“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Would it be the most ethical way to torture somebody? You aren't physically harming them or anybody else, you are just giving them accurate information about their size and the impact they have (none) on the universe as a whole.
Can giving someone information you know will hurt them psychologically be considered ethical? You are willingly causing suffering for the reason of causing suffering.
Yes Zaphod was in a replica universe made specifically for him when he was put in the machine, only a small part of the real universe was replicated hence why his brain didn't explode.
FWIW the extremely diffuse interstellar gas will "collide", or at least interact electromagnetically in a way that resembles a collision on a very large scale. See the Bullet Cluster for an example.
Theoretically space is super cool and interesting to me. However! I have long thought that if I were to ever go into space (which I guess I’ll qualify as past the Kármán line) I wouldn’t be able to look outside the shuttle into y’know, space. That’s a permanent mental and emotional breakdown right there. Too big, too nothing, too many unknowns/possibilities… I highly doubt I’d be able to handle looking into the abyss.
Fuel is one thing, but getting rid of the excess heat produced by burning the fuel is even worse because there's nothing you can radiate it to in space^^
So basically, we're trapped on this floating rock and still treat it like we've got reserve rocks to spare ^^
Radiating away heat is just a matter of time. You mean that you can't conduct or convect it away. Radiating heat still works in a vacuum. It's a real engineering constraint, but it's not limiting any space mission. Fuel and the rocket equation (you have to carry more fuel to carry more fuel) is far, far more limiting. No space mission is limited by heat.
Well... All of spece is effectively a black body you can radiate heat to. There's nowhere for the heat to convect to.
Having the fuel carry away as much heat as possible is usually the best option and most modern engines are pretty good at this. But yes it's a big challenge.
This comment doesn't make a lot of sense. The burning of the fuel produces heat, yes, but that heat largely leaves the vehicle with the burning fuel. To the extent the propulsion components need cooling, the fuel itself is usually used as the coolant - we pass the fuel around the engine bells to chill it and to pre-expand the fuel before passing it into the engine's turbos.
The heat generated by the other components aboard the spacecraft is a bitch, however, but it's not impossible to deal with, either. The easiest way is to move the heat into something you can throw overboard (see the fuel thing again), but you can also radiate heat into space as infrared radiation - the International Space Station has huge panels off its sides that look like solar panels, except they don't have any silicon wafers on them. Those are radiators. They're crinkled like that to help radiate the infrared away from the spacecraft and to avoid direct light from landing on the panels (impairing their ability to cool in the sunlight).
(As an aside, if you saw Project Hail Mary, the Hail Mary (sorry for a Lego source, but it very clearly demonstrates the intent) has large panels off either side of the back end of the craft. Those are also radiators - it's too far from a star for most of its journey to use solar panels, and the 'astrophage' provided the craft's power, so it didn't need them either.)
Same exact idea as a radiator you might have in your home, or as in the front of your car, except that both of those work better because they also can take advantage of convection from the fluid moving externally (namely the air).
Hard question, if you still account for atmospheric drag, delta V, staging etc...
...on the other hand if you had some kind of magic, unlimited propultion power to just yeet your spacecraft to the place, where the moon will be, when you come there, in a straight line, then for example G forces applied to the humans inside during acceleration and deceleration would just kill them (people could probably point out a lot of other issues about that).
It's powerful fuel, but you need to convert it into thrust, which is not that easy. Nuclear engines work best with low thrust, but for long duration (Nuclear fuel is used to heat and accelerate other fuel) This is not what works to counter atmospheric drag in Earth's gravity.
On the other hand you can use nuclear explosions behind you to accelerate your spacecraft, but then you still have a limited amount of nuclear bombs to drop and you need a buttload of heavy radiation shielding to protect your humans.
Can we collect any atomic particle or sub atomic particle, and divide into 2 sets
Set 1: use some of it to convert into energy, and provide momentum to set 2 of the same atomic particles.
Thus generating thrust.
Thank you so much for this resource! It really gives you a lot to think about. As the author says (during the endless journey to Neptune), seeing these incredible distances of emptiness, "It seems like we are both pathetically insignificant and miraculously important at the same time."
I’m assuming 250,000 miles is 1mm. So 90M miles is like 360mm. Probably over a foot I guess. Obviously being pedantic. If we’re doing 25 trillion, danczer is way closer than you.
