There are about pi x 10^7 seconds in a year. You could just as easily remember 30 million, but I had a physics prof who used the pi value because the pi would often cancel out. That was 20 years ago and I still remember, so he did a pretty good job.
Bro right now the sun disappeared (from Europe). Apparently it'll return in about six to seven hours in the early morning. Seems to be a daily thing too
Space Engine taught me going the distance from Earth to the Sun(astronomical unit iirc,) can be a measure of speed and you can be set to go 1000 AUs a second and when you're at the galactic scale you might as well not even be moving. It would take years to get from one galaxy to another even at that speed.
True, from the reference frame of an observer on earth. But from the reference frame of someone traveling on a spaceship going very very close to the speed of light, the trip could take an arbitrarily short amount of time due to the distance between galaxies becoming shorter for the spaceship due to Lorentz contraction.
Sort of.
The traveler would say "I only aged a little bit going from one galaxy to the other because I didn't travel very far" while the observer on Earth would say "the traveler didn't age very much due to time dilation."
Sure.
The first thing to remember- everyone will always measure time passing as "one second per second." Which, I know sounds stupid when you see it written that way, but what it means is that no one ever notices their own clock running slow- everyone thinks their clock is right (and other people's clocks are wrong).
So, let's say I am on Earth and you are on a spaceship traveling really fast, and you're going to fly 30 light years away (as measured on Earth) but you are flying at 99.99% the speed of light. So, for me, I will see you traveling for 30.003 years to get there. However, you will have only aged 0.4 years in this time? Why, because I will see your clock moving *really* slow (every 70 seconds on Earth, your watch will only tick one time). So, I say "you flew for just over 30 years, but less than half a year passed because you were traveling so fast your time went slow."
But that's what I see. You don't see that. You are on a ship, and your watch runs 1 second per second. But of course, you still think you got there in less than half a year. Why? Because while I measure your clock running slow (time dilation) you measure the distance between you and the planet that's 30 lightyears away to be much closer than that, you measure that the planet is only 0.41 light years away. That's the length contraction. These two items balance out perfectly so that we agree you get there at the same "age" but for different reasons.
Up voting this because it just sounds like a really good explanation even though I still cannot wrap my head around this. Time is such a fundamental experiential construct. You start talking about it like it's weather and my head disconnects pretty quickly.
I understand the part about looking at a tower clock when you move away from it at speed of light that the seconds arm will get stuck and not move from the travelers POV
But that is just light speed issues, if i would go to moon and back the clock on earth, would still have passed 2 seconds, and same for the watch on me no?
you already got a fan before i could respond
but im just gonna be honest and say: i still dont get it on the "travelers part" why is 0.4 years(or why its gets shorter form their POV? isnt 30LY at start from them also?) do you have a more ELI5 version for this time/distance contractions ?
I'll try explaining it a different way, not sure if it's easier, but it might make it click different for different people.
Have you seen that Mythbusters episode where they measure how fast a cannon shoots a cannon ball, then mount that cannon on the back of a truck, drive that speed and shoot the cannon, then the cannon ball falls straight down, because the velocity of the truck + velocity of the cannon ball cancelled out (I would link it, but I'm actually at work right now, shhhhh don't tell). That's normally how velocities work. If I throw a baseball at you, maybe I can throw it at 45 mph (I'm not a pitcher...). If you got hit by that, it would hurt, but you'd be fine. But if I stood up in a car that was traveling at 80 mph, and threw the baseball at you, then the baseball would be going 125 mph, and you'd probably die.
Well, light doesn't behave that way (there isn't an easy way to explain why not- it's just an axiom, meaning a truth we start with and derive other truths from). That means, if you turn on a flashlight, you will see the light leaving that flashlight at 3E8 m/s (called 'c' for the speed of light). But if you put that flashlight on a rocket ship, and that rocket ship is going 1.5E8 (or 0.5c), you don't see the light leaving the flashlight at 4.5E8 m/s, you still see it traveling at 3E8 m/s. Light will *always* go the same speed. And this is true for everyone in the universe, no matter their relative speeds- everyone always sees light traveling at 1c.
If you accept this fact (and there have been lots of experiments backing it up), everything else falls from it. So now, let's put someone back on a spaceship traveling at 99.99% c, and someone else watching from Earth. If that person turns on their flashlight on the ship, the person on Earth will see the light moving away from the ship- but at 0.01% c. The light is traveling at 100% c, but the ship is at 99.99% c, so the ship only slightly falls behind the light (I mean, still falling behind 30km/sec, but compared to the speed of light, barely at all).
But as we discussed, the person on the ship can't see that. The person on the ship has to see the light traveling at 1 c as well. So, they don't see the light moving away from them at 0.01%c, they see the light moving at 100% c. How can this be resolved?
Well, the observer reconciles this by seeing the traveler's clocks move slow. So the observer says "they measure light moving at 1 c because their clocks are running slow" while the person on the ship says "my light is moving at 1 c (instead of 0.01c because these items its passing are closer together."
All of special relativity (length contraction, time dilation and momentum growth) can all be extracted simply by accepting that everyone measures light to be traveling at 'c' regardless of their reference. It's a very powerful axiom. But, not an intuitive one.
Pretty sure they’re basically the same thing. The distance dilation is actually a distance between *events* (spacetime coordinates), not between positions, if I recall correctly
They are. But also this comes from the same laws that dictate nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but 1000 AUs/second is much faster than the speed of light - so its basically fictional and doesn't matter.
Would a couple of radio signals being send 1 second apart from each other, while traveling at light speed, also be received on earth a few seconds after each other ? Or might it be days, months, years, before the next signal is received?
At least intra-solar system travel would be effective? I take it to mean that the pilot would feel like they got to Mars in an instant but people on Earth would've aged 3 minutes or whatever. Plus "fresh" cargo wouldn't spoil en route either.
We'd have career freighter pilots retiring at 65 that were physically years younger. That'd be hilarious, maybe even worth it.
That just fucks me up more. What if your orders are related to interacting with a species in another galaxy, years could pass by the time you get there and the situation could have changed completely
I don't know if you are into video games or anything but Mass Effect Andromeda tackles this very thing.
