A faster light speed wouldn’t make a difference, since she made the universe 96 billion light years wide.
Something tells me this isn’t a bad thing. If there is an edge of the universe, it’s probably going to be a very strange place.
Indeed, but the way the math for expansion works is that there is something called a Hubble horizon and that makes it impossible to ever reach the edge, since it is moving away from us faster than light. (The limit doesn’t apply to the expansion of space-time).
Quite a nifty solution by the Supreme Programmer to avoid us hitting the limits of the simulation. I couldn’t have designed it better.
Well it was a more convincing solution than just having level crossing arms come down and an infinitely long train cross every time you get near the edge.
“Space. It seems to go on and on forever… But then you get to the end and then a giant gorilla starts throwing barrels at you.”
–Fry, “Futurama”
I couldn’t have designed it better.
Delta Force game programmers: Ghm, that was a trivial solution to the problem.
So… is Rick the top God or are there infinite simulations?
Just along the Central Finite Curve.
And Earth is already stranger than some would like.
And that is scary. If the is one takeaway from observing the universe it’s that there are always bigger and stranger things out there somewhere.
Hey I hear there’s a nice restaurant out there
Good thing there isn’t one since we probably live in a donut.
I thought it was technically a three-dimensional donut shape progressing along a sort of 4D torus that we only exist on the “surface” of?
That’s a common misconception. We actually live on the surface of a 3D bear claw progressing along a 4D cruller.
It’s actually turtles all the way down.
Ah shit 🤯
Torus*
It does sort of feel like we’re in the butthole of universes, doesn’t it?
Imagine there being just no stars behind you. Just nothing. On one side you see the universe, like a wall of stars and lights, and next to that just pure nothingness. The void.
You could never get to the void because space-time has already accelerated the edge of all matter away from you faster than the speed of light.
Not “the void,” no, but “a void,” yes. As the universe continues to expand faster than the speed of light, the stars outside of our galaxy will slowly disappear from view. There will come a time when the night sky is just the milky way and darkness elsewhere. I don’t know if anything will still be around to observe it, though.
A bit off-topic but the voids in the universe (such as Bootes void) are scary af.
Or the quantum foam, or both, it’d be wild to be able to stare out into that sorta of black, in a metal way.
Stupid relative distance measurements ruining all our fun
Tell me all your thoughts on God 'cause I would really like to meet her
Disclaimer: To any higher power listening, I am not done living and do not want to meet God/a god immediately. There’s still plenty of candy left in this piñata.
blows raspberry
Willem
Defoeeee
You can’t do this to me. I started this company. You know how much I sacrificed?!
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.
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.
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.
99% of the universe is nothing. Wouldn’t that really be the dick move?
Broad as an ocean, deep as a puddle. Oh great, more rock.
99% of the universe is nothing.
Worst video game developer ever.
It’s actually just our solar system, the rest is just rendering tricks making us think there’s distance
Clearly it was made by Bethesda.
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.)
Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, is it really fair to say my client hit him, when the brick is essentially 100% empty space? And isn’t he also essentially 100% empty space so can he even be hit?
But, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a wookie from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about that; that does not make sense! Why would a wookie, an 8 foot tall wookie, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two foot tall ewoks? That does not make sense!
But more importantly, you have to ask yourself, ‘what does that have to do with this case?’ Nothing. Ladies and Gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case. It does not make sense! Look at me. I’m a lawyer defending a major record company, and I’m talkin’ about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you’re in that jury room deliberatin’ and conjugatin’ the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
Yeah, I rounded down.
wow. never thought of this in that way.
How much of a proton or electron is empty space?
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, that’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned a sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day. In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light years thick but out by us it’s just three thousand light years wide. We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point, we go around every two hundred million years and our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, in all of the directions it can whiz. As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed thereis. So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth and pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space because there’s bugger all down here on earth.
Gotta appreciate the classics.
Might as well watch it
You lost me at miles
Edit: /s for brevity
Same. Miles per second? What the hell kinda unit is that? Over here, we use Texases per lamb’s tail shakes.
Score of furlongs per Mississippi
Edit: duck autocorrect
I don’t want to criticize internet absurdity for many reasons, including but not limited to the fact that I depend on it to survive. Having said that, what’s the application of a length to area ratio?
I am referencing the Mississippi, a time unit. One Mississippi is equal to roughly one second.
Wow, that’s a lot better than my comment. Sorry I whiffed it.
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.
Bro doesn’t believe in dark matter because he can’t see it
We can measure its gravitation.
Yeah, but we can estimate. I’m confident it’s at least 11 in size.
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
*Aliens pulling out literal fireswords*
“Okay.”Dispensing freedom you mean.
I feel like I would treat my Togruta wife very well ;-;
Real talk tho, humans will eventually reach the stars, being negative/nihilist about it and saying it’s better if it doesn’t happen is dangerous because people like Elon/Donald will definitely do horrible things if people with remorse and morals aren’t involved/ already established there / the one’s initiating
Not saying you’re nihilist, but I go to Uni in SF and everyone is so anti-imperialism that they think any form of colonization (even on a dead planet like Mars) is bad and it’s pretty grating.
