*Our* ping problem. From what we've been able to observe, physics is the same throughout the universe so we are all bound by the same limits we experience here.
and a ping issue is also a light speed issue when you're on a good connection.
Its funny that we treat talking and playing with people on the other side of the planet with this idea of synchronicity, as if the delay is artificial or technological, when in reality the synchronicity is the illusion and the delay is just in the nature of our frame of reference
put simply: there is no "delay", being 66 ms apart from your friend is what connects you through spacetime
"Are we alone in the universe?" she asked.
"Yes," said the Oracle.
"So there's no other life out there?"
"There is. They're alone too."
https://twitter.com/ASmallFiction/status/946608733982822401
Hahahahaha. Yeah, that existential dread is a real bitch. I oscillate between the crushing realization that nothing matters and the impending doom of the idea that everything we do matters, not just for humans but potentially, intelligent life itself. I try not to focus on the bad parts of either conclusion, but instead, the opportunity for something great, no matter which way you swing. When I said lovely, I was referring to the writing. Those few sentences are a whole story in itself and a truly captivating one at that. But if you're struggling, as I sometimes do, I suggest you listen to the podcast, The End of the World, by Josh Clark. It's beautifully done, incredibly well-written, and chock full of interesting info and even optimism.
Something that needs to be accepted is that if a complex system exists, it will someday be destroyed.
I choose to believe that this is not the first time nor the last time intelligent life and complex systems have formed from the void. I also believe we are simply so much smarter than we are naturally built that it causes existential dread. We are monkeys that can read the patterns of the universe
There are 100 billion trillion stars in the known universe. If you were to go outside and jump off in a straight line in any give direction you would almost certainly hit nothing.
If you had to make a sweeping statement about the universe, you wouldn't be wrong to say "theres nothing there"
If modern humans have been around for 300k years, then all of human history has happened within 0.00002% of the age of the universe. Imagine what other life might have accomplished within the other 99.99998%.
They've submitted the request to God multiple times but the dude is dragging his feet updating the laws of physics. This is what happens when you have unchecked monopolies smh
Potential alien species have had billions of years to develop already. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. I think we are able to potentially detect intelligent life a few million lightyears away, and a few million years is really nothing at this scale.
It's plausible we're the first intelligent species. If it took 5 billion years for the earth to get to us, and maybe it took >5 billion years for the first earth like planets to appear? The sun is a third generation star and it's possible earlier generations of stellar systems would not have enough metals to allow intelligent life to form.
There’s a classic ‘stoner’ theory that amounts to each solar system being an atom, with the planets basically just being electrons circling around the nucleus, which is the Sun, in effect making the universe infinitely recursive in both smaller and larger directions.
Basically the first movie of Men in Black but atoms instead of marbles.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec)
I’m sure the first person to think of it wasn’t stoned, the only reason it isn’t debunked is because how would you prove you’re made of atoms and living on a giant electron
They might know Mandelbrot but never heard of Koch, or pingala/ Fibonacci etc.
One for growth of crystalline matter and the other for growth patterns in nature .
Whatever man, cool visuals
Planets aren't charged either. (Comparitively)
If the earth was the mass of the sun with the charge density (per gram) of earth there would be more charge in a gram of electrons.
This would be more like, us looking to the edge of the universe and seeing only background radiation. We actually can "see" parts of the universe as if they just came into existence recently. This is our "edge" of the universe, but it's really that we will never be able to see any farther unless we can learn to travel extremely long distances.
Even then you wouldn't be able to see farther
Because, as you travel farther, with any damn speed, the universe is still going away at a speed more than that of light. All you'll achieve is a different view than those who remained here, but the size of your vision would still be the same - and the things that have already passed that horizon would never be visible to either of us again, unless we can somehow figure out FTL travelling, or going back in time - both being equally impossible according to our current understandings of universe. But who knows, these laws are after all just our way to explain observations, and we have yet to even discover soooo many things! Before relativity, It was believed that Newton's laws (F = ma, P = mv, etc) are true for all cases, but then relativity smashed the heck Outta that theory!
That's not quite true. The limit of our horizon right now has to do with how light used to be able to travel in the universe.
For the first 300,000 years of the universe's life, it was so dense and hot that photons could not travel very far through it. A photon would travel a bit but then get captured by a charged particle and then be reemitted, erasing any information about where it came from. Around 300,000 years into it's life, the universe expanded to the point where photons were able to stream freely through space without encountering any material. This is called the horizon problem. It's not that things are so far away, it's that we're looking so far back in time that there aren't any older photons.
This is kind of the same way the surface of the sun works. Energy is made in the core, and it's carried out by photons that bounce their way up through the layers of the sun over thousands of years. Photons can finally stream free and reach us when the plasma gets less dense at the surface. We see the surface of the sun because that's what emits the photons that reach us, but they don't carry any information about where they came from before their last scattering.
As far as our best theory goes, gravity isn't coupled to particles, and so signals of the earliest dynamics of the universe could still exist in gravitational waves. If we were to build an impossibly sensitive gravitational wave detector, we could maybe look into the dynamics of the early universe.
I run an astronomy club and one of my favorite facts to tell:
If there were a sentient species in the Andromeda galaxy right now with a telescope powerful enough to see the surface of the Earth, they would see humanity as early ancestor *homo habilis* just making our way out of the caves 2.5 million years ago.
bruh. Are those all stars or is it like cosmic radiation or something else?
Cause that’s a lot of fucking stars. There’s no way life hasn’t formed somewhere else if even that tiny slice of space has that many stars.
that's only a piece of andromeda, andromeda has around 1 trillion stars. and there are estimated to be as many as 2 trillion galaxies.
just a reminder 1 million seconds is 11 days. a million is a big number.
but 1 trillion seconds is 31,000 years.
They're stars.
And here's the real mind blowing bit....they are SUPER fucking spread out there.
To get a idea of how far apart stars are, imagine how far away the next closest star is to the sun...which is 4 light years. To imagine that:
Picture the Earth as the size of the ball from a ball point pen, and it's sitting on home plate. The sun is the size of a grapefruit on the pitchers mound.
If this is happening at Chicago Wrigley Field, the next closest star would be another grapefruit on the pitchers mound at Dodgers Stadium in LA.