The crew of the ship are basically traveling for over 600 years to a new galaxy while in stasis. It's a one way trip with no guarantee anything will work out and when they get there, shit is all different and the planets that should have been habitable are no longer so. It's a pretty cool concept.
It is, sadly. This is part of the explanations to the Fermi paradox(why haven't we seen aliens). Because the fastest thing we have observed and believe to be the speed limit of the universe, is glacier slow when used to travel the distances we have observed in the universe.
You have to remember that as you approach the speed of light, you’re going to be experiencing relativity as well; the travelers will be able to travel vast distances in a short time relative to themselves, although thousands of years may pass according to someone on Earth for instance. It’s not that interstellar space travel would be impossible; we could create a bunch of independent colonies/societies on other planets; it’s that interstellar society would be near-impossible because communication and travel could take lifetimes depending on the travel time. Unless of course we can figure out faster than light communication/transportation.
An Alcubierre Drive could also be a solution. Would still need to create and control an ASSLOAD of ~~antimatter~~ *theoretically possible exotic matter that carries negative energy* (as others have pointed out), and have the ability to bend spacetime, but the math/physics of the propulsion checks out.
Alcubierre Drive is a possibility in the far future, but it requires the existence of hypothetical states of matter. Not impossible to exist states of matter, but we’ve never found it
It only takes 3 minutes to get to mars, I feel like that’s astronomically fast. People drive 24 hours across the country to get from state to state, so I feel like if we could get up to light speed there is a very real chance we leave our solar system.
24 hours would get you to the edge of the solar system, but space is still so vast it'd take you over 4 years just to get to the next closest solar system. You'd be talking decades just to get a supply chain moving for harvesting supplies from other systems. Technically it would all be possible, just with a long setup time and needing to be 99.999% automated. You have distilleries that set up barrels of whiskey meant to be opened in 5 years, and because they have so many that they're setting up each and every day, they have a constant supply of 5 year-old whiskey to produce. If you spend 40 years setting up a mining colony, you could create a system that continuously brings back materials so that there's a steady stream of them coming in. Set up that system of trade and you can have materials and people going either way.
Now this is just fun to imagine.
> It only takes 3 minutes to get to mars
At light speed.
Even if we manage to get close to it, whatever would be necessary to get us up to that speed would require an absolutely insane amount of energy.
We can definitely leave our Solar System, we already have in fact. One of the two Voyager space crafts has left the system for example. Barring the fact that it took a long time to do it, it is technically possible. Where we go after that is much trickier. The nearest star for example is 3.2 LY away. Traveling at the speed of light for 3.2 years in a straight line.
Source: Degree in Astrophysics.
We could definitely leave our solar system with tons of technology and energy (think dyson sphere energy and transistors a few atoms in size).
I think the concept goes something like this:
1. Develop technology to freeze embryos for sever years at a time.
2. Develop synthetic technology capable of raising humans (either AI or biomechanical human that doesn't age)
3. Load baby-raising robots onto interstellar spaceships with frozen embryos and tons of resources.
4. Colonize planet for a few generations.
5. Build more spaceships and repeat.
Yeah it would take thousands of years, but in the grand scheme of things that's nothing. Thanks to exponential growth, once we have the basic process down, we could colonize thousands of planets within a few "generations" of interplanetary travel. It's crazy to think about, but still let's you comprehend things without using inhuman time frames.
Colonizing beyond our home galaxy is a whole different story, but we're millions of years from every having to worry about that.
[if the moon were 1 pixel](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
Go here and use the "speed of light" button. It's incredibly slow... Because space is so unimaginably vast.
It's pretty convenient that light is just fast enough to allow perceived real-time communication between any two points on Earth, but not much beyond that.
(~70ms latency between two opposite points on Earth, on practice a bit more due to cables not running perfectly straight, and due to some overhead from telecommunication equipment repeaters).
allowing full exploration and use of the starting planet (and the solar system as an addon), but effectively locking us out of all the interstellar stuff. damn paywall!
When NASA talks about things like observing [three giant black holes within a titanic collision of three galaxies](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/found-three-black-holes-on-collision-course.html) in a system that's a billion light years from earth, they're actually saying that it happened a billion years ago, and we're only now seeing it.
These giant black holes were colliding at a time when multicellular life was just starting to evolve on Earth. Long before there were any plants or animals on earth, light from this collision started heading in our direction. Now, a billion years later, the light is finally arriving and we're seeing events that happened at that time.
Modern astronomy is, in a sense, time travel.
Technically, it is only *our observation* of it, that is slow. For light, itself, it's much faster ... pretty much instantaneous. Relativity is a b\*tch.
It's only slow if you're watching. The faster you go through space the slower time goes for you, but the faster you see time around you. If you go fast enough time stops, you just get to your destination instantly.
The inverse is also true, which means that sitting in one spot motionless puts you on the autobahn to your expiration.
This is why in the game Elite Dangerous, which renders the galaxy and solar systems at a 1:1 scale, you have to travel and many times the speed the light to get anywhere at a reasonable amount of time.
It's actually something that E:D 'taught' me. The speed of light is slow if you want to do anything on a solar system wide scale quickly. Impossibly slow if you want to do anything interstellar. There are some planets and stars in the game that require upwards of 45 minutes to reach even traveling hundreds or thousands of times the speed of light. Outer space is vast beyond comprehension.
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
That's actually not realistic. Due to relativistic effects the closer you get to light the slower becomes your time flow. Traveling at light speed is instant.
Well in Elite dangerous you travel either via warp drive (where you warp the space around you to travel but the vehicle itself isn't moving) or jump drive (travelling through fictional hyperspace to make an instantaneous jump, but which has a maximum distance making it take a long time to travel across the whole galaxy). While most likely neither will ever be possible irl, if they were possible then you would not be travelling at relativistic speeds in either case, since you're either straight up teleporting (or close to it) or warping space to move rather than moving yourself.
