"light year" don't hurt your brain thinking about this...
 

was just reading up on light years and this shit still boggles my mind...

A light year (or light-year, or lightyear), is the distance light travels in one year: about 9.461 × 1015 metres (9.461 petametres), or about 5.879 × 1012 (nearly six trillion) miles.

misc facts:

- It takes 8.3 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (a distance of 1.58 × 10-5 light years).

- The most distant space probe, Voyager 1, was 13 light hours (only 1.5 × 10-3 light years) away from Earth in September 2004. It took Voyager 27 years to cover that distance.

- The nearest known star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away.

- The center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 28,000 light years away.

- The Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.

-The nearest large galaxy cluster, the Virgo Cluster, is about 60 million light years away.

-The particle horizon (observable part) of the universe has a radius of about 46 billion light years, but light from the edge of the observable universe was emitted only 13.7 billion years ago (the age of the universe). The figures differ because distant objects have continued to recede from us due to cosmological expansion (see Hubble's law).

- One gigaparsec is equal to approximately 3.2 billion light years.

If You Look At Those Dimensions ? And Think About What We Can See Of The Universe And How Big It Is ?

It Is Almost Impossible That There Is No Other Life But Us On Some Other Distant Planet

yes, that is a very good point. i'm still just trying to comprehend the size of things in space and the distances, it's fucking crazy. the little grey aliens people describe are supposedly from the star system called zeta reticuli which is 39 light years from earth. the voyager 1 only made it 13 light 'hours' in 27 years and that is the farthest anything built by humans has been. so if those aliens really came 39 light years, my biggest question would be how the fuck could they do that? it seems impossible to say the least. maybe blackholes and wormholes play i part i don't know...

What hurts my brain most is that we might even be dead without knowing it.
If a star 50 light years away, turned into a deadly supernova 40 years ago, it will hit us in 10 years from now. It already happened, but because of speed of light, we just dont know it yet. :eyecrazy

Well if something was coming towards Earth, I think the actual object would be moving slower than the light of the object...so we would see it coming before it hit us...

Seems like an awful waste of space doesn't it?

This has always fascinated me, but I have a theory about those numbers. Because of gasses and our primitive knowledge of the universe, isn't it possible that it is smaller because of bending light or the presence of a vacuum?

there are so many variables it's hard to tell what's out there. We could be looking in a mirror.

oooo, maybe those vacuums change the frequency of our atoms and we re in fact looking into a parallel universe at ourselves.

it is very possible that the light its self could harm us and be the root of our demise.

I like the way you think, but i have to say that just from the statistics of the voyager 1 space probe thing, that we probably have a good idea of how far it actually travelled and also how far things seemed to be from it when it was way out there in space. even thinking of walking across the united states seems hard to comprehend, so when i look up at the stars...i am pretty sure they really are ridiculously far away...

Do you mind if I use those figures for a "My dick is so big joke"? :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Well, its not visible objects that is the concern, but the radiation energy released, which also travel the speed of light. The bigger or closer the supernova is, the more energy will hit us.
But look at the bright side; we will be killed instantly and never know what hit us :upsidedow

very true, if there were in fact vacuums, you would also think that the universe would equalize its self.

but look at it from this point of view. If i were to travel outside the gravitational pull of this planet, we would maintain our speed with very little resistance. So our top resonable speed of travel is consistant with our ability to store energy to slow ourselves down from that speed and ability to navigate and and predict any obsticles like planets or gravitational pulls.

exactly, can you image radiation flying through space without the resistance of an atmosphere?

Yeah, today we have the "natural" cosmic radiation, but its energy is not deadly enough through our atmosphere. However they say people that often travelling in the higher parts of the atmosphere are more exposed and could in worst case develop cancer. Like pilots.
With a big and close supernova the energy would be multiplied with zillions, and no complex lifeforms would survive. At least not with the technology we have today.

check out these links:

it's a scale model of our solar system...it helps getting an idea of the dimensions you are dealing with LOL

http://www.thegrid.org.uk/learning/s...solar_journey/

http://www.classzone.com/books/earth...?chapter_no=27
(travel through the system at 300x the speed of light...gives a good idea of distance)


To make a scale model of the solar system using a tenis ball for the sun, the earth would be approx. big as a peppercorn....Pluto, smaller than a pinhead, and, at more than half a mile (distance from the "sun", our tennis ball)

it's unfortunate that the first people to ever travel far into our universe might not be able to look at it without external cameras.

cool links, thanx man...

not a prob! :)

I took an astrophysic course in college as an optional course...(it was pretty much an introduction course)...but we did some cool shit...we did the scale solar system, live (went outside to do it of course)...its impressive to see hehe!

All of this is cool - but men still love to bang hot chicks with an IQ of 75.

Not new to me at all. I've learned them in my physics class. Got an A- in that subject.

