mass at all?? Like, splain this to me. For that matter, speaking of matter, this means that a black hole should be a repository of antimatter, up to almost half of its mass, depending, which the linked article also mentions. And of course this depends on what a pure quantum mass even is. And possibly, what might be evaporating is the singularity warp itself, which will ultimately result in a “naked singularity” as the accretion disc is devoured, a tiny warp just above the surface of the black hole itself, which might look like a totally black caricature of a ringed planet, spinning at insane speeds, its disc blending into the main body of whatever black holes are made of.
Third, everything should be evaporating. The Sun, Jupiter, Earth, us, because we all bend spacetime around us like a teensy Saran wrap, and these virtual guys should be popping into and out of us all the time as well. Oh but wait, we aren’t singularities. Or are we? We shear spacetime with this warp, so hypothetically, our bodies have the very smallest of singularities around us too, because this shearing at some Planck scale is happening. Oh, but it’s so slight. So? As my brother jokingly put it, you have to consider Deep Time, and further, Deespest and especially, Deeperest Time to know what’s really at play.
Oh silly me, I replied. Throw enough clocks at a problem, and it practically solves itself! 
I know I’m being a bit of a snark about this, but I love to pester the authorities on various subjects, because it seems like most people are so focused on their pet notions, they lose sight of The Big Picture, reality and all that. And this Big Picture place is what we currently call home. Almost every time, someone will be discussing their subject, and at some point I’ll try to grab the boundaries and try to expand them, and they’ll object, “Hold on now, let’s nail down this stuff first.” And I’ll relent and let them go. And they will brush off any attempts to grab those boundaries and expand them, almost every time because when they do, it kind of doesn’t work so well as an explanation of the world in general.
As an example, I love PBS Space Time and other science series which explore all kinds of things. But on an episode of a few months back, Matt the host said something pretty brain dead about the evolution of the solar system and rocky cores of the planets in contrast to the Sun. Something along the lines of the solar mass doesn’t “require” such a rocky center. Like, what the frack is that? That’s not how science works, and it’s also wrong. In order for the solar system to form, it most definitely does require a gravity well of solid matter to attract gasses to form a star, a super big one. But all the planets at least have rocky / metal cores, while the Sun is practically devoid of silicon, carbon and metals, which should be there from its formation. In fact, it should have the most of these materials. So where is it?
I get it, understanding the world is hard. Special Relativity which explains well The Big Picture, and Quantum Mechanics which deals with the nanoscopic, always fight, because the rules and the math are so radically different between them. The struggle to come up with a Theory Of Everything is so incredibly difficult because not enough people try to expand boundaries and ask tough, challenging questions, I assert. It’s why science eventually stops resisting the young Turks which begin to fill the old graybeard’s ranks, because the points they raise and their issues are valid. It’s how we advance. To quote a character in my fiction,
Challenge, debate, resolution
Knowledge, understanding
A process
Like life itself
Positive and negative
Belief and doubt
Truth and untruth
To derive
Greater Truth
It’s us stinkers who keep things interesting. Thank you for enduring yet another Stryker essay.
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Well, riding them would be awesome! 
Oops! Just saw @Timsup2nothin had the same idea.
As for the BlackHole vs WormHole discussion, I guess I’m thinking more along Sci-Fi lines. BlackHoles stretch you like spaghetti and you live forever in them with no escape possible but, WormHoles are passages to another area in the Universe. I’m thinking the movie BlackHole vs Deep Space 9
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Maybe the next thing will be a fishing expedition?
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