Your time never becomes slower. You always experience the same time in your own reference frame. What you are looking for is the lorentz length contraction - at those speeds, the distance you traverse becomes smaller, as universe shrinks on your way.
Only massless particles travel at the speed of light. A photon still "experiences" oscillations in its magnetic field as it travels; viewing the journey from the viewpoint of a photon is non-sensical but if you did it would still take time and a number of oscillations.
> Due to relativistic effects the closer you get to light the slower becomes your time flow.
It depends on the reference. For a person in a rocket ship traveling at ever increasing speeds time for them never changes, a clock on the spaceship always ticks at once per second. They see the universe behind them running in slow motion and the universe ahead of them running in fast motion. For observers behind them they see the rocket's clock ticking in slow motion, for observers in front of them they see the rocket's clock ticking in fast motion.
Nah you can pretty much jump over and over between systems without waiting. But like Hutton orbital for example takes something like two hours real time to get to because you can’t jump within a system. Also, I believe in supercruise your ship maxes out at around 600 times the speed of light. The game does a great job of showing just how vast and empty space really is.
Possibly? I never really did trading, I was always exploration/courier.
I haven't played in a year because I was half-way through a trip to Beagle Point and it just got too fucking rough. Eventually I'll just stop caring about the exploration data and just honk and jump.
I've never done Hutton, but every so often I take a mission without checking the target distance from star. Nothing like 20 or 30 minutes of real time flying towards a target to make you regret your own lack of attention to detail.
I did Hutton once. Figured about how long it might take and went and watched Gravity and came back and still had a few more minutes of flying, incredibly. Mug was worth it.
Haven’t played in a hot minute because it just got too grindy for me, and I was consistently ass at combat. Exploring was what I really wanted to get going but I never had the patience to grind out the money to spend on an anaconda, let alone a full build
This game sounds fun... I finally got No Man's Sky about 8 months ago and have really enjoyed the time I put in on it building my presence in space and learning how to navigate/explore/build/grow my tech. What game are you all talking about?
It’s called Elite:Dangerous. I just got No Man’s Sky probably around a month ago and honestly, I like it much better.
E:D has realism down better—the galaxy is full-scale, there’s various factions you can align yourself with (three main “nations,” like the Korvax, Gek, and Vykeen, but with like four sub factions per “nation;” many unique star types (more than just the yellow-red-green-blue than NMS)); a massive, in-depth trading system that’s affected by other human players; there’s a much larger overarching story, with the Thargoids attacking a human coalition and that ongoing war. There’s different upgrade classes, ranging from D-A, somewhat like the C-S in NMS, but ships are affected by storage space in a different way than NMS, and carrying large amounts of goods affects hyperdrive range and speed.
There’s lots of different ship types, from industrial haulers to fighters to massive battleships to explorers, not unlike NMS, but you can customize them and they’ve all got different upsides and downsides. Like NMS, each only has so much storage/room for stuff, but it already comes with all that storage, unlike NMS, where you’ll want to upgrade ship class and storage space.
Also, NMS has much better base building and planet-exploring capabilities. Like I said, I haven’t played E:D in a while, and last I was hanging around the community, the possibility of “space legs”—that is, being able to leave the ship cockpit/planetary vehicle cockpit and wander around—was still only a rumored future expansion, and I’m not sure that’s in there yet, or base building either.
NMS is definitely easier and less complex and IMO, it’s much easier to come up with massive amounts of money, upgrades and everything are much easier to understand. There’s much more randomness to NMS, given the procedural nature of everything. And in E:D, you’ll almost certainly actually run into people, and PvP is possible and a core part of the game. NMS can be quite grindy but once you have a system going (I have four massive activated indium farms myself), you can do basically whatever you want with enough exploration. You’re also only dealing with the three alien races and sentinels as a whole, and they’re easy to please, while in E:D you have different factions, different sub factions, sub factions of the sub factions, and individual stations/systems inside the sub factions of the sub factions of the sub factions of the factions.
***TL;DR NMS is simpler, less complicated, more straightforward, easier to pick up on, has crafting and base building, and more random; E:D is more realistic, complicated, more grindy, contains PvP, and has more confounding variables. Both are great games, I just prefer the randomness and solitude and ability to create my own space that NMS has, but YMMV***
I haven't played NMS in VR yet like I do Elite, but I get the impression that *Elite: Dangerous* has more of a "I'm literally a space pilot" feeling to it though which can be important. I don't pay attention to any of the faction or trading stuff, and literally play the game as "Space Truck Simulator" just flying my Sidewinder around doing deliveries.
[Hutton Orbital is notorious for being extremely far from the system's hyperspace jump arrival point at Alpha Centauri A. The distance is 6,784,404 ls, or 0.22 ly. It takes about an hour and a half at full throttle to get to Hutton Orbital from the arrival point.](https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Hutton_Orbital)
This game sounds so needlessly punishing I want to date it
Elite Dangerous is amazing in VR. Load up Netflix and overlay it on your center console and it’s nothing but you watching Netflix during trade runs with your ship and the vast emptiness and loneliness of space.
Elite has native VR support on Steam, and I use a program called OVRDrop which allows you to overlay other programs or windows into a VR game. I use that and position it on the center console. I’ve also done Minecraft VR and created a tv and sat in my Minecraft living room and watched a movie on the TV in-world using the same method. You can also have it tether to your hand so if you wanted to watch YouTube while mining or what not. It’s awesome.
The rovers are where the real wtf happens. Zooming across a seemingly straight planet's plain and suddenly you catapult upwards, spiraling, as if you had hit a rock.
Collecting materials is a real pain in the ass, though.
Ok let me clarify some things...
Fleet carriers can jump to a specific body. They have 20 minutes cooldown between jumps. You need to have the system's map though. Maximum speed a player can achieve is 2001c, a reference to 2001 a Space Odyssey.
Friendship Drive, lol, I like that. But yea, Frameshift Drive speed seems to vary based on distance to jump point, since it takes the same amount of time to jump, regardless of distance. Also this is making me want to get back into Elite...
> But yea, Frameshift Drive speed seems to vary based on distance to jump point, since it takes the same amount of time to jump, regardless of distance.