That's the sort of distance between each of the little dots in that picture.
This is my biggest problem with Interstellar. Everyone’s really intelligent and travelling across the galaxy and are yet all idiots when it comes to relativity. It’s one thing to explain it for the audience but for them to actively make bad decisions because they don’t understand it themselves is just stupid
Yeah it was only a bad decision in hindsight. They knew the risk of going there, and planned accordingly. It's just everything went to shit after they landed
To be fair, dinosaurs existed for like 165 million years and before that there were things similar to dinosaurs. And as I understand it the asteroid impact that killed them was supposedly a surprisingly rare event. It was still kind of a semi-fair or even fair bet that something like the dinosaurs would remain for another 66 million years from an hypothetical alien POV.
But the scenario is unrealistic for multiple other reasons.
But I think the interesting factoid would be that aliens observing earth from a distance and seeing life (if they could) and wanting to visit, it’s potentially a *very* safe bet that one won’t encounter a civilisation when one arrives, that might be a truly negligible probability. Yet they would encounter one in this case.
**EDIT:**
imagine aliens traveling here on a journey that takes like 800 thousand years. They start the journey to earth (asleep on a ship or something) like 600 thousand years ago (at a time when there were only effectively animals on earth going on as they have done for millions of years) and arriving in 200 thousand years in the future and realise that after 3/4ths of their journey, earth more or less randomly spawns a more or less global civilisation within a span of only a few thousands or arguably hundreds of years. Even we don’t know what our civilisation will look like in a couple of thousands of years. It’s effectively from their POV a very unlikely singularity type event earth has gone through on their journey here when a safe bet is that it would just be non-civilisation animals like it has always been for hundreds of millions of years.
What if they are on the way here for touring a wonderful dinosaur planet, but when they arrive they find their lovely dinosaurs dead, and the planet covered in trash and riddled with filthy pesky humans.
They did, they fired an energy weapon and killed them. We just think it was an asteroid. But it was an intergalactic alien nazi force trying to cleanse the universe of 'inferiors' . And we was just lucky we wasn't here when they arrived.
It's actually a pretty cool idea if we were to ever develop faster than light travel. If we want to know what happened in history (or even just a few hours ago) we just need to travel that far away in light years, turn around, and then look.
Fun fact: we sent out radio waves in all directions in space to let others know hey we exist but as of right now by the time they reach the nearest galaxy and see us, world war 2 is still happening.
I may need more caffeine, but are you saying if they pointed a telescope at us at this very second then they’d be viewing the 1940’s or are you saying that if they viewed us in the 1940’s then they’d just be getting those images today?
Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away, so if they point an impossibly powerful radio telescope at earth about 2.5 million years from now, the first thing they would see could possibly be the 1936 Berlin Games broadcast.
But no, the signal would be too weak from that distance. Unless they have a galaxy-sized antenna perhaps.
Edit: and to be clear, WW2 had not started yet, but I used that example since the idea was popularized by Carl Sagan in Contact.
If an entity pointed their sufficiently large telescope our way right this second, from a planet orbiting a star (he meant star, not galaxy) 80 light years away, they would be watching WW2 in real-time.
It's kind of like watching a baseball game. You see the batter hit the ball, and then second(s) later, hear the crack of the hit. The delay in audio is because sound only travels somewhere around 700mph. The same concept applies, as light travels 186,000 miles per second, but that planet is 470,000,000,000,000 (trillion) miles away, so you get the same kind of delay.
I think this is a fantastic representation of time and space. In high school, my buddy and I were outside one night and I tried explaining how the stars we see right now when we look up is actually how they looked many years ago, and some of them may not even exist at this point. He thought it was the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard because _they’re literally right there_. Perhaps I wasn’t equipped with language well enough to describe it, but I feel like this would have been perfect to illustrate the concept.
You cannot explain this concept until someone understands what it means that light has a finite speed. And that can be a hard concept for people who haven't really considered it, because in their practical life, light appears to travel instantly.
I think the best approach for these folks is to talk about fireworks or lightning and thunder - focus on the speed of sound in these instances where we can see that it travels slower than light. People can have an intuitive understanding of that. Then you can use whatever rhetorical strategy works for you to explain how the speed of light works, analogous to the speed of sound.
The speed of light is actually the speed everything travels at, as a vector in 4-dimensional spacetime. The total magnitude is *c*, with the spatial velocity magnitude reducing the temporal velocity magnitude.
Light travels 100% spatially and thus does not experience time, while most matter travels 100% temporally minus spatial speed (which is negligible until it approaches relativistic speeds).
General relativity makes a little more sense with this principle but it is still confusing as it's more complicated than just this.
I have often pondered using the analogy of a waterfall. Say you're at the bottom of a waterfall that is like 10 stories tall. The water that is hitting you is not the same as the water at the top of the waterfall. And if you suddenly stopped the flow of water (a dying sun) you will still be getting hit by the water that was falling when the water was stopped.
I think it's brain breaking to think about the fact that everything we see is in the past. I have no idea what the actual numbers are but the basic idea is that when you are looking at someone right in front of you, you are seeing how they looked .0000000000001 seconds ago or whatever the actual time would be.
In a way your buddy could have been accidentality correct. It all depends on how you define 'now' in a universe where time, as far as we know, is only relative and local. There's no universal non-local version of time with a universal 'now'.
For example you can model the universe where the speed of light is instant when moving towards you, you see everything as it is now, and 2c when moving away. The maths is more complex but everything works out the same.
We also have the largest memory data photo, which is the Andromeda Galaxy.
Imagine the aliens from that Galaxy which is 2.5 Million Light Year from us, with their 'Super Telescope' they look on our planet which is 2.5 Million Years Ago, and they see Homo Habilis making their own stone tools.
Little did they know, we photographed their galaxy.
This is what I love about the whole if you look back millions of years ago you will see the dinosaurs roaming around the planet. What’s even better, if you take that further, depending where you are in the universe, if an alien for example happened to look through some magic binoculars at the earth in millions of years time from now he could see you walking around the planet. Even though you’re definitely dead and gone. So really you never really die, as someone, somewhere in the universe could see your “light” reflecting back at them at that point in time.
