Fascinating thread. Could actually be a , but you know what I mean.

@QuadNarca

@Grue

(link)

Astronomers have been left red-faced after announcing the discovery of a new near-Earth asteroid — only to realize that the supposed space rock was the remains of Elon Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster and its spacesuit-clad driver "Starman."

The misidentified object, which was launched into space on board a SpaceX rocket in 2018, highlights a growing problem in astronomy that could lead to costly errors, researchers say.

On Jan. 2, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) added a new object, dubbed 2018 CN41, to its list of near-Earth asteroids. The supposed space rock was identified by an unnamed amateur astronomer in Turkey using years of publicly available data, Astronomy.com reported. However, just 17 hours later, the MPC released an editorial notice retracting the discovery after the citizen scientist realized they had made a mistake.

The Tesla Roadster, which was previously used by Elon Musk, was launched into space on Feb. 6, 2018, as the test payload for the maiden launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The publicity stunt garnered widespread attention at the time, partly due to Starman — a mannequin in the car's driving seat that was wearing a likely defective spacesuit and "listening" to David Bowie's album "Space Oddity" on loop.

The car and its driver headed toward Mars after escaping Earth's gravity and were supposed to enter a stable orbit around the Red Planet, which raised alarms at the time that it could become a potential Martian "biothreat" if it accidentally crash-landed there. However, the pair overshot their target and instead entered a stable orbit around the sun. Now, it circles the sun and occasionally zooms past Mars.

The Tesla has now completed roughly 4.5 trips around the sun, traveling at roughly 45,000 mph (72,000 km/h), according to whereisroadster.com. This means that the car has now exceeded its initial 36,000-mile warranty around 100,00 times.

However, the car is probably unrecognizable now after being exposed to years of intense radiation from the sun and bombarded by tiny fragments of space rocks, which have likely stripped the outer layers of the car and shredded Starman.

This is not the first time that human-made objects have been mistaken for near-Earth asteroids. The MPC has temporarily listed a number of spacecraft as space rocks over the last two decades — including the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, NASA's Lucy probe, the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission and others — as well as rocket boosters and other debris, according to Astronomy.com.

This type of confusion will also likely increase as more human-made objects are launched into space.

These misidentifications could lead to more false alarms for near-Earth asteroids, which could in turn result in costly errors, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Astronomy.com. "Worst case [scenario], you spend a billion [dollars] launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it's not an asteroid when you get there," he said.

While space agencies and private companies are required to accurately track their products in orbit around Earth, there is currently no legislation that forces them to do the same for spacecraft and debris that escape Earth's gravity, like the Tesla Roadster.

However, "such transparency is essential for promoting space situational awareness, reducing interference between missions, [and] avoiding interference with observations of natural objects," members of the American Astronomical Society warned in a 2024 statement.

!superheroes

The time has come...

We are now seeking qualified candidates to help us spread Cast Brew Coffee nationwide! Cast Brew Coffee isn’t just the best coffee product in America; it is now a franchise system focused on developing a new public square and giving entrepreneurs a chance… pic.twitter.com/2elKrQj8X6

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) January 1, 2025

Now normally when you think of franchising, you're adopting an already successful business format, right? What does Tiny Tim have to show on this front? 1 store, in Martinsville VA that has from what I understand never opened...

Here's the estimated initial financial breakdown to get your business started. There's also a contact form if Marsey McSneed is interested in exploring franchising.

sidenote

A few things about this- For similar costs or even less, you could be franchising with an actually successful, established brand like Starbucks/Dunkin. Included in this breakdown is $10-20k to fly out to Tim and be trained (by people that don't actually have a running store. 40k is also for just for the brand deal (again, it's a worthless brand with no name recognition, maybe try to get it going first Timmy) There's also things you're going to be acquiring independently that you'd think would be part of the franchise deal such as computer systems for inventory/transactions, and inventory from 3rd party suppliers, and marketing material. What's the point of franchising if you get no brand recognition, no marketing help, your inventory isn't from a simplified, centralized supply chain, ect? I really don't know, it sounds like you're doing all the work of setting up a real small business + Tim gets a cut + you're locked into his coffee brand in perpetuity.

Kiwi Farmers & Twittercels alike seem unimpressed by this "opportunity" that Tim had teased his audience with as a "big announcement".

These are some of the top replies on Tim's twitter anouncement

Kiwi Friends also are skeptical

Forced Unnatural Sex With Wife Not An Offence: High Courthttps://t.co/oBUnPZwtBz pic.twitter.com/tWwuE49Z7j

— NDTV (@ndtv) February 11, 2025

In response to the post that just went up demanding that we ban people from posting links from Twitter/X, and instead only allow Bluesky, we want the sub to understand that we will never restrict where people post their Panthers news from. This is antithesis to the purpose of this sub, a place to aggregate all the news we want to read about the Panthers organization. Heck, we don't even restrict posts that are sources from people like David Newton, and he's usually not a reliable source

Regardless of how you feel about what's going on outside of the Panthers fanbase, in relation to Twitter/X, this sub will always focus on exclusively Panthers media, news, and discussion. Every member here is free to post any links from Twitter, Insta, Bluesky, and any other source of news or discussion they see interest in

/r/panthers mods do the unbelievably rare action of letting the upmarsey and downmarsey system do it's job. They of course are getting heat for it (62% upmarseyd at the moment). Some

I don't understand the big deal? If you don't want to see the X/ Twitter post don't click on the link? Most of the panthers reporters/insiders post mainly on X

Honest answer? Virtue signalling

[–]judgeholden72 26 points 22 hours ago

Free market at work is now virtue signaling?