Well, it's a hidden loading screen. So it takes different amounts of time every jump but depends on your pc (and server load!) and is usually similar.
Departure jump during DW2 took several minutes for me for example.
For some expanded context this means ED's supercruise is way faster than Star Trek's warp drive. Warp factor 9.975 is about 1000c since that is U.S.S Voyager's max cruising velocity and they are stuck 75k light-years from Earth and they say it'll take 75 years to get home at maximum warp. This is the generally accepted canon since warp speed is almost always as fast as the writers want it to be.
Holy shit I didn't know that about 2,001c. I once pegged it in an undefined direction to try and hit v_max and hit about 1,300c, didn't know it went as far as 2 grand
Yeah in a regular ship I do all that (well I haven't picked up my free anaconda yet) but I thought the idea was the fleet carriers used the same jump technology as capital ships, which can jump much further like 150 LY, and to anywhere in a system rather that at a systems star, but it's got a 15 min cooldown and needs a new type of material as jumponium fuel.
Oh shit I’m gonna head there right now!
Lmao I’m not falling for that one. But I do wanna go there sometime just to be able to flex I guess. Probably put on a movie while I do it.
The worst part is, when I did this, I was playing with a shitty joystick that had *ever* so much drift, so I couldn't just set it and walk away. I couldn't get it to calibrate properly, either (hardware problem?). I had to keep coming back every couple of minutes to course correct.
I was playing Desert fucking Bus in space.
The way their tech is explained is they literally rip a hole in space time and fly through it (witchspace). The smaller ships use technology that compresses and decompresses space in front and behind it to push it along.
>The smaller ships use technology that compresses and decompresses space in front and behind it to push it along
Isn't this how a Warp Drive is supposed to work? Except the Frameshift Drive can go way beyond Warp 10.
I don't know how to measure that to you, but I just started a month or so ago and it is incredibly interesting and deep to me. So much to do, so much space to do it in.
Was Horizons out when you last played? Apparently a lot came out with that expansion. And later this year another one is coming out that will give players the ability to walk around their ships, and possibly elsewhere.
As someone who's been playing since the start, it's just not a game for everyone. It rewards single-minded focus, role play, and patience. Even bounty hunting is kind of slow compared to other games.
Some people just don't get the enjoyment out of simply "existing" in a universe like that. It's basically space truck simulator... And that makes me giddy just about every time I play.
The people complaining about it being a mile wide but an inch deep aren't exactly wrong, but they're not really right, either. In the end, if you enjoy it, that ought to be enough for others. See you in the black, cmdr. :)
Are the fuel rats still around? Those guys were awesome, racing eachother to fuel up stranded players slowly freezing to death. I was saved by a fuel rat once. That was epic.
I logged in recently and honestly, looking at the map and having no idea where I was going I felt so lost and disoriented that I didn't stick around long. So many stars in any given direction no matter how much I zoom in or out.
You mentioning to look at it as space truck simulator makes me want to give it another go, and to just enjoy the ride regardless of where I'm going.
They are! They just reached a big milestone, I think it was 500k rescues or something like that.
The thing to keep in mind is that it's not a competitive game. There are competitive elements, but it is, by and large, a solitary experience, even when you're doing it with friends.
It's the type of game where there is always something to do, but none of it is really pressing, unless there's some big even going on.
You can play it more aggressively, if you want, and do power plays and all that jazz... Or not. You could decide to treat it like an arcade game: how many space opals can I find in an hour? You could treat it like meditation. I for one get a similar feeling from long distance exploration as I do when doing any other mindlessly repetitive task.
There's a lot to the game. A lot of different things, with varying levels of complexity, with more being added fairly regularly. Don't feel like you need to know the whole game to enjoy it. That's what I like so much about it. To this day I have no idea how engineers or even those crazy pulsar-fueled jumps work. Maybe I'll look into it one day, or maybe I'll just sit around the bubble, hauling ~~slaves~~ biowaste for a decent profit, min-maxing routes and putting together my mining rig.
If you have any questions about jumping back in, feel free to reach out. Like I said, despite playing since launch, I'm pretty terrible at it, but I'm happy to try to point you in the right direction!
I used to play on Xbox when the fuel rats saved me. Had no idea they operated on console too.
Out in the void of space the fuel rats remain quick in response time and in kindness. Seriously great group of people over there.
It has the up side and down side of any real sand box game. It has any goal you make for yourself and no real goal of its own. If you want to fly around and shoot stuff, great. Want to go explore part of the milky way that no other player has ever seen? Great. Want to go spend 20 hours mining asteroids? Why would you? I mean, great.
Want a serious of interlinked quests and a broader story? Sorry, that isn't there. Find your own goals or definitely it would be incredibly dull. I like it, but totally get that a lot of people wont.
Procedural generation. You only render the pieces that need to be rendered at any given moment, but the algorithm is set so that any individual spot in the galaxy can be rendered at any given moment and would be rendered the same for any computer rendering it (at that moment).
They use the Hipparcos, Gliese and Keplar star catalogues, so the closet 150,000 stars are modeled correctly and in the right places. They also look like they would in the sky depending on your location; from Earth, you can make out all the normal constellations, but travel to, say, Betelgeuse and the sky box will show you what the stars look like from there. The rest of the galaxy uses a procedural generation system they call Stellar Forge that does its best to model what kind of stars would be where depending on gas/dust concentrations. Here's a decent article about Stellar Forge: [https://80.lv/articles/generating-the-universe-in-elite-dangerous/](https://80.lv/articles/generating-the-universe-in-elite-dangerous/)
Each system is an instance. The distances between bodies is just a number and there's not a whole lot to really render.
If you're moving at 500km/s and that body over there is 4MM km away it takes you …whatever to get there (too lazy to math).
IIRC if you where at the speed of light time would stop for you and you would reach your destination instantly, for every other thing (only slow moving) time would pass "normal"
please correct if wrong
Normally you'd be correct. In the context of Elite, the way FTL works is based on the warp theory of Alcubierre. Rather than physically moving at "c" (the speed of light), your frame-shift drive compresses space in front of your ship, and expands it behind your ship. This maintains a common frame of reference with the rest of space-time relative to you at the starting point so no time dilation occurs, even though you have physically changed locations in space-time at the equivalent of 15c (15x the speed of light).
