151–160 of 273 posts
Make sure you press the "c" button in the bottom right. Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach. I think we'll have a holodeck before we reach another star. And maybe that'll be enough.
I agree, but not because of the relative difficulty of the technology, but because we spend way more on entertainment than space exploration.
Make sure you press the "c" button in the bottom right. Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach. I think we'll have a holodeck before we reach another star. And maybe that'll be enough.
Is light slow? Or is the human perception of time just scaled down as a result of our rapid metabolism and infinitesimality? People historically mistake plants for being inanimate things with no reactivity, that they are far more simple and stupid than they truly are. Outside of a few exotic examples, plants simply operate on a wider timescale that's basically imperceptible without careful and particular observation.…
It’s always faster than you or I. Even if we zipped around at relativistic speeds it would still appear the same.
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Not out of reach if you get very close to light speed. Time would advance very slowly for you, so counterintuitively it is possible to travel 5000ly in your life time. Although for everyone else at least 5000 years will pass, so better say goodbye to family and friend. Hm, not sure if that is really less depressing... Also light isn't slow. A photon instantly travels to the end of time and yet it still takes a few mi…
It depends on acceleration though. If acceleration and deceleration take long enough, it could take an entire generation to get up to a fast enough speed that relativistic effects make any difference, and another generation to slow down enough to interact with anything you might see. Plus if you're traveling at near light speed, running into any matter at all would be pretty devastating for whatever craft you're in.…
Minor problem is that we don’t have any technology that’s close to capable of that. And at 0.1c relativistic effects are barely noticeable.
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Read up on time dilation and special relativity. Time absolutely does pass slower for you as you accelerate.
You two are talking about different meanings of "time". Traveling 5,000 LY at 0.5 c will cause you the spaceship pilot to age 20,000 years. It's non-relativistic, inside that inertial frame. Clock second hands still sweep slow but noticeable circles. Meanwhile, everyone outside of the spaceship is happening FAST, by your observations. You'll see stars turn red and go supernova.
I love how simple the HTML/CSS is. Absolute positioning with really large left: values. #saturn { position: absolute; left: 412397px; height: 34px; width: 65px; fill: #ffa043; }
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> Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach. Yes, agreed. I find it a little depressing. An unimaginably huge universe, tantalisingly there, but completely out of reach.
It makes me wonder what kind of "life" could perform interstellar travel? I used to imagine a spaceship being alive, with people inside being analogous to "cells" in a multicellular organism. Perhaps this is really how AI achieves consciousness?
That’s essentially the premise of Project Hail Mary. Good book.
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Traveling at .1c within the solar system wouldn’t really be feasible due to the need to accelerate and decelerate. Not for meatbag ships anyway.
There's nothing about 0.1c or even 0.999c travel that's detrimental to meatbags. They would both feel exactly the same to the traveler. If your (for now) imaginary rocket could accelerate at a constant, gentle 1G, you could reach 0.1c in about a month (traveler's time), and you could reach 0.999c in about 44 months. Building and fueling such a rocket is the hard part.
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You’d feel nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever. The starscape outside the ship would look strange though, shrinking into a small, blueshifted patch of sky straight ahead, while stars behind you would redshift out of the visible range. Everything moving at very low speeds relative to you would indeed appear to happen really fast.
What are the chances of hitting a small meteorite or part of it, traveling now at relativistic speeds wrt you?
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You mean technically? I should have posted the beta dwitter link which has the "compress" toggle, because most dweets are unicode packed. https://beta.dwitter.net/d/26521 Here's the js anyway: for(i=10;i--;x.fillStyle=R(i-8||255),x.beginPath(x.fill()))x.arc(960+[45,29,14,8,2,1.5,1,.6,0,0][i]*1e5*S(t/5e3/[165,84,29,12,2,1,.6,.2,1,1][i]),540,[24,25,58,69,3.4,6.4,6,2.4,696,2e3][i],0,7) This one is actually relatively si…
I presume including Pluto's parameters in the array is both a rebellious statement and a brag. ("Yes, my JS snippet could have been even shorter if you asked the IAU.")
The reason there are 10 radi is for 8 planets + sun + drawing the black backdrop (2e3): [24,25,58,69,3.4,6.4,6,2.4,696,2e3]
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What are the chances of hitting a small meteorite or part of it, traveling now at relativistic speeds wrt you?
Extremely low. Space is very empty.