Scale model of the solar system and FSD

[Winterwalker]

I'll raise you...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Sun;_VY_Canis_Majoris_and_UY_Scuti_size.jpg

Curses! Foiled again!

I see your UY Scuti and raise you further (with a little switcharoo) to "deep time" ;

30 kM/second (minimum supercruise) might be slow, but is in fact even more ridiculously fast when considering how silly short one second really is? There are 31.5 million seconds before a child's 1st birthday, compared perhaps to 500 million years, since the Cambrian Period which occurred in around the last 1/10th of the age of the earth?! Even at three times miminum supercruise speed (1000km/s) it will take me a number of days to travel between two planets in the same system to deliver this consignment of Liquor (which I now need, plus a sit down, after trying to get my head around how big UY Scuti also is)! How far could I get in 4.6bn years at the speed of light, 1c???

 

[Bran Tse Mallory]

I would love to tell you but I get confused with anything less than 10 billion years old. Currently trying to learn as much as I can about SM0313 a true second generation star!

This is mind blowing stuff as it is in our own backyard... A star from the very beginning of the Universe.

https://briankoberlein.com/2014/02/12/second-generation/

I started a thread about it not so long ago too: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=182270&highlight=second+generation+star

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

It will never become truly comprehensible. The numbers are quite simply too large to make sense to our puny minds.

We've developed to cope with sizes and distances that make sense to our natural environment as it's looked for millions of years. That's why our minds get somewhat confused when we see a huge mountain in the distance and it doesn't seem to move or become larger as we walk towards it.

Some things are simply truly incomprehensible, and there's nothing we can do about it.

For example - we know that the difference in strength between the Nuclear Strong Force and Gravity is 10^38:1 at the range at which NSF works, but it's still incomprehensibly large. You cannot set up any kind of perspective to make sense of that number.

Just to try though. Imagine that you've had a 100 Watt light bulb burning for the entirety of agrarian culture (about 10,000 years). The amount of energy that light bulb has consumed is ~1/10^38th of the energy the sun gives off in a single second.

That's just how astronomy works - the numbers are stupendously huge and far beyond any real comprehension.

I Disagree. As a geologist myself I regularly work with massive numbers, large distances. Its just a matter of practice.

Visitors to a mine site marvel at the excavator and the big trucks. To me they're toys, tools getting the job done. I still see they're BIG, but I'm familiar with the sheer size and what each can do.

We can all get our heads around apparent faster-than-light travel in games - reality would be no different.
But to the untrained mind (untrained in thinking/measuring/estimating large distances, yes, it is overwhelming.

And beautiful. Good post OP.

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

How far could I get in 4.6bn years at the speed of light, 1c???

Well since the current estimated diameter of the known universe is about 46 billion light years... at 1c you'd traverse about 1/10 of the diameter of the universe in that time.

Pour me a drink too, its going to be a long trip.

 

[Ursula_17]

Awesome Video... Thanks for sharing. I am going to give a copy to my wife for her Year 1 Primary School kids to watch!!

 

[Winterwalker]

Well since the current estimated diameter of the known universe is about 46 billion light years... at 1c you'd traverse about 1/10 of the diameter of the universe in that time.

Nice!

Pour me a drink too, its going to be a long trip.

That's "a long trip" at ridiculous speeds!!

[video=youtube;Yjg6mRFzZzE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjg6mRFzZzE[/video]


Like a boss ...

Spoiler

[video=youtube;xuqf_6oplMc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuqf_6oplMc[/video]

 

[Zieman]

How far could I get in 4.6bn years at the speed of light, 1c???

Depends on who measures the time.

If it is you, you'd get instantly as far as it takes to hit something that lies on your trajectory - causing a very big bang or even new Big Bang...

If it is an outside observer, who's not moving at relativistic speeds, you'd travel 4.6bn light years.

 

[stevesideas]

The scale of the universe is truly mindboggling.

As a side thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could force all Celebrities and Politicians into a Total Perspective Vortex. I think the world would be a much nicer place after that.

Mind bottleling ?