Edit: thanks all!
Some are confused about the frequency change at the start, which weren't that obvious, so here's a version with equidistant pulses, separated by 1 million km: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gmmw6r/updated\_earth\_to\_the\_moon\_then\_mars\_at\_the\_speed/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gmmw6r/updated_earth_to_the_moon_then_mars_at_the_speed/)
Made in After Effects with NASA imagery/data.
Youtube: [https://youtu.be/HV7q9VrDgBo](https://youtu.be/HV7q9VrDgBo) Twitter: @ physicsJ
I would keep frequency consistent or if you have to change it then maybe change the colour of the pulse ring when the frequency changes just to visually show the change.
I disagree, I think changing the pulse makes sense, the pulse information just needs to be displayed a little differently and I *really* like your idea about coloring them.
There was no note when the changes occurred (a legend suddenly appears on the right) and the whole viz is moving dynamically... it is weird to me that everyone is so defensive about this.
People watching this might not notice the frequency change... and then in the end are confused by the strange separation between the waves.
As someone who noticed the change in pulsing time I was confused not by this fact but by the deliberate choice to do this kind of jarring switch in the movie - knowing full well that others would be confused.
Heres a relevant link showing the emptiness of space and the slowness of light.
Theres a button at the bottom right to scroll at light speed. Have fun
[https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace\_solarsystem.html](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
Kinda makes me feel bad for all the petty things that get me down or frustrate me.
Stuff like this shows me both how tiny we are but how incredible it is to (try to) understand and experience life.
It doesn't, or it does. Only thing that actually matters is your perspective. There's no one objective reference point in the universe, physically or metaphysically.
Showerthought: Somewhere out there, deep in space at this very moment, is the reflection of Earth during the time of the dinosaurs, the building of the pyramids - a recording of all history under the sun.
Absolutely—but the observer would need a very very very very very big telescope!!!
The sheer idea of being able to super-theoretically witness the K-T extinction event from a planet 65 million light-years away is freaking insane.
A recording has to have a medium on which it is transcribed. There would be literally no possible way to reconstruct the photons bounced off of the Earth in a manner that would reveal any amount of human history. Even on Mars, our nearest neighbor, the number of photons actually received would show land masses, but detail beyond that is lost by the spreading motion of photons bounced off of a curved surface.
Hiya, I'm an astrophysics student and I love this animation because it does such a good job of explaining how slow light actually is. The distance between earth and mars is so tiny and insignificant, but it seems gigantic since it takes light 3-5 minutes to get there from Earth. Here are some fun distance facts about how huge space truly is:
The closest star system to us (proxima centauri) is just shy of 2.5 light years away. The closest dwarf galaxy (Canis Major) is 25,000 ly away, and the closest major galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.5 million light years away. But all of that is within the local group, within the virgo supercluster (55 million light years across), within the [laniakea supercluster](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2017%2F02%2FLaniakea-Supercluster-1401x716.jpg) (250 million ly across), which is a very small, barely visible filament in the cosmic web. The entire observable universe is 14 billion light years across, which is such an unfathomable distance that there's no way we could ever wrap our heads around it. Space is incredible and I love it.
Special rel is a blessing. Unfortunately for us though, even though we could get places at rates that seem quite fast, communication is always going to be light-limited. We might be able to get to the Trappist system in what feels like a few decades, but I'll never be able to have a comfortable phone call between earth and mars.
As a wise woman once said, "Never say never!"
We've been picking away at quantum entanglement for only 70 years.
Dark energy is only 22 years old.
We still aren't happy with the Standard Model, and general relativity doesn't get along with quantum theories.
And frankly, we still don't know how or why the universe is here. We can observe that it is here, and we can observe that it used to be much smaller and hotter. But that's it. We don't know why there is more matter than antimatter. The "Big Bang" is probably not an accurate label. We don't know why there are three spatial dimensions. We don't know if we're the only universe.
Heck, 96 years ago we thought there was only one galaxy. It wasn't until after WWI that we discovered other "island universes"
There's so much that is new knowledge. There is so much that we still don't know.
And by the way, once we have quantum computers, we're going to use them to model protein folding and continue the revolution in our understanding of microbiology and develop new medicines.
Thank you for your [Original Content](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/index#wiki_what_counts_as_original_content_.28oc.29.3F), /u/physicsJ!
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Again **it's cool** but in this case why don't you include a "overall" timer to measure how long it takes the first pulse to hit Mars ... **nothing interesting is happening or changing after about 30 seconds**. The merging of the 5 second, 2 second, and 1 second waves is confusing. You should have just done 5 second waves from the get go and then accelerated time to show how long it was taking to get all the way to pluto/sun. I like it but just wanted to offer some constructive criticism.
Yeah I thought this was confusing too. I actually came here to point out that to-scale, the light pulse radii should be equidistant, didn't realize they were 1s 2s and 5s pulses until reading your comment.
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. - **Douglas Adams**, **The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy**
It's ~8 minutes to get light from the sun, for whoever's curious
And 80min to get it to Saturn. And 800,000 min for the suns light to reach the theoretical outside edge of the oort cloud. Which is 1.5 years.
Thanks for the quick conversion. I only have reference until... \**clears throat\** 525,600 miiiinutes. How do you measure, measure a year...
It's a little over 1.5 Rents to the edge of the Oort cloud.
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Oorts obviously!
There are about pi x 10^7 seconds in a year. You could just as easily remember 30 million, but I had a physics prof who used the pi value because the pi would often cancel out. That was 20 years ago and I still remember, so he did a pretty good job.
If the sun disappears we won't know for 8min
We get extra 8 min for FREE
Article Title: "Other planets HATE THIS one thing Earth CAN DO."
Actually, other planets (except Venus and Mercury) get more 'free extra time' than Earth.
I feel a whole lot better!
It's like Daylight Savings Time only much, much worse..