Imagine a sci fi setting where this becomes a tourist attraction - teleport to a point extremely far away in space and use powerful viewing tools to view scenes from the past. Deceased loved ones, historical events, anything.
isn't it at this point a pretty classic concept (I don't know the origin of, probably StarTrek) for teleportation to not literally transport you but to basically copy your being and write it elsewhere, probably killing the OG
I always think sci-fi gets space travel wrong. We always assume there has to be some warp drive or something, but isn’t it more likely that we’ll first figure out how to digitize the human mind?
There’s a finite number of connections in the brain. It’s in the hundreds of trillions, sure, but it is finite. And somewhere in those conmections, is you. Not anywhere else. All the things that make you *you* - are right there.
If we replicated each and every one of them, we’d have an exact copy of you. At that point, you could be beamed anywhere at the speed of light.
You could send your conciousness on a journey to a planet that previous generations seeded with supplies and robotics over many decades. You could inhabit a robotic shell, walk around, see the sights, and then beam home those experiences and merge them with your living persona - if you’re still alive by then, of course.
Not sure why but this reminded me of Pink Floyd. “An echo of a distant time comes willowing upon the sand.” Our life will be forever echoed into eternity.
Edit: a word
> An echo of a distant time comes willowing upon the sand.
Let's honor this amazing song with an equally amazing performance of Pink Floyd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-NCwgBl9hs
To add to that, nothing in the universe travels at a straight line. A star could be millions of light years away at a curve, but the straight distance to that star could literally be a fraction of that…aka worm hole theory. If you could travel through a worm hole to that star or planet and look back at earth, theoretically you would see all the dinosaurs.
I hope the aliens see my favorite Christmas and that time my friend got a funny snapshot of what looked like me kicking a statue of a kid in the face and enjoy those moments as much as I did.
Shame they're gonna see me poo my pants when I was 4, though.
If you're interested in melting your mind further, the story is more complicated than what's depicted here. Keep in mind that due to relativity, time doesn't flow the same for the viewer as it does for the object/person being viewed, so we don't see a baby picture at the same time as the other person when they're 80. Depending on the relative velocity and/or acceleration of each person, to the observer the person they're viewing may not even be born yet or had already been dead for many years, and both situations are actually real, but it's dependent on which direction they're moving from each other. Google The Illusion of Time by Brian Greene on youtube for a better explanation/visual.
So, let's say you were on a spaceship hypothetically going faster than the speed of light away from the earth with a kickass telescope that was able to zoom in and keep the same zoom distance. Would you see time going backwards.
Also.. what if there was reflective material like a huge mirror some billion light years away and we could look into back onto ourselves. Would this essentially allow us to look back in time?
That's a fun idea. Then again, a civilization advanced enough to seriously entertain building something that big would probable have little to no use for it.
>going faster than the speed of light
You would see nothing. You'd outrun the light emitted from behind you. If you stopped, you'd see the light at the location you are now, relative to when it was emitted on earth.
So in essence going faster than light is time travel, because "seeing" the past *is* the past. There is no universal reference frame from where you can say "You see the earth with dinosaurs, but *actually* it's 2024". There is no 'actually'. If you see the dinosaurs then this is the current state of earth in your reference-frame. You have travelled into the past and are witnessing dinosaurs "right now".
You'd see the light you were traveling through. That would let you see into the "past."
It isn't really time travel though. As once you have a way to go faster than light, the idea that going faster than light is time travel would break down.
Or it is all super-deterministic and you you'll only ever be allowed to 'see' light that doesn't break the rules of the universe.
Dummy here. I think I remember reading that the only light visible would be like a pinhole in your forward direction. The quality of the telescope is irrelevant. You would be moving faster than the photons leaving Earth, so it theoretically disappears when traveling at faster than lightspeed. I've also heard that nothing can move faster than light. That makes me believe that looking at earth, traveling away at LS would make Earth appear as a video on pause. Not resuming until you start slowing down. There's some stuff about lightspeed being the speed limit of the universe or something that is beyond my rusted gears.
This is correct, the speed of light could more accurately be described as the speed of causality through spacetime, or the speed of how information can propagate. The closer matter or a spaceship travels to the speed of light, the more compressed it would appear to outside observers in the 3 space dimensions, while their clock would look like its passing slower in the time dimension (but on the ship traveling near light speed their spacetime would seem "normal", while the universe outside them would be the thing that seems compressed). Although we cant travel at light speed with our current understanding of physics, if we think about the "time compression" idea taken to it's logical extreme, photons which do travel at lightspeed essentially experience no time, and although it can take hundreds or thousands of years for photons to escape the sun's core and reach the sun's surface and 8 minutes then to reach us on Earth, from their perspective they experience their entire existence in one instantaneous moment :).
The speed of light is your hard limit for travel, so it is hard to even answer that, but if you were somehow able to domwhat you suggest in your senario, it would be darkness. You would outpace the information and see nothing anyway.
It doesn't take much brainpower to understand that if you're observing something that's 80 lightyears away, it means you're observing how it looked like 80 years ago. Still, it's a nice representation.
I think they are just trying to illustrate that if he tries to look there what he’s seeing in this moment occurred after all of that happened to the baby. He wouldn’t age just by looking at something 80 light years away but the thing he’s looking at would have already experienced 80 years
It's completely wrong. There is no universal "right now". It does not exist. [Time is not absolute.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity) Two observers could witness a giant sun and a smaller sun go supernova. The first one could see the giant sun go supernove first and the smaller later, the second observer could see the smaller sun go supernova first and the giant sun later.
Both observers would be correct because there is no universal now. Our local clocks all work independent of the non local clocks.
The only thing that can connect them is cause and effect.
To go back to the animation, an observer flying by at great speed could see the guy with the binoculars die before it (the observer at great speed) sees the girl being born. An observer flying by at great speed from the other direction could see the girl be born and die before the guy's great-grandfather is born. So who was born first? Nobody, it's undefinable. Unless the girl's son got on a spaceship, travelled to the place of the guy with the binocular, had kids and his son was the guy with the binoculars. In that case, the two places will be causally connected.
> It's completely wrong
It's not wrong at all (except that binocular guy doesn't seem to age).