Elon should not be the one who decides how the land/living conditions are set up
It’s not nihilist to recognize historical precedent combined with current human conditions and come to a logical prediction.
I wouldn’t have any problem with a completely dead planet being colonized by humanity but I absolutely do not trust humanity as a whole when it comes to a planet with life on it we don’t even respect our own species much less other ones history has shown this over and over again.
even if it is an inevitability doesn’t mean that it is positive just because it was inevitable that nuclear weapons got invented doesn’t mean that It’s a good idea for us to have that technology I would rather nukes not exist.
The fact is that any manned vehicle capable of interplanetary travel is by the nature of the energies involved, also a weapon of mass destruction. A spaceship is a weapon in the same way a car can be a weapon.
So either you massively restrict access to this technology, or you create a system of surveillance and defense that is so pervasive and effective that it makes 1984 look benign, OR you just say fuck everyone else and use that weapon to remove yourself from range of everybody else’s weapons.
Proliferation is an existential problem for anyone in range.
The usefulness of a fusion engine as a weapon is directly correlated to its efficiency.
It doesn’t really matter what kind of engine it is if it’s going fast enough.
Anything with enough mass and acceleration to move a human being from planet to planet in a reasonable timeframe has the kinetic energy required to wipe out a city. Once you start reaching relativistic speeds, you can take out entire planets by simply not slowing down on approach.
Although you are correct, this destroys the engine.
A good, efficient fusion engine just needs to point the exhaust end towards the enemy and the hyper-accelerated particles will punch a hole through the target for you. And then you point at the next target, etc. etc.
Also, it’s a butchered quote from Larry Niven’s Known Space books, referred to as the “Kzinti Lesson” - because the Kzinti thought humanity was unarmed and helpless until they discovered that humans are really good at improvising weapons.
Yup! Totally plausible - just more expensive and less repeatable. And harder to use against moving targets.
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.
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.
It’s not “just” the speed of light though, light is limited by the speed of information, also known as the speed of causality. If you were to somehow exceed that, then your future light cone becomes very messed up, and effect starts to be possible before cause.
In other words, literal time travel
Just put a bunch of dna on an asteroid. Nature will figure the rest of it out.
Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.
I guess us Americans are out…
Do you believe that the wide expanses of our planet Earth were crafted for the common ant to explore?
There is no evidence to suggest our planet or any animals on it are crafted.
Of course, but I’m trying to work within the established framework of the meme here
I think it wouldn’t be too unreasonable to suggest hyperintelligent ants could build a vessel the size of a human or larger and travel the Earth with enough speed.
Some of those ant colonies are larger than people so, seems reasonable enough.
That’s closer to us exploring our solar system I think, in scale, than it would be for us to explore even the galaxy let alone the whole observable universe let alone the whole universe.
Except that a large point of my comment is pointing out the hubris of man, so it’s important to note that ants are not hyperintelligent. They organize and build, but there is a finite limitation to their capability, at least in this and any known previous state of their evolution. Like that we are the most intelligent thing on our little planet doesn’t imply to me that we are not effectively to scale with ants on the cosmic level.
The intelligence doesn’t matter. The point is what is physically possible.
Even if we were hyperintelligent in the same scale as making current ants intelligent enough to build ships to ride the world around in, we’d still have to face the issue of the speed of light being a limiting factor.
Unless we actually manage to find some of those theorised strange particles which would fit with the math of the warp engine theory.
Alright, valid, you’re right, the presented limiting factor in the meme is in fact the SoL and not actually man’s ability to reach it. I concede, cheers.
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 started from zero volume
This is not true. It started with apparently infinite volume. This is the confusing nature of infinities.
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’
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.
Hum, no. It’s widely believed that the amount of matter + energy in the universe changes all the time.
It may as well as it is unreachable. It hasn’t existed forever hence only a limited amount of space is closer to us than the age of the universe.
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
And sending a space ship at a good fraction of light speed to a nearby star uses more energy than our total civilization uses at the moment. We’ve got some work to do climbing up the Kardashev scale before we’re anywhere close to that kind of travel.
Read this and thought it had something to do with the Kardashians.
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!
Other way around. Instant from your POV but not from Earth’s.
Not the other way? You’d feel like you got there in an instant, while people on Earth needed to wait years?
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).
Think about it this way - everything moves through spacetime at the same “speed”, so the faster you go through space, the slower you move through time, which is why photons experience no time.
😵💫
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.
Or maybe they were just bored, and wanted to make a cool new celestial object called a black hole.
Yeah the whole concept of the “paraplegic universe” in Deaths End is so fucking good. And by good I mean bone chillingly terrifying.
When the game is open world but no fast travel or mounts.
Also the Universe: continues expanding
I see you around a lot and appreciate your contributions. When I don’t have a good response, I’m just going to comment, “Kolanaki!”