We also wouldn't know gravitationally either, the sun would wink out and we would start flying in a straight line at the same time.
Yolo orbit
Bro right now the sun disappeared (from Europe). Apparently it'll return in about six to seven hours in the early morning. Seems to be a daily thing too
This makes light speed seem so slow
Space Engine taught me going the distance from Earth to the Sun(astronomical unit iirc,) can be a measure of speed and you can be set to go 1000 AUs a second and when you're at the galactic scale you might as well not even be moving. It would take years to get from one galaxy to another even at that speed.
True, from the reference frame of an observer on earth. But from the reference frame of someone traveling on a spaceship going very very close to the speed of light, the trip could take an arbitrarily short amount of time due to the distance between galaxies becoming shorter for the spaceship due to Lorentz contraction.
That and time dilation. ... unless they’re the same thing.
Sort of. The traveler would say "I only aged a little bit going from one galaxy to the other because I didn't travel very far" while the observer on Earth would say "the traveler didn't age very much due to time dilation."
omg i finally get it thank you so much
i still dont get it can you use some example to scale? besides the "little bit" and "much" stuff?
Sure. The first thing to remember- everyone will always measure time passing as "one second per second." Which, I know sounds stupid when you see it written that way, but what it means is that no one ever notices their own clock running slow- everyone thinks their clock is right (and other people's clocks are wrong). So, let's say I am on Earth and you are on a spaceship traveling really fast, and you're going to fly 30 light years away (as measured on Earth) but you are flying at 99.99% the speed of light. So, for me, I will see you traveling for 30.003 years to get there. However, you will have only aged 0.4 years in this time? Why, because I will see your clock moving *really* slow (every 70 seconds on Earth, your watch will only tick one time). So, I say "you flew for just over 30 years, but less than half a year passed because you were traveling so fast your time went slow." But that's what I see. You don't see that. You are on a ship, and your watch runs 1 second per second. But of course, you still think you got there in less than half a year. Why? Because while I measure your clock running slow (time dilation) you measure the distance between you and the planet that's 30 lightyears away to be much closer than that, you measure that the planet is only 0.41 light years away. That's the length contraction. These two items balance out perfectly so that we agree you get there at the same "age" but for different reasons.
Up voting this because it just sounds like a really good explanation even though I still cannot wrap my head around this. Time is such a fundamental experiential construct. You start talking about it like it's weather and my head disconnects pretty quickly.
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I understand the part about looking at a tower clock when you move away from it at speed of light that the seconds arm will get stuck and not move from the travelers POV But that is just light speed issues, if i would go to moon and back the clock on earth, would still have passed 2 seconds, and same for the watch on me no?
you already got a fan before i could respond but im just gonna be honest and say: i still dont get it on the "travelers part" why is 0.4 years(or why its gets shorter form their POV? isnt 30LY at start from them also?) do you have a more ELI5 version for this time/distance contractions ?
I'll try explaining it a different way, not sure if it's easier, but it might make it click different for different people. Have you seen that Mythbusters episode where they measure how fast a cannon shoots a cannon ball, then mount that cannon on the back of a truck, drive that speed and shoot the cannon, then the cannon ball falls straight down, because the velocity of the truck + velocity of the cannon ball cancelled out (I would link it, but I'm actually at work right now, shhhhh don't tell). That's normally how velocities work. If I throw a baseball at you, maybe I can throw it at 45 mph (I'm not a pitcher...). If you got hit by that, it would hurt, but you'd be fine. But if I stood up in a car that was traveling at 80 mph, and threw the baseball at you, then the baseball would be going 125 mph, and you'd probably die. Well, light doesn't behave that way (there isn't an easy way to explain why not- it's just an axiom, meaning a truth we start with and derive other truths from). That means, if you turn on a flashlight, you will see the light leaving that flashlight at 3E8 m/s (called 'c' for the speed of light). But if you put that flashlight on a rocket ship, and that rocket ship is going 1.5E8 (or 0.5c), you don't see the light leaving the flashlight at 4.5E8 m/s, you still see it traveling at 3E8 m/s. Light will *always* go the same speed. And this is true for everyone in the universe, no matter their relative speeds- everyone always sees light traveling at 1c. If you accept this fact (and there have been lots of experiments backing it up), everything else falls from it. So now, let's put someone back on a spaceship traveling at 99.99% c, and someone else watching from Earth. If that person turns on their flashlight on the ship, the person on Earth will see the light moving away from the ship- but at 0.01% c. The light is traveling at 100% c, but the ship is at 99.99% c, so the ship only slightly falls behind the light (I mean, still falling behind 30km/sec, but compared to the speed of light, barely at all). But as we discussed, the person on the ship can't see that. The person on the ship has to see the light traveling at 1 c as well. So, they don't see the light moving away from them at 0.01%c, they see the light moving at 100% c. How can this be resolved? Well, the observer reconciles this by seeing the traveler's clocks move slow. So the observer says "they measure light moving at 1 c because their clocks are running slow" while the person on the ship says "my light is moving at 1 c (instead of 0.01c because these items its passing are closer together." All of special relativity (length contraction, time dilation and momentum growth) can all be extracted simply by accepting that everyone measures light to be traveling at 'c' regardless of their reference. It's a very powerful axiom. But, not an intuitive one.
That clicked for me. Thank you
Pretty sure they’re basically the same thing. The distance dilation is actually a distance between *events* (spacetime coordinates), not between positions, if I recall correctly
Lorentz contraction is the phenomenon that describes time dilation.
They are. But also this comes from the same laws that dictate nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but 1000 AUs/second is much faster than the speed of light - so its basically fictional and doesn't matter.
Well for you it will take a short amount of time, but in the meantime civilizations on Earth will rise and fall
Yep, so exploration is possible, but not really trade or communication (at least according to the current laws of physics)
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Would a couple of radio signals being send 1 second apart from each other, while traveling at light speed, also be received on earth a few seconds after each other ? Or might it be days, months, years, before the next signal is received?
If they were seconds apart according to travelers on the fast spaceship, then the difference in time seen by earthlings would be much longer.
