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And to add the cherry on top, should you ever reach his arbitrary speed limit, it distorts time itself. Even if you flew through space at c for a little weekend getaway, you’d return to a now foreign world only to find time had skipped forward +2,000 years, your entire family and social circles long dead from old age with societal and technical advancements beyond what you could have ever thought possible, completely isolating you. You’re now doomed to live in an unfamiliar world where not a single human speaks your language nor can they relate to you in any meaning way.
AKA, gods speeding ticket.
Unless Artificial General Intelligence is developed, then perhaps some pattern could be found and the future humans can decode some of what you’re saying.
Maybe even some brain-neuron scanner type of thing to measure your exact thoughts.
I have a solution for this: When you travel somewhere, travel with everyone’s mind at light speed. You see we think about lightspeed wrong. It’s meant for whole species to migrate. Not 1 individual.
Another alternative is just take a snapshop of everyone’s minds at that point, then let them continue living even with your snapshot. When you return you pick back off where you left off. Living in your own dimension. The other dimension is long gone but you miss nothing.
We don’t know how big is the universe beyond the observable universe.
What is observable is constrained by cause and effect. To see something, information must come from there to us. That cause and effect relationship cannot happen faster than lightspeed.
We therefore have no evidence for anything other than the observable universe. Claims about anything else run into Russell’s teapot issues. We can speculate, but it’s ultimately nothing more than a story.
The observable universe is constantly expanding as the passage of time allows light to reach us from more and more distant parts of the universe. So it’s less “we don’t know what’s outside” and more like (to a certain extent) “we have to wait and see.” And there’s nothing we’ve seen to indicate that these external regions that are being revealed are anything but more of the same kinds of things in our inner region of the observable universe.
Yeah, but we can estimate. I’m confident it’s at least 11 in size.
Light speed is a “you must be this clever to participate” barrier to becoming an interstellar species, that’s all. Even if it’s not breakable, it just means you gotta be able to plan hundreds or thousands of years into the future.
We can hardly plan 5 years into the future, let alone hundreds of thousands… It’d be pretty sad if the answer to the Fermi paradox is that everyone is too stupid to participate.
everyone is too stupid to participate
if they are anything like us, its probably for the best.
I don’t know, man, I kinda want to hear some of this Vogon poetry I’ve been hearing so much about.
meh. its only the third-worst in the Universe. you gotta go for the good stuff!
That was awful. Thank you.
I guess us Americans are out…
99% of the universe is nothing. Wouldn’t that really be the dick move?
The universe is basically 100% empty. An atom is more than 99.9999999 empty space.
Say that again when a brick made of 99,9999999% empty space hits you!
(Mustn’t be a hard hit, maybe more like a soft touch. For science, you know.)
Yeah, I rounded down.
wow. never thought of this in that way.
How much of a proton or electron is empty space?
99% of the universe is nothing.
Worst video game developer ever.
Clearly it was made by Bethesda.
It’s actually just our solar system, the rest is just rendering tricks making us think there’s distance
Broad as an ocean, deep as a puddle. Oh great, more rock.
Hear me out. It doesn’t even matter that it’s 96 billion light-years away if you’re traveling at light speed. Because if you can travel at light speed, time would be frozen for you relative to earth time.
So if you’re in a spaceship traveling at light speed to your destination, it would feel like you gotten there in an instant.
Also, due to length contraction, at light speed the universe isn’t 96 billion light years wide, it’s 0 anything wide.
At light speed there is no time and no distance, the origin is the destination. You won’t even experience a single tick of Planck time to get there. Instantaneous.
Doesn’t it also require infinite energy to do so if “the thing” has mass at all?
ie. Our description of physics breaks down at such extremes, so in truth, we have no fuckin’ idea, just a best guess? (Thus far)
Yes, it requires infinite energy for any mass to get to light speed.
I don’t think our understanding of physics breaks down at such extremes though. I believe it’s decently understood, as in general and special relativity. I’m not a physicist though.
It’s my understanding that whenever infinity is encountered, it means that our model doesn’t quite work.
It may be the way it is with this particular model/equations/bit of physics, and it may simply indicate “Nope”. I suspect not though.
AFAIK the observable universe is limited by the parts of space which expand faster than the speed of light.
Some billions of years later and we might have not seen other galaxies at all, maybe we are lucky.
In an instant from the point of view of the people on Earth, but from your point of view time still moves forward.Edit: guess I was mistaken!
Not the other way? You’d feel like you got there in an instant, while people on Earth needed to wait years?
Other way around. Instant from your POV but not from Earth’s.
Time is frozen at light speed. You arrive at your destination instantaneously, not even experiencing a tick of Planck time. To an outside observer it takes you time. From the perspective of a photon from the sun, there is no time or distance passing between its genesis in the sun and it landing on your face. From an observer on earth it took 8 minutes and millions of miles.
Well, you arrive at A destination instantaneously. Important distinction. Though you might not all arrive at the same destination. And since no time passes for you and your computer… how exactly do you decelerate again? If you are going the speed of light, then you ARE light. You have ceased to exist as a Lemmitor. There is no coming back.
You’ll need to accelerate to the light speed though, which will take time.
So for the astronaut it’d take approximately a year to reach light speed if accelerating at 1G, and another year to slow down
I mean if we’re already violating physics by having objects with mass going the speed of light, I don’t see what’s wrong with also assuming the thing we have for going light speed can’t also instantaneously accelerate.
