• How Far Can We Go? Limits of Humanity - In a Nutshell
    70 replies, posted
We haven't even really explored our own system yet. No one has stepped foot on any celestial body besides our own moon. Even the moon, being the closest, and a rather decent size, doesn't have anything built on it. There could be life on Mars, one of it's moons, or any other planet, and we wouldn't even know. However, until there's a reason outside of curiosity that has positive returns on investments. I fear it will be a while until we even build a shed on the moon. It's sad really.
[QUOTE=gjsdeath;50316858]We haven't even really explored our own system yet. No one has stepped foot on any celestial body besides our own moon. Even the moon, being the closest, and a rather decent size, doesn't have anything built on it. There could be life on Mars, one of it's moons, or any other planet, and we wouldn't even know. However, until there's a reason outside of curiosity that has positive returns on investments. I fear it will be a while until we even build a shed on the moon. It's sad really.[/QUOTE] [video=youtube;CbIZU8cQWXc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc[/video]
Is it possible that there exists some form of energy or particle or whatever that moves faster than the speed of light that we have no way of detecting?
[QUOTE=Ardosos;50317058]Is it possible that there exists some form of energy or particle or whatever that moves faster than the speed of light that we have no way of detecting?[/QUOTE] Short answer: Not likely, no. The basic concept behind this reasoning is that space and time are intrinsically connected and going at light speed means that something doesn't experience time at all. All the particles that we observe or imagine now very neatly explain everything as going sub-lightspeed, the main exceptions being dark matter/energy, but as a candidate of FTL there isn't any evidence to imply that those things could be an answer. I really like Wikipedia's page on our current physics mysteries. [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics[/url] This is pretty much it, unless we're about to realize we don't have a clue about anything yet. And although that's the most remote possible scenario, all of the extremely carefully observed evidence suggests that's not gonna be the case.
[QUOTE=IrishBandit;50315870]That's not how it works. The galaxies aren't all moving in a direction, space itself is expanding, meaning that all the galaxies are getting further away from each other.[/QUOTE] Actually the Andromeda Galaxy is coming our way, and we'll collide in about 4 billion years.
[QUOTE=Kljunas;50318211]Actually the Andromeda Galaxy is coming our way, and we'll collide in about 4 billion years.[/QUOTE] Yep, and only within our cluster as the video says. I really enjoyed this vid btw, spot on.
[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;50315597]I'm not sure exactly, but not much longer than the distance times the speed of light, I don't think, since the rocket spends most of its time on the trip near light speed.[/QUOTE] One of the (many) problems is that if you hit a speck of dust at these speeds, your trip may very well be over. [editline]o[/editline] Hitting a 1 milligram sand grain at 0.7[I]c[/I] would have a force roughly equal to 5 tons of TNT.
Watching stuff like this reminds me of the passages on space from the [I]Aniara[/I] epos: [quote]In the sixth year Aniara fared with undiminished speed toward Lyra’s stars. The chief astronomer gave the emigrants a lecture on the depth of outer space. In his hand he held a splendid bowl of glass: We’re slowly coming to suspect that the space we’re traveling through is of a different kind from what we thought whenever the word “space” was decked out by our fantasies on Earth. We’re coming to suspect now that our drift is even deeper than we first believed, that knowledge is a blue naïveté which with the insight needful to the purpose assumed the Mystery to have a structure. We now suspect that what we say is space and glassy-clear around Aniara’s hull is spirit, everlasting and impalpable, that we are lost in spiritual seas. Our space-ship Aniara travels on in something that does not possess a brain-pan and does not even need the stuff of brains. She’s traveling on in something that exists but does not need to take the path of thought. Through God and Death and Mystery we race on space-ship Aniara without goal or trace. O would that we could turn back to our base now that we realize what our space-ship is: a little bubble in the glass of Godhead. I shall relate what I have heard of glass and then you’ll understand. In any glass that stands untouched for a sufficient time,gradually a bubble in the glass will move infinitely slowly to a different point in the glazen form, and in a thousand years the bubble’s made a voyage in its glass.Similarly, in a boundless space a gulf the depth of light-years throws its arch round bubble Aniara on her march. For though the rate she travels at is great and much more rapid than the swiftest planet, her speed as measured by the scale of space exactly corresponds to that we know the bubble makes inside this bowl of glass.[/quote] [quote] In thousands or in myriads of years a distant sun shall capture and enfold a moth that flies toward it as toward the lamp when it was harvest time in Doriswold. Then we shall end our journey through these regions, then deep asleep shall lie Aniara’s legions and all be swiftly changed in Mima’s hold. [/quote]
Did people actually expected to travel outside of our galaxy, or our cluster of galaxies..? Because that's pretty crazy, and only tells how people don't seem to have any idea about the scale of the Universe, and how unrealistic/dumb their expectations are. And don't take this as condescending please, people just seem oddly optimistic when it comes down to space travel, almost without any respect to the laws of physics and nature. It's pretty much impossible to predict the future, but if we do achieve faster than light travel at some point (which I heavily doubt), I'd say we have quite a few nearby planets under our control by that time already, using conventional acceleration methods with sub-light speed crafts, with travel times averaging out at easily +1000 years to reach a destination inside [I]our[/I] galaxy. That sounds pretty crazy too.
[QUOTE=JohnnyMo1;50314109]Why do I bother typing up reasonably long explanations to you when I know you aren't going to pay any attention or have any sort of argument of your own?[/QUOTE] The only way I can see us being able to bypass the speed of light would be by cheating, which I imagine might be even harder than the impossible task of travelling faster than light. For instance, if we could fold space in a way that we didn't have to travel the full distance, but I suspect that's just as sci-fantasy as literal FTL travel.
The fun cartoon-y aesthetic and cheery British narrator didn't keep this from being deeply depressing.
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