Great visualization of the unintuitive nature of special relativity. It's kind of mind blowing to realize that if we could accelerate our spaceship at a mere 1G continuously, we could visit the center of the Milky Way in under 20 years (spaceship time), totally do-able in a human lifespan. Of course 27900 years would have passed on Earth, so you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about your vacation.
> accelerate our spaceship at a mere 1G continuously
Yikes. At around 90%c, it's starting to look like a sunny day. Any physicists care to weigh in on the accuracy of this? I can search for the energy density of starlight in interstellar space... but how fast does one need to go to hit that "sunny day" point?
According to the simulation moving relativistically in addition to shifting the frequency also increases the intensity significantly. Something I had never heard about until now. I'd love to find a reference for it as I found that surprising too.
The more common name to read about it by is "Relativistic Beaming".
Yikes. At around 90%c, it's starting to look like a sunny day. Any physicists care to weigh in on the accuracy of this? I can search for the energy density of starlight in interstellar space... but how fast does one need to go to hit that "sunny day" point?
Also, since the whole universe appears to shrink into a thin line, am I in fact moving now in all directions at once?
The effect is in the way you see light rays appear to arrive because of your motion. It doesn't really change that those things are really an absolute direction or that you're going in one direction.
Great visualization of the unintuitive nature of special relativity. It's kind of mind blowing to realize that if we could accelerate our spaceship at a mere 1G continuously, we could visit the center of the Milky Way in under 20 years (spaceship time), totally do-able in a human lifespan. Of course 27900 years would have passed on Earth, so you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about your vacation.
Every proton would have the energy of a baseball. It's bananas. Granted, space is really empty, but it's not that empty, somewhere around a hundred atoms per cubic meter. Your ship might look like a very, very long shooting star. Probably dialing the speed down a touch would be worth it for whatever your shielding material is, but who knows? We're talking miracle engines here. I think in the "Valkyrie" ship-on-a-stri…
What do you mean “the energy of a baseball”? A baseball at what speed?
I assumed they meant a baseball at baseball speed.
Maybe if you could start by persuading a small black hole to go where you want and following in its wake (or lack of wake actually). The black hole swallows everything in your path and grows more powerful. Perhaps if you had an array of three or more black holes you could steer the group by differentially feeding them somehow. If the initial black hole were an orbiting pair your spaceship could orbit a lagrange point…
Black holes aren't immune to the effects of gravity from other objects just because they're black holes. It'd be no different than trying to use a trio of stars as your gravity engine (well, more space efficient). I.e. you still have to accelerate the stars, you still have to deal with slower things the stars "eat" slowing them down, if the stars pull your ship it's slowing them down. Effectively, you've just increased the mass of your spaceship by however much mass the black holes have and then still had to find something to accelerate the whole lot instead of your spaceship.
Maybe if you could start by persuading a small black hole to go where you want and following in its wake (or lack of wake actually). The black hole swallows everything in your path and grows more powerful. Perhaps if you had an array of three or more black holes you could steer the group by differentially feeding them somehow. If the initial black hole were an orbiting pair your spaceship could orbit a lagrange point…
Humans are humble. We only ride our star in about 200 km/s so we can take the scenery route. It takes mere 100 million earth years to get to the other side of our galaxy.
It's not very clear where our black hole in the center of the milky way is taking us though.
Every proton would have the energy of a baseball. It's bananas. Granted, space is really empty, but it's not that empty, somewhere around a hundred atoms per cubic meter. Your ship might look like a very, very long shooting star. Probably dialing the speed down a touch would be worth it for whatever your shielding material is, but who knows? We're talking miracle engines here. I think in the "Valkyrie" ship-on-a-stri…
I’d like to see a map of the known universe visualizing atomic density on a log scale. I’d never seen “a hundred atoms per cubic meter”, but it’s always been my intuition that, without some quite interesting shielding, you couldn’t make it anywhere near the speed of light. And on the other hand, I’ve seen claims that “space is really big” as you mentioned; but that claim has always seemed dubious.
One nice illustration of "space is really big" is a fact that if you take the cube with the side equal to the distance from the Sun to the nearest star and fill it with water, then the mass of this cube will be roughly equal to the mass of the whole visible Universe.