Nah' doesn't hurt my brain, neverending -and still expanding!!!!!!!!!!
That hurts!!

And offcause there is life - anyone ever to doubt this is just plain stupid if you ask me!

of course there is life elsewhere...I just don't think it's what people have in mind LOL.. (i.e. green humanoid creature)...it could have developped REALLY differently than on our planet...

Something you guys might like is Celestia a free space simulation software, you can see just how slow the speed of light really is when dealing with such huge distances... you have to be moving many light-years per second before you see stars move like in Star Trek.

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/index.html

http://www.mufor.org/photos/omicron.jpg

http://www.mufor.org/photos/delta.jpg

pretty interesting facts about lightyear.

We are not far technologicalwise from building ship that could go 1% the speed of light if we would spend the money and the effort, which we won't. Not hard to imagine a civilization 1000's of years more advanced, going 5% the speed of light or more. Now of course that still means a trip of a hundred years to the nearest star and that's a lot for HUMANS, but whose to say some alien civilization they live for 1000 years? Hell if tortoises can live for 200 years why can't aliens live for 1000?

And not to mention medical science. As you may have seen in sci-fi movies, freeze down the body and defrost it years later in same health.

Or even more sci-fi, but not impossible; somehow your mind and soul must be programmed in your brain. If we developed computers that could leech it, store it, and insert it to a young clone of yourself. Neverending life. THAT would be freaky :)

Age is not the only factor to be concerned with.

Muscle tissue degenerates at an alarming rate when not living in gravity. Just a few months and humans are unable to walk when they return to earths gravity. Even a few weeks takes a nasty toll. By the way keep in mind you heart is a muscle.

Bone density gets greatly effected as well without gravity. A pretty big issue when after a fairly short period of time human bones could become so brittle a small jolt could shatter them.

Currently it appears reproduction just does not work without gravity. Eggs just will not develop after fertilization.

Cosmic radiation is a real bitch. Can not see it and there is no current protection from it. NASA is currently on a quickly approaching deadline to figure this one out or all long term maned space projects are to come to a halt.

Unless we are 100% sure that some distant solar systems planet has an identical atmosphere as earth we are kind of fucked.

Boils down to this. Unless humans get very genetically altered to the point where it may be questionable that they even are "human" any more, "we" aint going nowhere outside of our solar system. Then unless we find a way
to bend the laws of physics or avoid them all together, there is no way to build a ship capable of such speeds; period.

They'd have had to fold space, or wormhole it.

Take a sheet of paper, draw a circle on one edge, a circle on the other. Light travels like drawing a pencil line from one circle to the other.

But fold the paper so that the two circles are up against each other and while it's not FASTER than light, it's quicker.

or something! hehe

That is one of the hypothetical ways around the physics issue.
Just better damn well hope that they are stable, do no collapse while your in one, oh and for that matter it would really help to know and understand what it is like inside of one. Would kind of really suck to discover it is like a high powered microwave with clouds of radiation and particles of anti matter drifting around.

Wow... what an intelligent, thought provoking thread... is this really GFY?

How do they calculate how large the universe is? We can't see the beginning or end so how do they derive that number? And what's outside of it?

Okay, now i fully undestand how antigravity craft works :thumbsup

They also say that the stars you see don't even exist anymore since that light has travelled for millions of years before you see it hehe.

yo spannow, i bet you got some crazy ass shit that you should share...

i sale short light years.

StickyGreen, if you only knew... :winkwink:


Okay here's a hint: SAIC - that's a good place to start.

Ok NOW this is a GFY thread... I was starting to wonder there... lol



Very ammusing thread to say the least! :thumbsup

this has been a very interesting thread .. im sure the wormhole option will be the first choice to explore since the distances are otherwise not feasable for any kind of large scale travel, yet :)

is it true that if you go faster than light, you can travel through time? or is it impossible to go faster than the speed of light?

If and a big if there is to be such travel, it will not happen with humans. Robots err nanobots would be making such a trip. Something akin to a virus so to speak. Self replicating, self repairing, able to build, adapt, and expand as it goes all the while reporting back.

Some people have been tokin off the bong tonight.

you should too, it might open up your mind a lil more...

nasa is a joke

this topic is really interesting..we learn something from it although not everyone can relate..

Please do share your feelings as to why.

Voyager 1 was travelling at very slow speed. All we need to do is propell objects at an intense speed off of earth and continue to speed up while in space and we can travel further.

Actually, I think that one of the principles of Relativity states that nothing CAN go faster than the speed of light. if you could ride on a beam of light, at the speed ot light, you would still see light moving away from you.

Doh! that is it. I wonder why this was never thought of before. :winkwink:

I was reading through some old threads and came across this one. Crazy shit!

good read.. Did you guys see the pictures of the planets and stars next to each other? That really gets you thinking..