I hear you, but it's a classic generic tangent—in fact a classic generic flamewar tangent. HN commenters are asked to resist those - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - even though it borders on irresistible.
Edit: but I've put the Celsius number in the title now as well...hopefully that will reduce the swelling.
I noticed it didn't have the Celsius value at the beginning, and a while later I noticed it was there. But "minus 280 F / 173 C" is terrible formatting, it looks like it's positive in Celsius...
Considering the conversion between the 2 temperature scales can flip the sign (e.g. -10C is 14F), "-280F/-173C" would've been a lot clearer.
Or you can think that way - you at 36 C radiate 900 W away while from our usual environment you get 800+ W radiated (and also transferred by air) at you (with your body producing that 50-100W difference), and at 280F you’d get only mere watts radiated at you from the environment while you still would start radiating at 900 and going quickly downhill from that as you surface quickly cools down (that is supposing you don’t have some performance enhancing stuff Expanse style to generate 900 watts boiling you blood to bring those 900 watts non stop to the skin) until coming into equilibrium with the environment.
It's not like using Kelvin or Celsius helps you grasp these temperatures. -173C is very, very cold, but how cold? What can you compare it to? Not many humans have any experience with something of this scale
Liquid nitrogen (boiling at -196 C) is a semi-common substance that people would have heard of, though not everyone would have seen or interacted with it.
I've seen liquid nitrogen, briefly, as it was sprayed out of a hose. It immediately boiled into a (quite cold) gas, of course. I was told not to play with it too much because they would have to evacuate the building. Oh the joys of "bring your kid to work" days in manufacturing facilities
That's the example Copilot used when asked to make a list of temperatures in 50 C steps with an example or two of something around that temperature that people might have heard of. Also cryogenic freezing of biological samples.
You would think either they could parameterise all units or a plausible browser extension could convert elephants to swimmingpools and King's thumbs to badly measured fractions of a diameter.
Speaking of "feet" as a measurement - Randall Carlson has an AMAZING video[0] on the source of the 12 inch foot.
And how its all related to the measurement of the precession of the earth. And yes - its specifically how to measure things in space. And its all from Sacred Geometry.
Well, the definition of 0ºC is based on the freezing point of water at one atmosphere of pressure, which isn't super relevant on the Moon. You could give it in K but that's not very relatable.
-280F, -173C, or 100K is not relatable to anyone except niche researchers. Maybe slap in the extra few people who happen to work with liquid helium and you are still talking about 0% of the population.
Temperature is roughly how fast molecules are moving, vibrating etc. And the impact of low/higher temperature are really how fast molecules are knocking you. For an ideal gas, temperature is proportional to the square of the velocity.
So at room temperature (300K), the speed of the molecules is roughly 300^0.5 = 17.3 in some arbitrary units. If you drop down to freezing point of water, (273K), speed is 16.5. And that is starting to get cold. -40C (as cold as most humans will experience) is 15.3. So each drop of 1 in speed is pretty drastic.
At 100K, the speed is 10, or 7 drops from 17. That should be a lot colder than room temperature. But not cold enough. Most of the speed is still there, we haven't even cut it by half. It's the next few 1/3rd cuts of the temperature that will start to get us closer to zero speed.
It's hard, I can imagine the average kinetic energy slowing down, but can't imagine heat halving since there's no halving we can feel without dying.
Humans should experience something within -50°C to 50°C for most, if not their entire lives, but that's just 223K to 323K, maybe that's the range we can understand as a warmth difference, so getting to that temperature might feel like that super wide, in human warmth terms, drop in temperature twice, which still feels unimaginably cold.
It’s sort-of the point to realize that it actually is (a third of something). The lander is receiving a third of the thermal energy that it would receive at room temperature.
Warm-blooded mammals of course have a reference point based on their thermal homeostatic capabilities (ability to maintain body temperature). “Warm” and “cold” is in relation to that.
I don't think that black-body radiative transfer is a linear process.
The Stefan-Boltzman relation says power scales with the fourth power of temperature. So 1/3 absolute temperature would be 1/81 the inbound radiative energy. If you are getting 800W inbound at room temp, you would get 10W inbound at 100K (=300K/3).
Ars has been one of the best publications across my whole experience with the internet, going on 20+ years. Without them I wouldn't have been clued into how broken the internet is.