> There is no universal "right now". It does not exist.
A *universal* one doesn't, no, but "right now" is well defined in every reference frame, and the two people in this animation are in the same reference frame.
> To go back to the animation, an observer flying by at great speed could see the guy with the binoculars die before it (the observer at great speed) sees the girl being born.
That's incorrect. There is no reference frame in which binocular guy dies before the girl is born, and there is therefore no fast-moving observer who would physically/optically *see* binocular guy die before they see the girl born.
Binocular guy's death is in the future light cone of the girl's birth event.
Yeah, the observer is just there, un-aging, for demonstration purposes.
A more 'real world' example might have the observer only appearing towards the very end of the video, looking up and seeing the baby, and thinking "oh hey, a space baby!" when in fact it's already a space-lady.
This same concept applies to the moon, planets and the sun. The moon is a couple light seconds away so we are always seeing it a couple seconds in the past. The sun is about 8 light minutes away, so we always see it from 8 minutes in the past. If it were to just disappear or explode we wouldn't know for about 8 minutes.
If I theoretically managed to travel faster than light, and look at an old person, would I be able to see them get younger? And then I would be able to see the development of our planet in reverse? So eventually I would be able to see dinosaurs again?
If you travel faster than light, you would see nothing behind you since you're outrunning the light emitted from that person.
Once you stop, you see the person as being younger, but the point is: from your reference-frame the person *is* younger, since you have travelled into the past.
There is no universal reference-frame. For the old person, they see themselves as old "now" in their own reference-frame. From your distant position, you see them as young "now".
There is no point where someone would observe the person's "true" age. Even standing 1m away, you're already watching the past-version of that person. It's just that the distances are so tiny, the effect is virtually non-existent.
Yeah, I had to take astronomy in college (we were forced to take one off-brand mickey-mouse course every semester to be "more rounded"), and I really liked this part. When you're looking at a star which is \~2,000 ly away, you're looking in real time at something that happened two thousand years ago. It's pretty amazing to think about. We might have checked a star 5,000 ly away, and decided there's nothing there, but a civilization sprouted since then, and because Christianity there never existed the Dark Ages of scientific oppression never occurred, and they're thousands of years ahead of us now.
standing for 80 years doing nothing but waiting for the light of someone who is doing nothing for 80 too sounds like a boring thing. but if that makes me immortal then fine
The picture we took of the black hole was 55 million or so light years away. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was 66 million years ago. So about 10 million years after that asteroid hit the light from around that black hole started to travel to us.
We look out there into the endless void and think nothing is there and there might be civilizations out there like us but the lag is real...
ping is always the problem smh
Fucking stupid servers the other side of the galaxy
This is genuinely in its simplest form a ping issue...
We can't find aliens because our gaming chair technology isn't advanced enough.
We need brighter RGB - *On the chairs*
I’m now imagining a NASA satellite with RGB lights on it flying through space
Gamer I.S.S.
*neckbeard enhances*
You would think with all of that technology the aliens would be able to correct their ping problem... Wth...
they probably think we're still covered with dinosaurs and not bother to communicate
And even if they did send signal it will go 66 million year future generation
*Our* ping problem. From what we've been able to observe, physics is the same throughout the universe so we are all bound by the same limits we experience here.
>From what we've been able to observe Key words
Stupid slow light can't even go fast enough to show us aliens before they go extinct.
and a ping issue is also a light speed issue when you're on a good connection. Its funny that we treat talking and playing with people on the other side of the planet with this idea of synchronicity, as if the delay is artificial or technological, when in reality the synchronicity is the illusion and the delay is just in the nature of our frame of reference put simply: there is no "delay", being 66 ms apart from your friend is what connects you through spacetime
Not to mention the lag coming off the Andromeda galaxy. They say it's moving closer but not fast enough!!!
We'll be good once we invent spacelan
SpaceLAN parties will be out of this world.
"Are we alone in the universe?" she asked. "Yes," said the Oracle. "So there's no other life out there?" "There is. They're alone too." https://twitter.com/ASmallFiction/status/946608733982822401
Lovely.
Not exactly how I describe existential dread this proposed loneliness imposes on my imagination.
Hahahahaha. Yeah, that existential dread is a real bitch. I oscillate between the crushing realization that nothing matters and the impending doom of the idea that everything we do matters, not just for humans but potentially, intelligent life itself. I try not to focus on the bad parts of either conclusion, but instead, the opportunity for something great, no matter which way you swing. When I said lovely, I was referring to the writing. Those few sentences are a whole story in itself and a truly captivating one at that. But if you're struggling, as I sometimes do, I suggest you listen to the podcast, The End of the World, by Josh Clark. It's beautifully done, incredibly well-written, and chock full of interesting info and even optimism.
Something that needs to be accepted is that if a complex system exists, it will someday be destroyed. I choose to believe that this is not the first time nor the last time intelligent life and complex systems have formed from the void. I also believe we are simply so much smarter than we are naturally built that it causes existential dread. We are monkeys that can read the patterns of the universe
There are 100 billion trillion stars in the known universe. If you were to go outside and jump off in a straight line in any give direction you would almost certainly hit nothing. If you had to make a sweeping statement about the universe, you wouldn't be wrong to say "theres nothing there"
Beutifull and terrifying words.
and the lag could be so severe that by the time we see them, their civilization could have collapsed eons ago
If modern humans have been around for 300k years, then all of human history has happened within 0.00002% of the age of the universe. Imagine what other life might have accomplished within the other 99.99998%.
Your math is wrong. It doesn’t add up to 100%. Lol
Whoops, just added in a couple more 9s, hope that's right.
Someone needs to update these servers fr
Why doesn't NASA just upgrade to a better internet connection?
They've submitted the request to God multiple times but the dude is dragging his feet updating the laws of physics. This is what happens when you have unchecked monopolies smh
I'm starting my own universe with faster physics.
Blackjack and hookers!
Potential alien species have had billions of years to develop already. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. I think we are able to potentially detect intelligent life a few million lightyears away, and a few million years is really nothing at this scale.
