Thank you for including Pluto!
If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
261–270 of 273 posts
Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Light is comparatively and objectively slow in comparison to the distances that exist. Andromeda is 1M light years from us. From that perspective, 300k kph is oddly slow actually. I love the passion that you're brining to the table though. It reminded me of the blue giant stars whose lifespans can be as short as tens of millions of years, more often hundreds though. For billions upon billions, I suppose that would be…
There's a great video is saw. In 30 minutes it goes through the entire lifespan of the universe.
Even after all the stars die, the white dwarfs will continue to glow. And after eons, the last black holes will evaporate. The point is that the age of stars is only a tiny fraction of the lifetime of the universe. Maybe the speed of light makes sense at that scale.
But... I'm not happy with that theory. In a relatively short amount of time the expansion of the universe will increase faster then the speed of light. Which means it will be impossible to ever get information from the other side of the universe.
I find it very unreasonable that the universe imposes a speed limit on everything and then completely ignores it.
Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Follow up question from someone who's mostly forgotten his university physics. Do photons actually exist, in the traditional sense of physical matter. Or are they just a convenient short hand to describe the transfer of energy via waves in the fabric or space time, if they dont experience the universe when passing through it but only when interacting with matter and matters "dents" in space-time.
As a non-physicist, my understanding is that they actually exist, but can't be thought of as flying around like ping pong balls. I think it's one of those things that comes down to interpretation though, where the math is very clear but how you think of what it "means" lies beyond science.
Went on a slight rabbit hole reading after posting this and seems like we're all just excitations in a stack of quantum fields :-D
Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can leave it pretty easily. :p Only took Voyager 1 about 40 years. If ~1.0C is the fastest man can travel, that's still pretty good. Alpha Centauri is in reach (less than five light-years).
Alpha Centauri is a triple star system with no habitable planets. Why in the hell would you go there? Sending people to another solar system is so resource intensive that assuming you can convert the entirety of Jupiter into some kind of orders of magnitude more efficient exotic rocket fuel you might have enough resources for a small handful of expeditions, so you really need to make them count. Maybe it would make s…
I mean, why did we go to Mars without any intention of colonizing it? The Moon?
Exploration is what humans do. If Alpha Centauri is only 5 years away, you can bet we're sending people there no matter what. Permanent colonization only becomes a priority in an existential event, and if we eventually achieve ~1.0C travel then that implies our tech is at a level we'd be colonizing Mars and a few moons long before we think about leaving the solar system.
Even getting to 0.9C is going to be very very hard for humanity.
Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Light could only go to Andromeda and back 1000 times before the sun burns out. That's not very many times IMO. On the scale of galaxies, light is slow relative to any timescale relevant to large objects.
Carrying the metaphor further, that's closer than America was to Europe in the 18th century.
That's an interesting perspective.
Tangentially, I've long wondered about sci fi like Star Trek. Namely, even with FTL, how large can your interplanetary alliance be? How far away can the parliament be? Over what distances can you defend against common enemies? Trade? Culturally exchange ideas?
Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
That’s one of the answers to how you could go to the stars: go sloooooow as in slow down your cognition and metabolism so the trip doesn’t take long. Ents could fly to the stars no problem. Makes me wonder if there might not be a bunch of star faring “slow life” out there that we don’t notice for the same reason a hummingbird doesn’t notice trees growing.
See also : The Jaunt, by Stephen King.
Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> It makes me wonder what kind of "life" could perform interstellar travel? That’s essentially the premise of Project Hail Mary. Good book.
Not really, because it was a single person and the spaceship was a vehicle. The other race was still in a vehicle.
Think more about the difference between single celled organisms versus a multicellular organism: IE, the spaceship itself is alive and has a lifespan where interstellar travel is a fraction of its life. The people inside are like cells inside our body.
Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> "A photon instantly travels to the end of time" Please explain this. TIA
A very layman’s explanation I read a long time ago. Imagine you are in a car driving in a big open desert. You can drive in any direction you want. You can drive East or South or West or North, or some degree between them. But the more you travel East, the less you can travel North or South. The more you travel North, the less you can travel East or West. If you drive completely North, you aren’t traveling at all in the East/West direction.
Spacetime is like that, except North/South is space, and East/West is time. The more you travel through the spatial dimension (the faster you go) the less you travel through the time dimension (the less time passes for you). Photons are traveling completely through the spatial dimension (North/South) and so aren’t moving through the time (East/West) dimension at all, so from a photon’s perspective (if they had perception) no time ever passes so they would zip around “instantly” and never “experience” anything.
It is also why the speed of light is the fastest you can go. Once you are going 100% North, you cannot be going any more North.
Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
#269Make 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.…
Such an interesting perspective! It would be nice to see evolution sped up as well, or any process that seems unchanging for less than a few thousands of years.
Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Carrying the metaphor further, that's closer than America was to Europe in the 18th century.
That's an interesting perspective. Tangentially, I've long wondered about sci fi like Star Trek. Namely, even with FTL, how large can your interplanetary alliance be? How far away can the parliament be? Over what distances can you defend against common enemies? Trade? Culturally exchange ideas?
I have had similar thoughts as well. Assuming FTL isn’t possible, at some point it wouldn’t make sense to have a cohesive system. Say, there’s an outpost that is 30 years away by the fastest spacecraft.