/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11859442
who are you quoting?

>>11859442
The cosmological distances are so incomprehensibly large, I created a model to help you understand them. You've most certainly encountered my model before, one way or another, even if you've never heard of me.

In my model, sometimes referred to as the Burnham scale, a speck two-thousandths of a mm across representing the Earth lies one inch away from a speck of dust a hundredth of an inch across representing the Sun. The planet Mercury is four-tenths of an inch from the Sun, Venus nearly three-quarters of an inch, Mars at 1.6 inches, Jupiter at 5 inches, Saturn at just under 10 inches, Uranus at 19 inches, Neptune at 30 inches, and Pluto at 39.5 inches. One way of visualizing the Burnham scale is to stand with an outstretched arm; the tips of your fingers to the center of your body approximates the radial distance of Neptune or Pluto from the Sun.

Alpha Centauri is 4.5 lightyears away. On the Burnham scale, it's 4.5 miles away.

Since all stars in the Galaxy are several lightyears apart, with each represented by a speck of dust, each star in the Galaxy is separated from its neighbors by miles. They're practically isolated.

The span of the Milky Way Galaxy on this scale is about 100000 miles. It's enormously big compared with the Solar System: 6.336 billion inches vs 80 inches for the Solar System.

The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million lightyears away. That's 2.5 million miles away on the Burnham scale.

Andromeda and the Milky Way are members of the Local Group of galaxies, which is itself is part of galaxy clusters - which are part of galaxy superclusters.

The model is fairly accurate, because there are 63360 inches in a mile and there are 63294 Astronomical Units in a lightyear.

While my model is well-known and often used to help illustrate the vast distances of the cosmos, it's a curious fact of the modern age that the people who believe gravity is the dominant force in the universe have never deeply engaged my model.

We'll never reach out of the solar system, but that doesn't fucking matter because there's enough resources on Jupiter and its moons to create a civilization millions of times more advanced and large than ours.

>>11859442
You can get there in a hundred years by using thermonuclear bombs to push a colony ship.

>>11859533
Are you tripfagging as a dead man? what the fuck

>>11859442
>magnetic fields don't interact with plasma

Your ability to follow recent developments is a fantasy

>>11859533
Gravity IS the dominant force at large scales

>>11860262
>>11859533
>eu garbage
into the trash it goes

>>11860477
>miscategorizing us developments as eu garbage

case in point

ok doomer

>>11860205
Yeah nobody said otherwise mining nearby asteroids is as far as you can get anything else is a manchild fantasy
>>11860585
Being a space faring species is a non-issue its not "doomerism" you retard because as far as we know we're practically safe for an absurd amount of time from space weather and external threats nothing to worry about really.

>>11860213
Pretty optimistic of you

>>11859443
Himself, when he made this thread yesterday and got BTFO.

>>11862283
Wtf are you talking about schizo?

>>11859442
>Impossible to reach due to universal distances
GIVE IT A 100 YEARS DOOMER

>>11859442
The problem isn't one of distance it's a problem of the length of an average human life-span. Using current tech, it would take about 100-150 years to reach the Alpha Centauri system. To a human this seems absurd, but in cosmological scales 100 years is like a nano-second. A space faring species could colonize the entire galaxy in a 100-200k years or so, which barely even registers on a cosmological scale that is measured in millions of years.

In fact even conventional chemical rockets are incredibly fast by the standards of the natural universe, it's humans that process information so slow that 100 years seems like an eternity to our small primate brains.

>>11861036
>>11859442
>Interstellar travel is a fantasy
"Not fast enough?! Just strap several NUKES to it."
*pic related*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y61DLw88dBA

>>11862368
>it's humans that process information so slow that 100 years seems like an eternity
Fast not slow

>>11862368
If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.
In other words if our universe doesn't let us travel fast we can still modify our bodies in order to sustain long voyages.
By hibernation or other sorts of suspend animation or even uploading our brains on a computer.
It's still a technological problem, just a solvable one.

I have a question for all of you who think interstellar travel is
>impossible

Do you think we reached the end of physics?
As in: Do we know everything there is to know about the laws of the physical universe?
Do you think there is nothing at all we might have missed, missunderstood or simply not encountered yet?

And if you do, what makes you think that?

>>11864077
No,But we'll definitely reach a limit.

>>11859533
Ay that don't look that far anymore, also, nice

>>11859442
>Furthest continent
>Impossible to reach due to oceanic distances
Intercontinental travel is a fantasy

>>11859442
>Reaching the edge of the Earth is fantasy
>Reaching the Moon is fantasy
>Reaching Mars is fantasy
>Reaching that asteroid is fantasy

Everything is fantasy until it's not

>>11866246
>>11866887

I'm the guy who posted this
>>11864077
yet I have to point out that your comparisons don't really work here.

There never was an actual limit on people to cross the oceans. They just didn't try very hard. The vikings crossed the ocean to America and then nobody for hundreds of years.

Interstellar travel is really something else because we don't even have an idea how to do it. It's not that we are complacent or are just not trying hard enough. We just have no idea how to do it in reasonable timeframes (and no a 10 years or longer journey is not a reasonable timeframe)

Fact is we REALLY need some breakthrough in physics and / or engineering. Some discovery we aren't even aware of now.

>>11867288
>We just have no idea how to do it in reasonable timeframes (and no a 10 years or longer journey is not a reasonable timeframe)
Is this really the hill you’re willing to die on? Sure, it’s a risky and massive enterprise, but if humanity or its descendants will exist for another couple thousand years it’s unimaginable to me that they won’t try and succeed.

>>11867589
In a so-called unreasonable time frame of, say, a hundred years, I mean.

>>11867288
This. If we really wanted, we could send a ship to Alpha Centauri and colonize it with our current technology. Colonizing the solar system would be trivial. The problem is organizational, societal and economic, not technological. Plus we are still very, very far away from the end physics, there is just so much more to learn about the possibilities of manipulating spacetime in new and exciting ways.