what do you guys think has been the most historical events of the 2020s that aren’t the obvious ones like covid and the wars

IF YOU HAVE ECLIPSE GLASSES, GO OUTSIDE AND LOOK AT THE SUN RIGHT NOW

There is currently a dark spot on the surface of the Sun visible as a black dot, it’s called AR3664
These sunspots happen very often but ones this big are very rare, and this one is visible without a telescope

this sunspot is also releasing massive solar flares that will cause auroras to be visible in northern US states and all of canada

this is extremely rare, STARE DIRECTLY AT THE SUN RIGHT NOW (if you still have eclipse glasses)

so here’s two fun facts i learned about saturn today that just prove that this planet is the physical embodiment of chaos

1. saturn’s biggest moon, titan, is currently moving away from saturn. As it does, saturn’s obliquity (it’s axial tilt, which is just how tilted the planet is toward the sun) will increase. This increase then destabilizes titan’s orbit, which causes it to move away further, which causes the obliquity to increase more, in a feedback loop that will eventually
-eject titan from the system entirely, flinging it off into space
-cause saturn to flip on its side, like uranus is today
we don’t know when this will happen but we know it will (it will probably be between 1-100 billion years from now)

and
2. Saturn’s moon Hyperion has a chaotic rotation. Earth takes 24 hours to complete one rotation, and it’s very stable.
Hyperion is not

Hyperion’s day length and axial tilt constantly changes chaotically and unpredictably due to interactions with saturn and the other moons. This is so chaotic that it becomes physically impossible to predict where hyperion will be more than a month in advance
Even with things like supercomputers, we genuinely have no idea how long a day on hyperion will be or how tilted it will be more than 1 month from today

fun fact: there is a US law that prevents NASA from working with the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) in any capacity whatsoever

NASA and CNSA are literally prohibited from working together by law

China has a space station, Mars rovers, has landed several things on the Moon, and has a successful human spaceflight program

Now, where have I heard of 2 extremely capable spacefaring nations working against each other before?

fun fact: there is an area on the Moon called the Sea of Moscow that was discovered by (who would’ve guessed) Russia in the 1960s

however, the rules for naming places on the Moon said that you couldn’t name them after anything political, and the city of Moscow fell under that category

but the soviet union was determined
so they argued that the city of Moscow was “a state of mind” and so not political

and it WORKED

your daily reminder that the United States Space Force has a classified “fleet” of space planes very similar to the Space Shuttle but with no crew and they only do military stuff

they’re called X-37s and every once and a while one will launch, stay in orbit for a few months, and come back down
what they do up there is classified
we have no idea what is on board


(it’s probably just spy satellites and stuff but i like to tell people this because as much as people like to joke about the Space Force, it’s a serious organization that actually does stuff)

so i’m sure you guys know boeing at this point
the airplane company that keeps having doors fall off their planes and other wacky events

well a lot of people don’t know that Boeing is also a space company and has launched things into space

and now they’re working on the first crewed flight test of Boeing Starliner, which is a new vehicle meant to take people to the International Space Station

let’s go over a brief history of Boeing Starliner because it is the worst crewed spacecraft since Apollo 13

the first flight test of Starliner occurred in 2019, it didn’t have people on it and was just trying to get to the ISS
It was almost ready to approach the ISS and then MISSED

the second test, also with nobody on it, went fine a few years later
keep in mind that Boeing wanted people on Starliner in 2018. It’s now 2024 and a crewed flight test is just now about to happen

istg if Boeing kills a bunch of astronauts I think that’ll just be the end of the company
the first company to kill someone in space
let’s hope that doesn’t happen

hey look outside your car is on fire! ha ha april foul

time to perform ritualistic sacrifices to Artemis, Selene, Chang’e, Chandra, and whatever other moon gods i can think of for the successful landing of the VIPER rover sometime this year
dear god this thing needs to succeed
we aren’t sending humans back to the moon without it