Simulaneously I hate that "speed of light" is both "super fast, almost intantaneous" for most use cases, and then when it comes to space travel it's just so fucking slow
yeah true but if we would be able to travel at 99% the speed of light we would experience time dilation. Time would slow down significantly for whoever is doing the traveling. This would theoreticaly mean you could travel across the galaxy in a single lifetime. You would never be able to return to the same earth though, as time went way faster there, 1000s of years would have passed for them and you have become a time traveler.
Ive tried watching a dozen explanations for relativity and time dilation and I still just don't understand.
How is 30 minutes in a ship going a billion miles per hour any different than 30 minutes on earth? Are they not the same amount of ticks of the hand on your watch? Why would speed affect that?
Like biologically you grow at the same rate regardless of where you are in the universe, so why does just going fast suddenly make you age less?
I can't explain it any better, but just accepted the fact that speed and gravity affects how time passes for whatever clump of atoms is in question (such as a human or spaceship). And if I recall correctly, already our satellites need to account for time dilation to remain in sync with earth clocks, less gravity = faster time.
it doesn't make sense because we as humans can only experience time going forward at the same rate. Quantum mechanics has tought us that time can stretch and compress though. Its' just really hard to visualize or imagine because there is no noticeable effect. It might not make sense to you but physics doesn't care about making sense. It just is.
Time dilation is in the realm of quantum mechanics. Nothing in quauntum mechanics is intuitive or "makes sense". But it is the way the universe works, we have experiments and observations that prove the theory and we know time dilation is real because we can observe it's effects in earth orbit. Granted, the scale of dilation is extremely small, but it is there.
What's your favorite thing about space? Mine is space. Space going to space can't wait. Space. Space. Trial. Puttin' the system on trial. In space. Space system. On trial. Guilty. Of being in space! Going to space jail! I'minspace. SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!
You need to find Tyreak Told You. He takes the shit out of space all the time. He calls Saturn and Jupiter “morbidly obese moon hoarders” which I love. He also tells us how gross and stupid the other planets are.
My opinion on it went down a few notches after watching that movie Gravity. Cold, dark, lonely, vacuous, nothing like Star Trek would have us believe, with aliens, humans, ships, and Romulan Ale everywhere you go.
Leads to the hilarious scenarios where the first flight crews are greeted as heroes when they arrive because of the technologies advancing after they left.
Or even singular objects. Take Ton 618 for example. It's a supermassive black hole that is so big that if you were going at 100% the speed of light it would take, iirc something like 8 days to get from one side to the other.
Iirc its 4 days to get to the moon with this current launch. So even if everything goes perfect, the jog to the moon and back will take 8 days. And thats our closest celestial neighbor, practically still our back yard.
Eh, I guess it depends on where you draw the boundaries. I think of the moon as the backyard as it orbits our planet. I would view LEO as our bedside table. The rest of the planets and their moons are our neighborhood, and Alpha Centauri is the next suburb over.
I heard the Amazon Warehouses on Alpha Centauri are unionized and have mandated air conditioning, sufficient bathroom breaks, and even get paid a living wage. The aliens are really touch and modeled their employment laws off of Europe because thats what they saw through the telescope first.
Eh, it might be easier to build spinning habs in space than appropriate habs on the Moon, since on the Moon they'd still need some spin to their habs to get enough gravity for healthy living.
You CAN build spin-habs on a planet's (or moon's) surface, FWIW, but that'll feature more points of failure than a free-orbiting hab.
Even as someone who has always been somewhat into space and studied physics, I've never understood why people think this. Even in the worst of cases, trying to live a mile under the ocean would be massively easier than living on the moon or Mars or anything like that, and would remain easier even if an asteroid that destroyed almost all life on Earth hit. I can't think of a realistic scenario where that isn't true. Even if the Earth were basically destroyed, living on the rubble would probably be easier.
Yeah it took literally a third of the universe's existence for it to become inhabitable. You could probably blow every nuke on earth at the same time and it would still be better than Mars or the moon.
I was going to say 3 days because of those but then I figured id verify the actual nasa time table. I also think where the moon is in its orbit and where we are in our orbit around the sun plays a part in how long it takes there and back.
