Fletcher: did you read the thing about the grid anomaly
Autumn: No!
Autumn: What are you talking about?
Fletcher: the grid anomaly!
Autumn: What the fuck is a grid anomaly?
Fletcher: the big grid of stars, the thing the hubble saw in 2012
Fletcher: nasa said it was an image processing error
Lois: I haven't heard of that either
Fletcher:

Fletcher: ring a bell?
Autumn: No.
Fletcher: upper right
Fletcher: ignore the big black rectangle
Fletcher: nasa images have big black rectangles, nobody knows why...
Lois: Whoa!
Autumn: What am I looking for?
Fletcher: a grid of stars
Fletcher: like you'd expect from the name grid anomaly
Fletcher: anyway, the big new telescope in russia decided yesterday to look at it, and guess what
Fletcher:

Lois: That's pretty uhh
Lois: Terrifying, actually
Lois: That is fucking terrifying
Autumn: It looks like baseball stadium lights being reflected on the lens.
Fletcher: right
Fletcher: only one lens was in space and the other one was in northern russia
Lois: Maybe they're borg cubes
Lois: Or a minefield
Lois: So what is it really?
Fletcher: aliens
Mary: We don't have a definitive explanation yet, but there are a few reasonable candidates.
Lois: Isn't it possible that it's a natural occurence?
Fletcher: no
Mary: Some people think so, yes.
Mary: The most likely theory is that there's some natural process that produces grids of stars. Just like the hexagon they found on Saturn.
Lois: There's a hexagon on Saturn??
Fletcher: or it could be the obvious explanation
Fletcher: the one you'd have if you came across a bunch of trees planted in a grid
Mary: Saying it's due to aliens sounds exciting, but without a plausible reason why aliens would cause this structure in particular, it isn't really an explanation.
Mary: In that it can't be said to explain the anomaly.
Fletcher: bullshit
Autumn: Probably it's some error in however they're generating the pictures.
Fletcher: they generate them by looking real hard and taking a picture of the actual light from actual stars that are in an actual grid
Mary: Possible, if the glitch is tied to that particular region of space. Either in terms of the coordinates we use for it, or what's really there to be seen.
Fletcher: one theory is that it's an error, but not in our image processing
Fletcher: rather, in the universe itself
Fletcher: a glitch in the galaxy generation subroutine
Mary: Again, that wouldn't be an explanation. Fleshing it out to be one would make it into the "natural process" type of explanation.

Back to logs index page