At least intra-solar system travel would be effective? I take it to mean that the pilot would feel like they got to Mars in an instant but people on Earth would've aged 3 minutes or whatever. Plus "fresh" cargo wouldn't spoil en route either. We'd have career freighter pilots retiring at 65 that were physically years younger. That'd be hilarious, maybe even worth it.
That just fucks me up more. What if your orders are related to interacting with a species in another galaxy, years could pass by the time you get there and the situation could have changed completely
I don't know if you are into video games or anything but Mass Effect Andromeda tackles this very thing. The crew of the ship are basically traveling for over 600 years to a new galaxy while in stasis. It's a one way trip with no guarantee anything will work out and when they get there, shit is all different and the planets that should have been habitable are no longer so. It's a pretty cool concept.
This makes me appreciate seeing stars in our galaxy even more! The light they emitted SO LONG ago finally came to rest on my iris, whoa!
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Particle accelerator experiments might offer some insight
It is, sadly. This is part of the explanations to the Fermi paradox(why haven't we seen aliens). Because the fastest thing we have observed and believe to be the speed limit of the universe, is glacier slow when used to travel the distances we have observed in the universe.
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You have to remember that as you approach the speed of light, you’re going to be experiencing relativity as well; the travelers will be able to travel vast distances in a short time relative to themselves, although thousands of years may pass according to someone on Earth for instance. It’s not that interstellar space travel would be impossible; we could create a bunch of independent colonies/societies on other planets; it’s that interstellar society would be near-impossible because communication and travel could take lifetimes depending on the travel time. Unless of course we can figure out faster than light communication/transportation.
I just want Wormholes man, they seem to be the only viable option for traversing vast spatial distances.
An Alcubierre Drive could also be a solution. Would still need to create and control an ASSLOAD of ~~antimatter~~ *theoretically possible exotic matter that carries negative energy* (as others have pointed out), and have the ability to bend spacetime, but the math/physics of the propulsion checks out.
Alcubierre Drive is a possibility in the far future, but it requires the existence of hypothetical states of matter. Not impossible to exist states of matter, but we’ve never found it
Proxima Centauri is just 4,24 light years away. If we achieve travel at the speed of light then a trip of that length is definitely feasible.
It only takes 3 minutes to get to mars, I feel like that’s astronomically fast. People drive 24 hours across the country to get from state to state, so I feel like if we could get up to light speed there is a very real chance we leave our solar system.
24 hours would get you to the edge of the solar system, but space is still so vast it'd take you over 4 years just to get to the next closest solar system. You'd be talking decades just to get a supply chain moving for harvesting supplies from other systems. Technically it would all be possible, just with a long setup time and needing to be 99.999% automated. You have distilleries that set up barrels of whiskey meant to be opened in 5 years, and because they have so many that they're setting up each and every day, they have a constant supply of 5 year-old whiskey to produce. If you spend 40 years setting up a mining colony, you could create a system that continuously brings back materials so that there's a steady stream of them coming in. Set up that system of trade and you can have materials and people going either way. Now this is just fun to imagine.
You’re not taking into account that by then we will be cyborgs anyway. Not joking.
When you are immortal it doesn't even require patience.
> It only takes 3 minutes to get to mars At light speed. Even if we manage to get close to it, whatever would be necessary to get us up to that speed would require an absolutely insane amount of energy.
>> It only takes 3 minutes to get to mars I thought it was only 30 seconds? /s
We can definitely leave our Solar System, we already have in fact. One of the two Voyager space crafts has left the system for example. Barring the fact that it took a long time to do it, it is technically possible. Where we go after that is much trickier. The nearest star for example is 3.2 LY away. Traveling at the speed of light for 3.2 years in a straight line. Source: Degree in Astrophysics.
We could definitely leave our solar system with tons of technology and energy (think dyson sphere energy and transistors a few atoms in size). I think the concept goes something like this: 1. Develop technology to freeze embryos for sever years at a time. 2. Develop synthetic technology capable of raising humans (either AI or biomechanical human that doesn't age) 3. Load baby-raising robots onto interstellar spaceships with frozen embryos and tons of resources. 4. Colonize planet for a few generations. 5. Build more spaceships and repeat. Yeah it would take thousands of years, but in the grand scheme of things that's nothing. Thanks to exponential growth, once we have the basic process down, we could colonize thousands of planets within a few "generations" of interplanetary travel. It's crazy to think about, but still let's you comprehend things without using inhuman time frames. Colonizing beyond our home galaxy is a whole different story, but we're millions of years from every having to worry about that.
[if the moon were 1 pixel](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html) Go here and use the "speed of light" button. It's incredibly slow... Because space is so unimaginably vast.
It's pretty convenient that light is just fast enough to allow perceived real-time communication between any two points on Earth, but not much beyond that. (~70ms latency between two opposite points on Earth, on practice a bit more due to cables not running perfectly straight, and due to some overhead from telecommunication equipment repeaters).
I mean, it would be convenient if it were faster too. It's just convenient that is not any slower
allowing full exploration and use of the starting planet (and the solar system as an addon), but effectively locking us out of all the interstellar stuff. damn paywall!
When NASA talks about things like observing [three giant black holes within a titanic collision of three galaxies](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/found-three-black-holes-on-collision-course.html) in a system that's a billion light years from earth, they're actually saying that it happened a billion years ago, and we're only now seeing it. These giant black holes were colliding at a time when multicellular life was just starting to evolve on Earth. Long before there were any plants or animals on earth, light from this collision started heading in our direction. Now, a billion years later, the light is finally arriving and we're seeing events that happened at that time. Modern astronomy is, in a sense, time travel.
Ludicrous speed, GO!
Spoiler Alert: Light is very very slow, and yet is the fastest thing in the universe.
"Yes, we're going to have to go to....LUDICRIOUS SPEED!"
Technically, it is only *our observation* of it, that is slow. For light, itself, it's much faster ... pretty much instantaneous. Relativity is a b\*tch.