Not banning a website and letting people click on it if they want is the definition of free market lol. What kind of logic steps are you taking to get banning X is actually free market lol.

judgeholden72 -8 points 21 hours ago

Because users are asking for it to not be utilized.

That's the free market. Reddit isn't imposing a ban. Users are asking mods, who are not reddit, to not allow links that have it because those links are less useful

Went back 7 pages, /u/judgeholen72 doesn't appear to post in /r/panthers very frequently, possibly ever. Posts in the /r/nygiants sub every once in a while and a smattering of loser gen X subs. Still claims this is a grassroots every the "users" of the sub is asking for.

Some r-slur tries shit and the mod keeps going "yeah that's fine" and he responses "but what about?".

But that's the truth, I have never removed any posts based on where they were posted from. Usually links to certain sites would just get downmarseyd but the mod team has always been careful to only use our removal cowtools for stuff that is either meant to troll/harass/flame or is irrelevant to the Carolina Panthers

So, nsfw sites are okay to post from? .onion sites? Like, I feel like at some point Reddit would nsfw or quarantine the sub.

As long as the posts are directly Panthers news and discussion related (maybe as a crazy example, some porn star does a weekly discussion about the Panthers while topless) and as long as the post is properly tagged NSFW, then we should have no problems with Reddit

So, and I mean this with all sincerity, if I start just posting full Athletic articles through archive ph, then that's fine? ESPN+ articles?

People already do it. All we ask that you copy and paste the key parts of the content you're posting. So for example if you're posting a paywalled article that lists 5 free agents the Panthers should target, comment those 5 names within your post for people who aren't subscribed

I don't mean posting just the paywalled article. I mean something like:

https://archive.ph/pGbJA

That should be fine too. I've seen Archive posts on many subreddits and as far as I've seen Reddit has no rules against it

This guy gives up against the slight rebuttal, cries about how much he doesn't like X, and then says the mod is taking it too personally.

I'd argue against it from a functional perspective. Because Twitter has removed the functionality for non-users to see threads or visit profiles, it's simply a bad source and we should have higher standards of accessibility for the reddit audience.

I've lost count of how many other sites that get posted here that are paywalled that most members have no issues with. The Athletic, NFL+/ESPN+ articles, and many other links posted are paywalled

Cmon bro you know it's hard to use, it's not about a paywall, it's about links that I don't want to click because I know it'll annoy me if it's part of a thread that I won't be able to read. With the others you mentioned people tend to post a copy of the article in the comments for non-members. It's a hallmark of the reddit community that makes this place fun to go to, and it doesn't really exist for tweets. Put it to an official vote or something, it's weird how personal you're taking this.

Put up a poll in a thread with a bunch of flairless posters are commenting.

Put up a poll and see what the user base thinks

I don't think we need to, no sub rules or reddit rules are being violated, it's just a matter of preference and opinion.

This would fall under the often lamented umbrella of "over moderation".

Which ironically people call us Nazi mods for lol can't win for losing

Is there any way we could do an actual poll? It seems to be a widely supported move because of… well the nazi salute stuff.

I get wanting to protect peoples ability to post news, but can we really not vote to avoid supporting a nazi?

I'm going to start posting Panthers news in 4chan and start linking to it here.

It's patently ridiculous to say any source is okay.

And this is a community and if that's what the community wants then the mods should feel obliged to comply.

You're (likely) not a credible source, while a panthers beat writer who uses Twitter is

🫡 it's been fun while it lasted, i seem to be in the minority here and that's okay, but that man can not be supported in any way

Then don't read it lol. Why does everyone think you can tell other people what to do.

Not telling you to do anything man. I wanted my opinion to have some representation on this post.

I'm not telling you to do anything, I'm just wanting you to not be able to do things I don't like.

There's DOZENS of people out in the cold....doing something!

BREAKING: Ross Ulbricht has been pardoned by President Donald Trump

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) January 21, 2025

If you don't know who Ross is

FREEDOM!!

FREEDOM!!!! pic.twitter.com/itRuuyFAxe

— Free_Ross (@Free_Ross) January 22, 2025

"And, peculiarly, Civ 7 only really covers history up to about 1950. You get planes and tanks, but there are no home computers or helicopters in this tech tree at launch. The final science victory condition is launching the first manned spaceflight – quite a step back from setting up an exoplanet colony"

I was talking to @PegMeMommy about Valentine's Day. I was telling him about how me and my siblings got our mom flowers and stuff for Valentine's Day. During the conversation he said he had never heard of kids getting their mom something for Valentine's Day, and he doesn't know anyone who does this. For me, this is the opposite: Where I'm from, everyone gets their mother something. Now both of us are wondering which is normal.

Decided to make a poll!

Do you buy your mother something Valentine's Day?

!physics !ifrickinglovescience

my friend finds basically every girl his age who’s in decent shape attractive. this actually seems like the ideal way to be wired?

— Ava (@noampomsky) February 14, 2025

Turns out, the gender that can reproduce in 30 seconds instead of 9 months is wired to not be very picky when it comes to whom to frick.

!foidmoment !r-slurs

For comparison, here is how Europoors react to the biggest political shift in Germany in decades

I was banned once from this sub for saying that most men are libertarians. But that's just the way it is

!chuds !trump2024 !trump2028

You can just go into reddit subs and suggest that they’re nazis if they haven’t banned Twitter links and they roll over. I literally have a chudjak pfp and I got r/xxfitness (3 million subscribers) to ban them in 6 minutes with 0 effort.

Horrid website. pic.twitter.com/uird4D37mX

— rDrama.net (@rdramanet) January 29, 2025

It's OVER.