186,282 miles per second... How big is our Universe? Yeah, it's big.
If you could travel at the speed of light...
- Thread starter JeffKeryk
- Start date
And?
"Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, an the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth."
Prof. Brian Cox
and one year to get out of our own Solar System. that's how big it is at the edge of the Oort Cloud. and still at that distance our own Sun has gravitational effect. the Sun is insanely powerful. a power we will never touch. if i could travel at the speed of light, i would explore all the strange worlds beyond Neptune. the Trans Neptunian objects like Eris and Sedna.
I saw a picture the other day of how far Voyager 1 will have travelled in 1 million years and it is a very small portion of our galaxy, of which there are billions or trillions of others out there. It’s wild thinking about it.
According to one highway patrolman, I've already done that.
That end of the observable universe has already moved a heck of a lot further away by the time we see it. And would move a heck of a lot further away then that by the time light from here today reaches it.
There is a distance that objects are moving away from us as we are moving away from them, so that the total combined speed is > the speed of light. If those distant objects can have there previous images viewed today with what we have, or not, I don't know, and if not I'm not sure what's stopping us from viewing it. Telescope ability, or something else? Would such objects be viewable here today if telescopes were / are powerful enough? Or, are such objects beyond our viewable universe in distance?
Those distances get to be mind boggling.
Compared to those distances, we are indeed like a speck of sand compared to all of earth.
There is a distance that objects are moving away from us as we are moving away from them, so that the total combined speed is > the speed of light. If those distant objects can have there previous images viewed today with what we have, or not, I don't know, and if not I'm not sure what's stopping us from viewing it. Telescope ability, or something else? Would such objects be viewable here today if telescopes were / are powerful enough? Or, are such objects beyond our viewable universe in distance?
Those distances get to be mind boggling.
Compared to those distances, we are indeed like a speck of sand compared to all of earth.
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If one was technologically advanced enough to accelerate a space craft to the speed of light, you probably could figure out FTL travel as well.
Not sure I am buying all of that meme…
2,000 years to get out of a disc that is roughly 1,000 light years thick where we are? That’s off by a factor of 4 (it can’t be more than 500 light years to the “edge”) or a factor of 10 if you consider the dark matter halo.
And that last part of the meme - for a universe that is +/- 14 billion years old - it’s 14 billion light years observable in each direction, even accounting for early inflation. So, why the 90 billion years to go 14 billion light years? That’s off by a factor of 5, or more…
Maybe because it’s “The speed of ight”? Is that the same as the speed of light, or is it different?
2,000 years to get out of a disc that is roughly 1,000 light years thick where we are? That’s off by a factor of 4 (it can’t be more than 500 light years to the “edge”) or a factor of 10 if you consider the dark matter halo.
And that last part of the meme - for a universe that is +/- 14 billion years old - it’s 14 billion light years observable in each direction, even accounting for early inflation. So, why the 90 billion years to go 14 billion light years? That’s off by a factor of 5, or more…
Maybe because it’s “The speed of ight”? Is that the same as the speed of light, or is it different?
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AZjeff
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I'm not authorized to think about things like this. But I do watch Dr. Who sometimes.
I have no way to prove it, but I think FTL travel is impossible regardless of how advanced a civilizations gets. I believe this is the reason we will never make contact with any other life in the universe.
Thanks for the clarification Astro. My goal was to get our community thinking, contemplating, etc.
I have so much learning to do!
Here's an article that addresses this. The key lies in the fact that while objects in space are moving away from each other, space itself is expanding at the same time.
Some may hit a pay wall.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/starts...d-how-can-we-see-46-billion-light-years-away/
Ed
Billy Bob in Hooten Holler, West Virginia, might disagree with you. He and some others out his way mentioned being abducted by aliens and probed.
It's like a cruel joke. We can intuit that there are things out there, but can never directly observe them. And what we can see is being reduced all the time.
Well, we actually see what USED to be there.
When you say universe, you're overstating the case. The Milky Way alone is 100,000 light years across. It contains between 200 and 400 BILLION star systems. So we don't need to explore the universe to make contact. The nearest galaxy to us is Andromeda, and it is 2.5 million light years away. So yes, we'll likely never contact intelligence in another galaxy, but the Milky Way itself is sufficiently large enough to contain other intelligence.
If we could get to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light, say .1c, the Milky Way would take 1,000,000 years to traverse. It's estimated age is just under 14 billion years. So there's a strong potential that intelligent life could send probes of some sort, perhaps self-replicating von neumann type, to explore our galaxy. There are between 6,000 and 10,000 star systems within 100 light years of Earth.
So you're implying that maybe nothing is out there and everything we can see might be just a projection on some cosmic bed sheet?
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