sevenfourate
Devotee of OCD
- Location
- Lowestoft, Suffolk
Beneficial gene mutation means this Sister Universe are all locked into using belt drive……
Food for thoughts.
- Thread starter gavroche
- Start date
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Beneficial gene mutation means this Sister Universe are all locked into using belt drive……
roubaixtuesday
self serving virtue signaller
The universe is much bigger than that.
Even our own Galaxy is 100,000 light years across.
And that is one one hundred billionth of the universe. The rest of is much*l further away.
Our nearest neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away.
The furthest objects detected are estimated over 13 billion light years away.
Drago
Legendary Member
- Location
- Suburban Poshshire
We know nature can warp space - if humans ever figure it out those distances will become moot.
gbb
Squire
- Location
- Peterborough
It's a difficult construct to understand. I say understand...not accept (I'm talking about myself now) Wr can all accept what cleverer people surmise, but certainly, like infinity, the construct of their being nothing is difficult for the human brain to comprehend.
Here's another construct...perhaps it's not expanding into nothing...perhaps its pushing something else out of its way ?
Just light hearted thinking....
In a similar vein, I heard a scientist on 'how the universe works' consider there may have been something BEFORE the big bang. We don't (their words) know if there was, but there may have been. We wilk never know, so for all intents and purposes, all time begins from that point.
roubaixtuesday
self serving virtue signaller
Not sure what you mean by this?
- Location
- Somewhere wet & hilly in NW England.
This is indeed a challenge to us mere mortals.
Out in the real world I consider myself fairly intelligent. Each year, I set myself the task of studying, maybe investigating is a better word, three new 'topics'. I do this to keep my old brain active and it satisfies my innate curiosity.
Last year I took a proper look at large-scale cosmology, which I have often dabbled with in the past, and it is fascinating to take a peek at the boundaries of human knowledge and associated theories in this area.
The irritating thing is that I simply run out of 'headroom' and fail to properly grasp some of the rationalisation of scientists, etc with super-powerful brains. It's quite humbling really.
Our ex-neighbours have a son who is an Associate Professor of Cosmology at a Californian university. Wow, is he clever! On the couple of occasions he has spoken to me about his work I have been aware of him 'dumbing down' for my benefit. And it is still difficult to understand what exactly he is articulating.
My default method of exploring these subjects is to simply accept the consensus outputs of those with planet-sized brains and have some fun trying to understand some of their abstract thoughts in my relatively under-powered brain. It is hard though.
Like many, I too, have difficulty comprehending absolute nothingness. Similarly the emergence of all matter (visible and the significantly larger amount of dark matter from a singularity). It just seems irrational. The same with the expansion of space itself and that instant of rapid inflation post 'big-bang' when the universe simply 'popped' into existence. Which is entirely possible as space can expand faster than the speed of light. That took some mind-warping thought to get my head around as I was constrained by the notion of the speed of light being a universal constraint. But, it appears that this only applies to objects moving through space and not space itself!
I do wish that I possessed a much higher-powered brain! Cest la vie.
Neuroscience (on my 'list' for this year) is equally baffling!
Drago
Legendary Member
- Location
- Suburban Poshshire
Imagine space were a piece of paper. One end to the other might be 30cm.
But bend it in half and punch a pencil through and the distance becomes the thickness of the paper.
And so it is with space.
We know black holes warp space and time.
We know from gravitational lensing that gravity of much less magnitude than that found in a black hole also warps space.
We also know about other relatvistic effects such as time dilation - arhthe speeds humans can achieve at present the effect is minuscule, but measurable nonetheless.
So we know for a fact that neither space and time are constant, and are both affected my naturally occurring and observable phenomena.
So imagine if humankind ever mastered being able to artificially create and control these effects? That the next nearest galaxy is a gazillion lightyears way matters not if one is able to artificially manipulate the fabric of space-time.
roubaixtuesday
self serving virtue signaller
Ah. OK, gotcha.
I fear such mastery would in fact be a violation of the laws of physics - great for sci-fi, but not so much for travel.
Drago
Legendary Member
- Location
- Suburban Poshshire
A ha! We know it doesn't violate any laws of physics because we can see these phenomena occurring naturally.
The limiting factor won't be physics. It'll be something ancillary, such as the amount of energy required.
The limiting factor won't be physics. It'll be something ancillary, such as the amount of energy required.
- Location
- Somewhere wet & hilly in NW England.
Indeed!
Gravity only exists as a by-product of mass deforming space. So the warping of space is a natural phenomenon.
Just maybe, we will eventually be able to warp space for our own benefit.
I fear that it will not happen in my lifetime, though.
roubaixtuesday
self serving virtue signaller
What we see naturally that warps space time is gravitational lensing. That does not enable in any way what you're suggesting!
gbb
Squire
- Location
- Peterborough
I had a former colleague who likes this kind of conversation and he went into great depth explaining the principle of 'bending or folding' space to reduce time or distance to travel (or something like that)
When I said...'yeah, but I don't understand, not really'..he replied 'yeah, it makes sense, you get it don't you? '
I finished by saying 'YOU don't really understand (with all due respect)..you accept what someone else hypothesised, but you don't understand'
I can accept the theory of anything, its not the same as understanding. But accepting something isn't very fullfilling (for me anyway)
roubaixtuesday
self serving virtue signaller
The warping of space time due to massive objects does not enable faster than light travel.
NASA on lensing and dark matter
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/how-gravity-warps-light/
Summary of recent theoretical research
https://physicsworld.com/a/spacecra...ld-travel-faster-than-light-claims-physicist/
NASA on lensing and dark matter
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/how-gravity-warps-light/
Summary of recent theoretical research
https://physicsworld.com/a/spacecra...ld-travel-faster-than-light-claims-physicist/
Drago
Legendary Member
- Location
- Suburban Poshshire
Nothing can travel faster than light, at least with the current understanding of physics. The faster physical object travels the heavier it becomes, until it becomes infinitely heavy at the speed of light. It is not possible to provide infinite thrust via conventional means, making light speed travel impossible.
You need to set aide the conventional comcept of "travel", or distance, time and therefore velocity. Manipulating the structure of space-time would be circumventing those extreme distances insted of actually traveling them in full. Think of it as taking the lift - the conventional route might be walking round and taking the stairs which could be a journey of hundreds of feet, but the lift takes you to the same destination for a journey of 10 feet. Or in one possible scenrio the lift wohld remain stationary while the building itself moves up ormdkn around us. So using my theoretical suggestion we would be taking taking an extreme shortcut, possibly even at zero relative velocity by manipulating space around us as we remain in place, rather than actually travelling ourselves.
As aforementioned by my good self, we know the structure of space time can be affected (or manipulated if you will) by mass and gravity because we see it in nature - there are no physical laws being broken. However, humankind will likely never be able to manipulate it for ancillary reasons such as energy budget, etc (energy budget being my favourite objection, did some of the maths for that for my Masters - we'd have to likely harness the energy of galaxies worth of stars, which seems unlikely in the extreme.)
But just because we may never be able to do it doesn't mean physics won't permit it...because we can clearly see with a telescope that it does.
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Smokin Joe
Squire
- Location
- Bare headed cyclist, Smoker
As Prof Brian Cox explains, no other inhabited planet will ever be able to contact us. At some point in their evolution they will invent the internet and turn into knobheads.
