3 ms·
It makes me a little sad, because we're in this frustrating position of knowing how "effectively unlimited" the universe is, but also knowing how impossible it
by tombert 3y ago
It makes me a little sad, because we're in this frustrating position of knowing how "effectively unlimited" the universe is, but also knowing how impossible it is to realistically explore it, at least not without a fundamental change to our understanding of physics.
I think it'd be cool to set up colonies on other planets, or hell, other solar systems, but the inability to communicate seems like a pretty hard blocker. I mean, even sticking to the solar system, will start taking six hours for the light to even reach earth from Pluto, assuming it can even have a direct path.
I don't know anything about physics, so I was hoping that the entanglement hypothesis might allow us to fix that, but clearly that wasn't the case. This makes me sad.
- staunton 3y agoWe have "enough time" to explore stuff. You or me will not live to see it but what's stopping a spaceship from going to some place for a few million years?
- tombert 3y agoI mean, sure, in the scope of the universe then there's plenty of time before the heat death for some humans to explore another star system, they just won't really be able to communicate about it and relay back to us within a human lifetime really. I'm just kind of hoping that physicists are all wrong, and that there turns out to be some fancy math that allows to do something faster than light. Not saying it's gonna happen that way, but a guy can dream.
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoFundamentally there don’t seem to be any physical laws prohibiting us from solving biological immortality at least, so maybe if we can get the robot bodies up and running for ourselves we’d be able to do some exploring over a very long time.
- xandrius 3y agoNo exploring for me though :(
- jayrot 3y agoIt’s still wild to me that early exploration (or I suppose colonization) of earth had the same limitation, though. The latency of packet transmission by sailing ship was pretty insane.