4 ms·

No wonder the Millennium Falcon takes so longer to calculate its jump to hyperspace. Tens of thousands a year is one an hour! There are so many supernovae you

No wonder the Millennium Falcon takes so longer to calculate its jump to hyperspace. Tens of thousands a year is one an hour! There are so many supernovae you really could bounce too close to one and that would end your trip real quick

ninkendo 2y ago
Star Wars takes place entirely within one galaxy, and the number of supernova per galaxy is something like 1 per century, so, nah, Han was just bullshitting to stall for time while his busted-ass computer cobbled together numbers.
- IggleSniggle 2y ago
  Not only that, it happened a long long time ago. I'm no astronomer; would that be more or less supernovae?
  - Wobbles42 2y ago
    Indeed. They didn't say it happened an "int" time ago. They didn't even say a "long" time ago. They said a "long long" time. I'd have to pull up a copy of the C standard to be sure, but even if the units of "time" are plank times, I suspect the implications could easily be that the story occurs before the big bang.
    - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
      I suspect you're thinking of a double (floating point). A long long is only a 64 bit integer. 2^64 planck times is 9.9e-25 seconds. Planck times are really tiny. 2^64 nanoseconds is 584 years.
      - Wobbles42 2y ago
        Oh, you're right! I do remember doing this calculation with integers at some point. I might have been using something like a UUID as my bitfield length. The context was timestamps -- I (playfully) figured out how many bits we'd need to count Planck times before the expected heat death of the universe, thus being truly future proof. I was expecting the answer to be a rediculous number, but in fact it was more in the "not efficient, but definitely feasible" range. Floating point gets us there too, of course, but it has its own drawbacks and it isn't nearly as funny.
- wruza 2y ago
  Most movies don't even leave our stellar vicinity, because they want to use hyped star/constellation names and these are from the very local set of stars. Not only a naked eye sees only around a few thousands stars, but most of them are basically next door. The mean distance to the star that you can see is <1% of galaxy size. Almost everything you see is in a 10px circle on the 1080p fullscreen galaxy map.

ninkendo 2y ago

Star Wars takes place entirely within one galaxy, and the number of supernova per galaxy is something like 1 per century, so, nah, Han was just bullshitting to stall for time while his busted-ass computer cobbled together numbers.

IggleSniggle 2y ago
Not only that, it happened a long long time ago. I'm no astronomer; would that be more or less supernovae?
- Wobbles42 2y ago
  Indeed. They didn't say it happened an "int" time ago. They didn't even say a "long" time ago. They said a "long long" time. I'd have to pull up a copy of the C standard to be sure, but even if the units of "time" are plank times, I suspect the implications could easily be that the story occurs before the big bang.
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    I suspect you're thinking of a double (floating point). A long long is only a 64 bit integer. 2^64 planck times is 9.9e-25 seconds. Planck times are really tiny. 2^64 nanoseconds is 584 years.
    - Wobbles42 2y ago
      Oh, you're right! I do remember doing this calculation with integers at some point. I might have been using something like a UUID as my bitfield length. The context was timestamps -- I (playfully) figured out how many bits we'd need to count Planck times before the expected heat death of the universe, thus being truly future proof. I was expecting the answer to be a rediculous number, but in fact it was more in the "not efficient, but definitely feasible" range. Floating point gets us there too, of course, but it has its own drawbacks and it isn't nearly as funny.
wruza 2y ago
Most movies don't even leave our stellar vicinity, because they want to use hyped star/constellation names and these are from the very local set of stars. Not only a naked eye sees only around a few thousands stars, but most of them are basically next door. The mean distance to the star that you can see is <1% of galaxy size. Almost everything you see is in a 10px circle on the 1080p fullscreen galaxy map.