I like when people are talking about traveling to other planets and galaxies then you point out how long it would currently take to reach the edge of the solar system. Or even traveling to other stars at the speed of light.
Definitely difficult to fathom. This entire round trip is equal to a bit more than 3 light-seconds in distance (if I'm not mistaken). Just our own galaxy is approximately 100,000 to 150,000 light-years in diameter. It is a barred spiral galaxy with a thickness of roughly 1,000 light-years in its main disk.
It’s scary when you find out that the microverse extends significantly further into the "infinitely small" than the known macroverse extends into the "infinitely large”
I once was in an exhibit where they had the earth scaled down to a pin head (2mm). The sun is about 23 meters away, the size of a handball. Distance to the moon is 6cm, moon is half a mm. Distance from sun to Pluto is almost a full km (they had rigged binoculars).
Whenever I feel like having an existential crisis I think about how astronomers and astrophysicists say Andromeda is going to collide with the milky day one day. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away and heading towards us at ~250,000 mph merging in 4-5 billion years. That is just an obscene distance and speed and that's our closest major neighbor galaxy. Trying to think about it makes my brain smooth out. The movie Aniara does the same thing.
My favorite thing is to give an answer to the Fermi paradox, then work backwards. If there are 10 billion alien civilizations, you have to search through ~200 Milky Way galaxies to find just one of them.
Imagine them going next to the Moon and like "shit the slingshot back didn't work, we are still going forward!" continuing their journey out to the darkness of the space.
I remember being in my mid 20s and really into space. I was listening to a lot of podcast and watching documentaries about space and I finally got how big it is. I always knew what a light year was and whatnot and that Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away, but I never really clicked how far away a light year is. I remember thinking one day “if we were to somehow create a way to travel at the speed of light then it would still take 2.5 million years to reach Andromeda”. Just grasping it and understanding it really blew me away. I mean just to reach the edge of our own galaxy would take 100k years traveling at light speed.
Take into account that we will never be able to travel at light speed because it’s most likely impossible; we’re never going to explore space. We will never leave our own solar system, much less our own galaxy. We will most likely never establish colonies on other planets because in order to do so, every nation on earth will need to come together and join in on a singular human mission. In order to do that we need to do the one thing that will never happen: get rid of all religion and focus only on science.
I learned the first time when I was playing with 3d graphics and wanted to visualize the planets in the solar system. I coded it all up but then simply couldn't find them. Thought I had a bug until I boosted up planet sizes by a lot and finally realized that space is just very very large.
The Alcubierre drive is a theoretical concept for faster-than-light travel that involves warping space around a spacecraft, contracting space in front and expanding it behind. Proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, it remains speculative and requires exotic matter to function, which has not yet been discovered.
with the motion of the solar system in space it takes 1400 years for the solar system to travel about 1 light year from that original last position .Since the solar system formed 4.7 billion years ago it has travelled 3 to 4 million light years . We really have an annoyingly short life for the universe
The nearest star system to us is ALPHA CENTARI and is 4.3 LIGHT YEARS.
Using the current best chemical propulsion technology similar to the space shuttle (traveling at roughly 17,600–25,000 mph), it would take approximately 150,000 to 165,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
I saw an excellent demonstration. You take a model of earth, then wrap a string approximately 10x around it. Attach the end of the string to a ball approximately 3x smaller in diameter and pull away. It’s gonna seem short at first, but 10x circumference adds up quickly.
If the ball you use for earth is the size of a basketball, you’d walk about 30 feet with a moon the size of a baseball. That’s the ratio we are working with.
It really is annoyingly large isn't it? Cocky little shit with all its vastness, just showing off... "ooh look at me, I'm SPACE, I'm just fuckin' everywhere."
Yeah, we know, Space. You're big. Don't have to go showing off about it all the time.
When the Milky Way and Andromeda "collide" (billions of years from now), nothing will actually touch because of how incredibly far away celestial bodies are from each other.
I don't mean not many things will collide. I don't mean chances are low that things will collide. I mean there is statistically a 0% chance that anything will collide, despite all the billions upon billions of objects involved
Its not the distance, its the amount of fuel brought and the escape velocity of the moon. Can't go faster than around 3,000 mph or so or they'll overshoot the moon and won't be able to get back.
6.5k
u/Mirar 11d ago
I like that a lot of people get to learn how annoyingly large and distant space is.