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oneshtein parent
100K

muzani
This actually puts it into perspective, knowing it's closer to absolute zero than room temperature.
layer8
It’s roughly a third of room temperature.
dietr1ch
Which is hard to grok since a third of something warm doesn't seem to be extremely cold.
abdullahkhalids
This is an interesting explanatory challenge.

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.

dietr1ch
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.

layer8
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.

ted_dunning
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).

tempodox
Exactly, the Kelvin unit makes it easy to see that. I can't believe they used fucking Fahrenheit in the title.
shadowgovt
"You know how hot you feel when you're running a fever? Well, it was nearly three times that cold!"

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