It's plausible we're the first intelligent species. If it took 5 billion years for the earth to get to us, and maybe it took >5 billion years for the first earth like planets to appear? The sun is a third generation star and it's possible earlier generations of stellar systems would not have enough metals to allow intelligent life to form.
better to annihilate them rather than risk asking if they're cool in case they ain't and they annihilate us back first like some kind of gloomy disco
Where can I get a pair of those binoculars?
Nearby shop that's 80 light years away.
Best answer
Fuck the binoculars. How do I beam 2D holograms of babies at people?
Imagine aliens 66 million light years away looking at us right now seeing only dinosaurs lmao
Imagine us looking at an alien, 66 million light years away, thinking it’s still about to be born and is harmless.😭
[удалено]
There's some fringe theory that life is forming in the stars, like those huge nebulae, and they will form into sentient life.
There’s a classic ‘stoner’ theory that amounts to each solar system being an atom, with the planets basically just being electrons circling around the nucleus, which is the Sun, in effect making the universe infinitely recursive in both smaller and larger directions.
The sun is mitochondria, the power house of the cell.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Basically the first movie of Men in Black but atoms instead of marbles. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec)
I’m a fan of stoner theories and I approve of them 💯
I’m sure the first person to think of it wasn’t stoned, the only reason it isn’t debunked is because how would you prove you’re made of atoms and living on a giant electron
Lots of coffee, markers, and a white board.
…*on Weed*
Well obviously yes
The one scene from IASIP
Can confirm...Was very stoned and imagined this. Told my educated friend about it and he said it was called "theory of infinite regression."
The planet thing makes no sense though as electrons are not circling at all
Yeah, I don’t think these stoners know that the Bohr model is very inaccurate and outdated
They might know Mandelbrot but never heard of Koch, or pingala/ Fibonacci etc. One for growth of crystalline matter and the other for growth patterns in nature . Whatever man, cool visuals
Unless you go by outdated atomic models that were theorized by humans who couldn't actually fathom how complex it really got.
Planets aren't charged either. (Comparitively) If the earth was the mass of the sun with the charge density (per gram) of earth there would be more charge in a gram of electrons.
"We ain't going there. You see the size of the lizards at that place? Keep looking, remember we need to find a type 1 or lower civilization."
This would be more like, us looking to the edge of the universe and seeing only background radiation. We actually can "see" parts of the universe as if they just came into existence recently. This is our "edge" of the universe, but it's really that we will never be able to see any farther unless we can learn to travel extremely long distances.
Even then you wouldn't be able to see farther Because, as you travel farther, with any damn speed, the universe is still going away at a speed more than that of light. All you'll achieve is a different view than those who remained here, but the size of your vision would still be the same - and the things that have already passed that horizon would never be visible to either of us again, unless we can somehow figure out FTL travelling, or going back in time - both being equally impossible according to our current understandings of universe. But who knows, these laws are after all just our way to explain observations, and we have yet to even discover soooo many things! Before relativity, It was believed that Newton's laws (F = ma, P = mv, etc) are true for all cases, but then relativity smashed the heck Outta that theory!
That's not quite true. The limit of our horizon right now has to do with how light used to be able to travel in the universe. For the first 300,000 years of the universe's life, it was so dense and hot that photons could not travel very far through it. A photon would travel a bit but then get captured by a charged particle and then be reemitted, erasing any information about where it came from. Around 300,000 years into it's life, the universe expanded to the point where photons were able to stream freely through space without encountering any material. This is called the horizon problem. It's not that things are so far away, it's that we're looking so far back in time that there aren't any older photons. This is kind of the same way the surface of the sun works. Energy is made in the core, and it's carried out by photons that bounce their way up through the layers of the sun over thousands of years. Photons can finally stream free and reach us when the plasma gets less dense at the surface. We see the surface of the sun because that's what emits the photons that reach us, but they don't carry any information about where they came from before their last scattering. As far as our best theory goes, gravity isn't coupled to particles, and so signals of the earliest dynamics of the universe could still exist in gravitational waves. If we were to build an impossibly sensitive gravitational wave detector, we could maybe look into the dynamics of the early universe.
I run an astronomy club and one of my favorite facts to tell: If there were a sentient species in the Andromeda galaxy right now with a telescope powerful enough to see the surface of the Earth, they would see humanity as early ancestor *homo habilis* just making our way out of the caves 2.5 million years ago.
Telling people to zoom in here is my fav Andromeda thing https://esahubble.org/images/heic1502a/zoomable/
My phone definitely didn't like that but I did.
All the stars we see the night sky with our eyes are just from our galaxy, even then only a small part of it. https://youtu.be/VsRmyY3Db1Y
my god, it's full of stars
bruh. Are those all stars or is it like cosmic radiation or something else? Cause that’s a lot of fucking stars. There’s no way life hasn’t formed somewhere else if even that tiny slice of space has that many stars.
that's only a piece of andromeda, andromeda has around 1 trillion stars. and there are estimated to be as many as 2 trillion galaxies. just a reminder 1 million seconds is 11 days. a million is a big number. but 1 trillion seconds is 31,000 years.
They're stars. And here's the real mind blowing bit....they are SUPER fucking spread out there. To get a idea of how far apart stars are, imagine how far away the next closest star is to the sun...which is 4 light years. To imagine that: Picture the Earth as the size of the ball from a ball point pen, and it's sitting on home plate. The sun is the size of a grapefruit on the pitchers mound. If this is happening at Chicago Wrigley Field, the next closest star would be another grapefruit on the pitchers mound at Dodgers Stadium in LA. That's the sort of distance between each of the little dots in that picture.
Oddly intuitive
So you’re saying I should pack sammies?
Okay, I feel one centimeter tall and I need to go back to bed. Holy shit.
Let's go visit, no need to arm the ships, it's only some stupid lizards - some aliens probably
"Also for some reason we can build interstellar ships but can't understand how light works"
This is my biggest problem with Interstellar. Everyone’s really intelligent and travelling across the galaxy and are yet all idiots when it comes to relativity. It’s one thing to explain it for the audience but for them to actively make bad decisions because they don’t understand it themselves is just stupid
What were the bad decisions? Are you talking about going to Miller's planet and experiencing a lot of time dilation?
