The entire known universe could be traversed in one human lifespan if you could go close enough to the speed of light.
The entire known universe could be traversed in one human lifespan if you could go close enough to the speed of light
Julian Green
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Gavin Allen
Wrong. The observable universe is 46.6 billion light years across. Humans are puny.
Julian White
This. What OP is impossible without purely theoretical supertechnology like artificial wormholes or negative mass.
Julian Sullivan
I read on Wikipedia that for the traveler it would be equivalent to one human lifespan because of time dilation.
Logan Parker
Humanity's destiny will be to create self-aware recursive-learning AI beings who will venture out into the cosmos to observe and gather information for millions, if not billions of years before looking inwards at themselves, becoming obsessed with the long-gone human shape that originally created them and seeding genetically-recreated humans and human variants on terraformed planets across the galaxy in order to learn more about themselves and possibly cause the same circumstances that led to their creation to happen again
Cooper Bell
As a purely mathematical exercise, yes, you can calculate the relativistic time dilation and reach some result where you could travel several billion lightyears in the span of a human life.
But there's the engineering problem that speeds arbitrarily close to c require arbitrarily large amounts of energy to achieve (and power to maintain), so you can't do it as a practical matter.
There's also the problem with relativistic mass. Except for a handful of quantum objects with zero rest mass (e.g. photons) you'd eventually accumulate sufficient relativistic mass to form singularities. Even if you solved the above engineering problem, what you propose is not even theoretically possible.
Angel Baker
It wouldn't be you who is going that fast, but otherwise this is kind of true, I believe. Vsauce had an illustration one time that an observer traveling at the speed of light wouldn't perceive the passage of time. Consciousness as we know it wouldn't exist close enough to the speed of light for the observer to be human. Such high amounts of energy would be required, no complex molecule could stay together.
It would work at this point if and only if it is possible for light to span the universe. As we observe the expansion of the universe with cosmic microwave background, it seems to be expanding faster than the speed of light. Essentially:
A particle dubbed as an observer has the theoretical capacity to travel close enough to the speed of light such that its perception of time has only advanced 60-100 years once it spans a universe that has had its expansion frozen.
>Vsauce video
youtube.com
>Universe expanding > speed of light
curious.astro.cornell.edu
Brayden Bennett
How fucking retarded are you? Jesus, man.
Aiden Powell
OP, I appreciate your thought. I think I would do it if given the opportunity... To just surrender to the thought that I left everything behind to see what exists beyond.
Evan Lee
you're seriously considering wasting more resources and killing the planet to go to space when there are still people starving in africa, bigot?
Liam Thomas
There's no Africans starving on Mars.
thinkingman.jpg
Jaxson Powell
It says it here:
en.wikipedia.org
>Theoretically, time dilation would make it possible for passengers in a fast-moving vehicle to advance further into the future in a short period of their own time. For sufficiently high speeds, the effect is dramatic.[2] For example, one year of travel might correspond to ten years on Earth. Indeed, a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel through the entire known Universe in one human lifetime.[12].
Cameron Fisher
Fun fact: to the traveler, it would appear as if the Universe (along the direction they're moving at) is shrinking. From the Earth's point of view, it would take many billions of years, but to you, like other people said, it could last just a few years.
>you'd eventually accumulate sufficient relativistic mass to form singularities
Please don't try to apply special relativistic concepts to curved spacetime. "Going fast" in Minkowski spacetime (where you get your "relativistic mass", an already shaky concept as it's frame-dependent) is not going to cause a black hole to appear.
Cooper Mitchell
What if you hit a speck of dust?
Isaac Mitchell
What happens if a speck of dust going very nearly close to the speed of light hits you? You'll probably explode, that's what.
If you want to get to the edge of the observable universe in, say, 50 years (from your perspective, of course), you'd need to pick up a speed of about 0.999999999999999997 times the speed of light. A speck of dust from a nebula can weighs as little as 0.1 picograms, but even at that velocity, it would have about 3 trillion joules worth of kinetic energy. That's about 1/20 of the Little Boy bomb, but still probably enough to blow your spacecraft to smithereens.
Hudson Mitchell
> looking at giant rocks in a void
This is the most autistic thing ever.
Kevin Cook
lnteresting stuff, user.
Isaiah Carter
>(and power to maintain)
Why would you need additional power to maintain it? An object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. What outside force is there?
Wyatt Butler
this
you'd need power to slow down though
Matthew Butler
I'd imagine the intergalactic medium could cause a drag force at such ridiculous velocities. However, a quick calculation for a density of about an atom/m^3 shows that even for the velocity in , the drag would be of the order of 10^-10 newtons, so probably negligible.
Carter Carter
Wouldn't the human body disintegrate at the speed of light?
Joshua Hall
There will be if the radical Marxists have their way.
Owen Torres
you cant travel at the speed of light but you can get close to it. how fast you are going doesnt matter, its the acceleration and deceleration that kills us.
Gavin King
No matter how fast you're traveling, the edge of the universe will always expand faster