I would think you’d have to instantaneously accelerate because incremental acceleration doesn’t work the way we typically think it does at high speeds.
If you’re moving at 99.999% the speed of light relative to Earth, anything close to your speed is going to be moving quite slowly relative to you. When you accelerate some more, the change in speed relative to those close things is much larger than the change in speed you experience relative to Earth (it gets smaller and smaller as you approach light speed). But as far as I understand, there’s no such thing as moving at light speed relative to Earth but not relative to other sub-light speed things. You’d have to instantaneously move at light speed relative to everything (every sub-light speed thing).
There is no evidence that the Universe is bounded at all. For all we know, it is infinite in spacial dimension.
John Green: Yikes!
True, but there is thought to be a finite amount of matter + energy, which cannot be created or destroyed. And since it is spreading out from an original dense point, it stands to reason that there would be a vacuum area that it has not reached yet.
Our current understanding of the big bang is not that it spread out from one place, it happened everywhere all at once. If the universe is infinite, it started from zero volume and infinite density then immediately became infinite in volume and finite in density. The density of matter/energy is what is finite, not the amount of matter/energy, that is infinite (if the universe is infinite). Then there was a period of rapid inflation, then is settled down to the inflation we see today.
Infinite or finite, the universe is not spreading out into anything, the distances between points are simply increasing.
It’s so obvious, to me, to think of the universe as occurring 'in a box’and that expansion happening like someone is inflating a balloon inside it - so we’re running out of room as such.
Take away the box and my brain just melts. I’m not very familiar with this stuff, however
The important thing in the balloon analogy isn’t what the balloon is expanding into, it’s just that every point on the balloon is drifting away from every other point.
One thing to consider, though, is that space may not even be a real physical thing. Maybe location is just a property of things, like mass or electrical charge. It could just be an inherent value that adjusts and influences other things according to the laws of physics. Maybe it’s less that “space is expanding” and just that “the location property of everything is constantly diverging.” There’s no need to worry about what anything is expanding into because our conception of space may just be a mental construct.
…absolutely wild
edit on a 2nd read it strikes me that determining whether space is expanding vs the location property of everything is diverging is a relatively impossible exercise (key word, there).
A lot like the non-trivial thought experiments, ‘prove you’re in/not in a simulation’
it started from zero volume
This is not true. It started with apparently infinite volume. This is the confusing nature of infinities.
Hum, no. It’s widely believed that the amount of matter + energy in the universe changes all the time.
That’s not at all how it works. In particular, it didn’t start from an original, dense point. It started everywhere, with nearly uniform density apparently infinitely in all directions. If the Universe is boundless, there is no reason to suspect the material it contains is not equally boundless.
Not really. As far as we know information can’t travel faster than light speed, and the oldest/farthest stuff we can see is 14 billion years old / 14b light years away. That gives us the radius and age of the observable universe.
By our current understanding of how the universe works we can’t see anything further or older than that (and will never be able to), so any assumption about things outside/before the observable universe is completely baseless
When the game is open world but no fast travel or mounts.
Wait, now that I think about it, the observable universe have precisely that length because the speed of light, doesn’t it?
Its a combination of the speed of light and how inflation has varied the size of the universe. Light’s only been able to travel about 14 billion light years since the universe began but those further regions used to be closer so light from them was already part of the way here when they vanished over the cosmic horizon.
Do you believe that the wide expanses of our planet Earth were crafted for the common ant to explore?
There is idea in the three body problem novels:
Tap for spoiler
That the speed of light was infinity at the birth of the universe but sentient species reduced the speed of light several times as a offence/defense mechanism to protect themselves from others.
The mere though of that is dreadful to me.
Dark Forest Theory is probably wrong. In-universe, the series unknowingly undermines it with communication tech that can transmit instantaneously. That would take away the assumption that civilizations can’t effectively communicate over interstellar distances and build trust.
In reality, it’s something of an extension of the “every individual for themselves” mindset of evolution–something White Supremacists have loved. Kin Selection Theory does away with that. There is a basis for building trust and working together within evolution. The precursor ideas were even done in Peter Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” over a century ago. Kin Selection Theory put a mathematical foundation on it.
I like the book series as literature, and the Netflix series has been OK so far (not great, but OK). Liu Cixin himself, however, has some really shitty opinions that come through the text.
Humanity stands on the brink of self-destruction because we have yet to overcome the primitive, selfish aspects of our nature. I have to believe that any civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel—without having destroyed itself along the way—must have achieved a certain level of cooperative enlightenment.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Anything capable of altering fundamental physical parameters like that will be unknowable to us. We’d be like bacteria are to a human.
Its probably for the best.
If humans are able to get to another planet with life on it we would probably do horrific unspeakable things to the aliens.
You mean civilize and liberate the aliens from their barbarism? /s
Dispensing freedom you mean.
*Aliens pulling out literal fireswords*
“Okay.”
Nah, we can bend space. Sam Neill checkmates God.
Take a shortcut through hell, eh?
That movie is about the first time humanity tried to enter the Warp without a Gellar field.
Best part of Warhammer lore imho.
For those of us who work retail, yeah…
The universe is actually expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light. There’s only a finite distance we’d technically be able to travel if we were to leave right now.
It can’t. Checkmate scientists.
To be clear it’s lightspeed in space time, we “just” need to get rid of time to conquer the space.
I mean, have you seen the human back, fuckin psychopath LMAO