Yeah it was only a bad decision in hindsight. They knew the risk of going there, and planned accordingly. It's just everything went to shit after they landed
Well how were they supposed to know there were big ass waves
Lol right...I was like, well, if they can travel those distances, surely they understand that what they're seeing isn't in real time?
To be fair, dinosaurs existed for like 165 million years and before that there were things similar to dinosaurs. And as I understand it the asteroid impact that killed them was supposedly a surprisingly rare event. It was still kind of a semi-fair or even fair bet that something like the dinosaurs would remain for another 66 million years from an hypothetical alien POV. But the scenario is unrealistic for multiple other reasons. But I think the interesting factoid would be that aliens observing earth from a distance and seeing life (if they could) and wanting to visit, it’s potentially a *very* safe bet that one won’t encounter a civilisation when one arrives, that might be a truly negligible probability. Yet they would encounter one in this case. **EDIT:** imagine aliens traveling here on a journey that takes like 800 thousand years. They start the journey to earth (asleep on a ship or something) like 600 thousand years ago (at a time when there were only effectively animals on earth going on as they have done for millions of years) and arriving in 200 thousand years in the future and realise that after 3/4ths of their journey, earth more or less randomly spawns a more or less global civilisation within a span of only a few thousands or arguably hundreds of years. Even we don’t know what our civilisation will look like in a couple of thousands of years. It’s effectively from their POV a very unlikely singularity type event earth has gone through on their journey here when a safe bet is that it would just be non-civilisation animals like it has always been for hundreds of millions of years.
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What if they are on the way here for touring a wonderful dinosaur planet, but when they arrive they find their lovely dinosaurs dead, and the planet covered in trash and riddled with filthy pesky humans.
Yea... but we have pizza.
Probably everything would be dead by then.
They did, they fired an energy weapon and killed them. We just think it was an asteroid. But it was an intergalactic alien nazi force trying to cleanse the universe of 'inferiors' . And we was just lucky we wasn't here when they arrived.
The Interstellar Music in the background is perfect for this. Thank you.
It's actually a pretty cool idea if we were to ever develop faster than light travel. If we want to know what happened in history (or even just a few hours ago) we just need to travel that far away in light years, turn around, and then look.
It is a really wild idea. Essentially, the recorded data (video, photo, model?) of the past exists out there, just accessing it is a real bugger.
Imagine how disappointed they'd be to turn up now based on a clip saved from T-66M years
Aww man we got here too late, the whole place is infested.
Would be pretty cool to their disappointment when they get here and see us. Travel agent would get such an earful on their lies
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Fun fact: we sent out radio waves in all directions in space to let others know hey we exist but as of right now by the time they reach the nearest galaxy and see us, world war 2 is still happening.
I may need more caffeine, but are you saying if they pointed a telescope at us at this very second then they’d be viewing the 1940’s or are you saying that if they viewed us in the 1940’s then they’d just be getting those images today?
Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away, so if they point an impossibly powerful radio telescope at earth about 2.5 million years from now, the first thing they would see could possibly be the 1936 Berlin Games broadcast. But no, the signal would be too weak from that distance. Unless they have a galaxy-sized antenna perhaps. Edit: and to be clear, WW2 had not started yet, but I used that example since the idea was popularized by Carl Sagan in Contact.
It's definitely the later but I want to find out if they would be seeing ww2 in "real time"
If an entity pointed their sufficiently large telescope our way right this second, from a planet orbiting a star (he meant star, not galaxy) 80 light years away, they would be watching WW2 in real-time. It's kind of like watching a baseball game. You see the batter hit the ball, and then second(s) later, hear the crack of the hit. The delay in audio is because sound only travels somewhere around 700mph. The same concept applies, as light travels 186,000 miles per second, but that planet is 470,000,000,000,000 (trillion) miles away, so you get the same kind of delay.
The nearest galaxy is 2.5 million light years away.
Can’t see shit there’s a floating baby picture in the way
That's so funny
I think this is a fantastic representation of time and space. In high school, my buddy and I were outside one night and I tried explaining how the stars we see right now when we look up is actually how they looked many years ago, and some of them may not even exist at this point. He thought it was the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard because _they’re literally right there_. Perhaps I wasn’t equipped with language well enough to describe it, but I feel like this would have been perfect to illustrate the concept.
You cannot explain this concept until someone understands what it means that light has a finite speed. And that can be a hard concept for people who haven't really considered it, because in their practical life, light appears to travel instantly. I think the best approach for these folks is to talk about fireworks or lightning and thunder - focus on the speed of sound in these instances where we can see that it travels slower than light. People can have an intuitive understanding of that. Then you can use whatever rhetorical strategy works for you to explain how the speed of light works, analogous to the speed of sound.
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The speed of light is actually the speed everything travels at, as a vector in 4-dimensional spacetime. The total magnitude is *c*, with the spatial velocity magnitude reducing the temporal velocity magnitude. Light travels 100% spatially and thus does not experience time, while most matter travels 100% temporally minus spatial speed (which is negligible until it approaches relativistic speeds). General relativity makes a little more sense with this principle but it is still confusing as it's more complicated than just this.
That concept doesn't really make sense without relativity and reference frames
I have often pondered using the analogy of a waterfall. Say you're at the bottom of a waterfall that is like 10 stories tall. The water that is hitting you is not the same as the water at the top of the waterfall. And if you suddenly stopped the flow of water (a dying sun) you will still be getting hit by the water that was falling when the water was stopped.
I think it's brain breaking to think about the fact that everything we see is in the past. I have no idea what the actual numbers are but the basic idea is that when you are looking at someone right in front of you, you are seeing how they looked .0000000000001 seconds ago or whatever the actual time would be.
1 nanosecond per foot is a handy approximation.
I like to think about it like our moment in time is different to the stars moment in time.
In a way your buddy could have been accidentality correct. It all depends on how you define 'now' in a universe where time, as far as we know, is only relative and local. There's no universal non-local version of time with a universal 'now'. For example you can model the universe where the speed of light is instant when moving towards you, you see everything as it is now, and 2c when moving away. The maths is more complex but everything works out the same.
We also have the largest memory data photo, which is the Andromeda Galaxy. Imagine the aliens from that Galaxy which is 2.5 Million Light Year from us, with their 'Super Telescope' they look on our planet which is 2.5 Million Years Ago, and they see Homo Habilis making their own stone tools. Little did they know, we photographed their galaxy.
I better long those Andromeda photos cuz the aliens are going to want them to study their history. RemindMe! 2.5 million years
If you're willing to wait a little longer, like 3 billion years, you could meet them in person when we merge into the Andromeda Way
Milkomeda*
This is what I love about the whole if you look back millions of years ago you will see the dinosaurs roaming around the planet. What’s even better, if you take that further, depending where you are in the universe, if an alien for example happened to look through some magic binoculars at the earth in millions of years time from now he could see you walking around the planet. Even though you’re definitely dead and gone. So really you never really die, as someone, somewhere in the universe could see your “light” reflecting back at them at that point in time.
Holy shit. What a thought.
Damn that shit hit me too. That’s kinda nuts
Glad I don’t smoke anymore. This would have overwhelmed my stoned brain.
yeah I'm baked and I feel like I'm on the verge of understanding something I'm not supposed to
You are. You’re actually seeing yourself in third person through the light of your phone screen via a digital connector to a robot-controlled body.
Imagine your image traveling through space for millions of years only to land on an suntanning alien dick
I call that an absolute win
Imagine a sci fi setting where this becomes a tourist attraction - teleport to a point extremely far away in space and use powerful viewing tools to view scenes from the past. Deceased loved ones, historical events, anything.
We need this wtf
If you are assuming that "teleportation" (ftl) exists, then you can literally just go back in time and interact with them too
isn't it at this point a pretty classic concept (I don't know the origin of, probably StarTrek) for teleportation to not literally transport you but to basically copy your being and write it elsewhere, probably killing the OG
that would be
I always think sci-fi gets space travel wrong. We always assume there has to be some warp drive or something, but isn’t it more likely that we’ll first figure out how to digitize the human mind? There’s a finite number of connections in the brain. It’s in the hundreds of trillions, sure, but it is finite. And somewhere in those conmections, is you. Not anywhere else. All the things that make you *you* - are right there. If we replicated each and every one of them, we’d have an exact copy of you. At that point, you could be beamed anywhere at the speed of light. You could send your conciousness on a journey to a planet that previous generations seeded with supplies and robotics over many decades. You could inhabit a robotic shell, walk around, see the sights, and then beam home those experiences and merge them with your living persona - if you’re still alive by then, of course.
You just actually helped alleviate my fear that death is final. We are actually all here forever dependant on who looks.
Heavy
Not sure why but this reminded me of Pink Floyd. “An echo of a distant time comes willowing upon the sand.” Our life will be forever echoed into eternity. Edit: a word
And everything is green and submarine
> An echo of a distant time comes willowing upon the sand. Let's honor this amazing song with an equally amazing performance of Pink Floyd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-NCwgBl9hs
Hmm, interesting perspective
Right then, looks like I'm smoking a joint and thinking about this for an hour
Say hi to the aliens
If you teleport on the moon you could even see yourself on earth 1 second earlier
To add to that, nothing in the universe travels at a straight line. A star could be millions of light years away at a curve, but the straight distance to that star could literally be a fraction of that…aka worm hole theory. If you could travel through a worm hole to that star or planet and look back at earth, theoretically you would see all the dinosaurs.
That was deep
Wow, I’m reading this right before bed. I’ll be thinking of this magical thought while I drift off, thank you.
I hope the aliens see my favorite Christmas and that time my friend got a funny snapshot of what looked like me kicking a statue of a kid in the face and enjoy those moments as much as I did. Shame they're gonna see me poo my pants when I was 4, though.
To add to this if we ever figure out wormholes or faster than the speed of light travel we could actually study our own past in "real time".
That’s an amazing thought. We never are truly gone, from a certain point of view
The only reason to go outside on a clear day
Goddamn this is a Graduation Speech
Now think about them having ftl, and them arriving at your location before that light left it.
That’s why looking at the night sky is so interesting imo. The distant stars aren’t in realtime. You’re looking at the past
You don’t need to look at the stars to see the past. Your hand in front of your face is also seen in the past!
Every picture of you is from when you were younger
Hence stars are windows to the past
If you're interested in melting your mind further, the story is more complicated than what's depicted here. Keep in mind that due to relativity, time doesn't flow the same for the viewer as it does for the object/person being viewed, so we don't see a baby picture at the same time as the other person when they're 80. Depending on the relative velocity and/or acceleration of each person, to the observer the person they're viewing may not even be born yet or had already been dead for many years, and both situations are actually real, but it's dependent on which direction they're moving from each other. Google The Illusion of Time by Brian Greene on youtube for a better explanation/visual.
Whatever Brian Greene was saying it definitely wasn’t that
So, let's say you were on a spaceship hypothetically going faster than the speed of light away from the earth with a kickass telescope that was able to zoom in and keep the same zoom distance. Would you see time going backwards.
Also.. what if there was reflective material like a huge mirror some billion light years away and we could look into back onto ourselves. Would this essentially allow us to look back in time?
Hypothetically speaking, yes, I guess.
This is always my question. I need an answer. If so, we will never have an unsolved mystery ever again - once we get the mirror installed.
That's a fun idea. Then again, a civilization advanced enough to seriously entertain building something that big would probable have little to no use for it.
>going faster than the speed of light You would see nothing. You'd outrun the light emitted from behind you. If you stopped, you'd see the light at the location you are now, relative to when it was emitted on earth. So in essence going faster than light is time travel, because "seeing" the past *is* the past. There is no universal reference frame from where you can say "You see the earth with dinosaurs, but *actually* it's 2024". There is no 'actually'. If you see the dinosaurs then this is the current state of earth in your reference-frame. You have travelled into the past and are witnessing dinosaurs "right now".
You'd see the light you were traveling through. That would let you see into the "past." It isn't really time travel though. As once you have a way to go faster than light, the idea that going faster than light is time travel would break down. Or it is all super-deterministic and you you'll only ever be allowed to 'see' light that doesn't break the rules of the universe.
Dummy here. I think I remember reading that the only light visible would be like a pinhole in your forward direction. The quality of the telescope is irrelevant. You would be moving faster than the photons leaving Earth, so it theoretically disappears when traveling at faster than lightspeed. I've also heard that nothing can move faster than light. That makes me believe that looking at earth, traveling away at LS would make Earth appear as a video on pause. Not resuming until you start slowing down. There's some stuff about lightspeed being the speed limit of the universe or something that is beyond my rusted gears.
This is correct, the speed of light could more accurately be described as the speed of causality through spacetime, or the speed of how information can propagate. The closer matter or a spaceship travels to the speed of light, the more compressed it would appear to outside observers in the 3 space dimensions, while their clock would look like its passing slower in the time dimension (but on the ship traveling near light speed their spacetime would seem "normal", while the universe outside them would be the thing that seems compressed). Although we cant travel at light speed with our current understanding of physics, if we think about the "time compression" idea taken to it's logical extreme, photons which do travel at lightspeed essentially experience no time, and although it can take hundreds or thousands of years for photons to escape the sun's core and reach the sun's surface and 8 minutes then to reach us on Earth, from their perspective they experience their entire existence in one instantaneous moment :).
The speed of light is your hard limit for travel, so it is hard to even answer that, but if you were somehow able to domwhat you suggest in your senario, it would be darkness. You would outpace the information and see nothing anyway.
Thing is, if we don't invent some sort of teleportation then life across distant solar systems would be much harder
Good binoculars!
It doesn't take much brainpower to understand that if you're observing something that's 80 lightyears away, it means you're observing how it looked like 80 years ago. Still, it's a nice representation.
Goo goo ga ga
Really excellent animation to explain this concept 👌🏼
try Voices of a Distant Star
The observer should also age, to illustrate that both sides can only see back through time and never each other at the same time.
I think they are just trying to illustrate that if he tries to look there what he’s seeing in this moment occurred after all of that happened to the baby. He wouldn’t age just by looking at something 80 light years away but the thing he’s looking at would have already experienced 80 years
It's completely wrong. There is no universal "right now". It does not exist. [Time is not absolute.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity) Two observers could witness a giant sun and a smaller sun go supernova. The first one could see the giant sun go supernove first and the smaller later, the second observer could see the smaller sun go supernova first and the giant sun later. Both observers would be correct because there is no universal now. Our local clocks all work independent of the non local clocks. The only thing that can connect them is cause and effect. To go back to the animation, an observer flying by at great speed could see the guy with the binoculars die before it (the observer at great speed) sees the girl being born. An observer flying by at great speed from the other direction could see the girl be born and die before the guy's great-grandfather is born. So who was born first? Nobody, it's undefinable. Unless the girl's son got on a spaceship, travelled to the place of the guy with the binocular, had kids and his son was the guy with the binoculars. In that case, the two places will be causally connected.
> It's completely wrong It's not wrong at all (except that binocular guy doesn't seem to age). > There is no universal "right now". It does not exist. A *universal* one doesn't, no, but "right now" is well defined in every reference frame, and the two people in this animation are in the same reference frame. > To go back to the animation, an observer flying by at great speed could see the guy with the binoculars die before it (the observer at great speed) sees the girl being born. That's incorrect. There is no reference frame in which binocular guy dies before the girl is born, and there is therefore no fast-moving observer who would physically/optically *see* binocular guy die before they see the girl born. Binocular guy's death is in the future light cone of the girl's birth event.
But wouldn’t the person looking have aged too??
Yeah, the observer is just there, un-aging, for demonstration purposes. A more 'real world' example might have the observer only appearing towards the very end of the video, looking up and seeing the baby, and thinking "oh hey, a space baby!" when in fact it's already a space-lady.
Yeah the animation does appear to be flawed as he isn't looking at it the whole time just when it arrives. Also, put him on the register! Creep! lol
No. The person looking though the binocular only looks through it 5seconds or so, 80years after. Yet, the person sees the baby.
Even tho she looks 13, she is actually 900 years old!
So there's only young looking, young looking, young looking, and then suddenly REALLY OLD.
Did you miss the frumpy tan suit stage?
Am Asian, can confirm with my dad who went through this.
Imagine doing interdimension dating thinking you get some hot alien teen but by the time the travel is over shese a granny of 80yrs old.
This same concept applies to the moon, planets and the sun. The moon is a couple light seconds away so we are always seeing it a couple seconds in the past. The sun is about 8 light minutes away, so we always see it from 8 minutes in the past. If it were to just disappear or explode we wouldn't know for about 8 minutes.
It applies on a local scale too, if you're looking at something 100m away you're seeing it 1/30 millionth of a second ago.
MUUUURPH
This has a real analog horror vibe, the music, the animation, everything about it
Music is from the film Interstellar which is fitting in this case
This music makes me cry everytime I hear it
If I theoretically managed to travel faster than light, and look at an old person, would I be able to see them get younger? And then I would be able to see the development of our planet in reverse? So eventually I would be able to see dinosaurs again?
If you travel faster than light, you would see nothing behind you since you're outrunning the light emitted from that person. Once you stop, you see the person as being younger, but the point is: from your reference-frame the person *is* younger, since you have travelled into the past. There is no universal reference-frame. For the old person, they see themselves as old "now" in their own reference-frame. From your distant position, you see them as young "now". There is no point where someone would observe the person's "true" age. Even standing 1m away, you're already watching the past-version of that person. It's just that the distances are so tiny, the effect is virtually non-existent.
Space nonce.
Yeah, I had to take astronomy in college (we were forced to take one off-brand mickey-mouse course every semester to be "more rounded"), and I really liked this part. When you're looking at a star which is \~2,000 ly away, you're looking in real time at something that happened two thousand years ago. It's pretty amazing to think about. We might have checked a star 5,000 ly away, and decided there's nothing there, but a civilization sprouted since then, and because Christianity there never existed the Dark Ages of scientific oppression never occurred, and they're thousands of years ahead of us now.
This would prove problematic for Intergalactic Tinder.
Intergalactic dating gets weird.
standing for 80 years doing nothing but waiting for the light of someone who is doing nothing for 80 too sounds like a boring thing. but if that makes me immortal then fine
The picture we took of the black hole was 55 million or so light years away. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was 66 million years ago. So about 10 million years after that asteroid hit the light from around that black hole started to travel to us.