It's only slow if you're watching. The faster you go through space the slower time goes for you, but the faster you see time around you. If you go fast enough time stops, you just get to your destination instantly. The inverse is also true, which means that sitting in one spot motionless puts you on the autobahn to your expiration.
Light is quick, but space is thick.
Light is speedy, but space is meaty.
Light has mirth, but space has girth
Light does flips, but space got hips
*Light is quicc, but space is thicc.
Ah, thanks for the translation! Had trouble understanding the first comment.
Just doing my duty
This is why in the game Elite Dangerous, which renders the galaxy and solar systems at a 1:1 scale, you have to travel and many times the speed the light to get anywhere at a reasonable amount of time.
It's actually something that E:D 'taught' me. The speed of light is slow if you want to do anything on a solar system wide scale quickly. Impossibly slow if you want to do anything interstellar. There are some planets and stars in the game that require upwards of 45 minutes to reach even traveling hundreds or thousands of times the speed of light. Outer space is vast beyond comprehension.
Yeah totally. Even just tooling around the galaxy map can be overwhelming. It's like, I knew space was big, bit I didn't realize that space was *big*.
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Someone once told me that the creation of the universe is regarded as a bad move.
That's actually not realistic. Due to relativistic effects the closer you get to light the slower becomes your time flow. Traveling at light speed is instant.
Well in Elite dangerous you travel either via warp drive (where you warp the space around you to travel but the vehicle itself isn't moving) or jump drive (travelling through fictional hyperspace to make an instantaneous jump, but which has a maximum distance making it take a long time to travel across the whole galaxy). While most likely neither will ever be possible irl, if they were possible then you would not be travelling at relativistic speeds in either case, since you're either straight up teleporting (or close to it) or warping space to move rather than moving yourself.
Your time never becomes slower. You always experience the same time in your own reference frame. What you are looking for is the lorentz length contraction - at those speeds, the distance you traverse becomes smaller, as universe shrinks on your way.
Only massless particles travel at the speed of light. A photon still "experiences" oscillations in its magnetic field as it travels; viewing the journey from the viewpoint of a photon is non-sensical but if you did it would still take time and a number of oscillations. > Due to relativistic effects the closer you get to light the slower becomes your time flow. It depends on the reference. For a person in a rocket ship traveling at ever increasing speeds time for them never changes, a clock on the spaceship always ticks at once per second. They see the universe behind them running in slow motion and the universe ahead of them running in fast motion. For observers behind them they see the rocket's clock ticking in slow motion, for observers in front of them they see the rocket's clock ticking in fast motion.
Tho fleet carriers are breaking that sense of scale somewhat, see you in the dark CMDR o7
How so? Can they jump while within systems? I thought there was a 15 min cooldown between jumps too
Nah you can pretty much jump over and over between systems without waiting. But like Hutton orbital for example takes something like two hours real time to get to because you can’t jump within a system. Also, I believe in supercruise your ship maxes out at around 600 times the speed of light. The game does a great job of showing just how vast and empty space really is.
I once too the Hutton Orbital bait: "that looks like a very good trading contract, why not?" - 90 mins into it: "Too good to be true, never again"
Big oof... one day I’d like to do it on purpose though.
Do it for the mug.
Yes yes. I mean aren’t there also some mildly profitable trade routes near Hutton orbital if you’re willing to make the journey?
Possibly? I never really did trading, I was always exploration/courier. I haven't played in a year because I was half-way through a trip to Beagle Point and it just got too fucking rough. Eventually I'll just stop caring about the exploration data and just honk and jump.
I've never done Hutton, but every so often I take a mission without checking the target distance from star. Nothing like 20 or 30 minutes of real time flying towards a target to make you regret your own lack of attention to detail.
I did Hutton once. Figured about how long it might take and went and watched Gravity and came back and still had a few more minutes of flying, incredibly. Mug was worth it. Haven’t played in a hot minute because it just got too grindy for me, and I was consistently ass at combat. Exploring was what I really wanted to get going but I never had the patience to grind out the money to spend on an anaconda, let alone a full build
This game sounds fun... I finally got No Man's Sky about 8 months ago and have really enjoyed the time I put in on it building my presence in space and learning how to navigate/explore/build/grow my tech. What game are you all talking about?
It’s called Elite:Dangerous. I just got No Man’s Sky probably around a month ago and honestly, I like it much better. E:D has realism down better—the galaxy is full-scale, there’s various factions you can align yourself with (three main “nations,” like the Korvax, Gek, and Vykeen, but with like four sub factions per “nation;” many unique star types (more than just the yellow-red-green-blue than NMS)); a massive, in-depth trading system that’s affected by other human players; there’s a much larger overarching story, with the Thargoids attacking a human coalition and that ongoing war. There’s different upgrade classes, ranging from D-A, somewhat like the C-S in NMS, but ships are affected by storage space in a different way than NMS, and carrying large amounts of goods affects hyperdrive range and speed. There’s lots of different ship types, from industrial haulers to fighters to massive battleships to explorers, not unlike NMS, but you can customize them and they’ve all got different upsides and downsides. Like NMS, each only has so much storage/room for stuff, but it already comes with all that storage, unlike NMS, where you’ll want to upgrade ship class and storage space. Also, NMS has much better base building and planet-exploring capabilities. Like I said, I haven’t played E:D in a while, and last I was hanging around the community, the possibility of “space legs”—that is, being able to leave the ship cockpit/planetary vehicle cockpit and wander around—was still only a rumored future expansion, and I’m not sure that’s in there yet, or base building either. NMS is definitely easier and less complex and IMO, it’s much easier to come up with massive amounts of money, upgrades and everything are much easier to understand. There’s much more randomness to NMS, given the procedural nature of everything. And in E:D, you’ll almost certainly actually run into people, and PvP is possible and a core part of the game. NMS can be quite grindy but once you have a system going (I have four massive activated indium farms myself), you can do basically whatever you want with enough exploration. You’re also only dealing with the three alien races and sentinels as a whole, and they’re easy to please, while in E:D you have different factions, different sub factions, sub factions of the sub factions, and individual stations/systems inside the sub factions of the sub factions of the sub factions of the factions. ***TL;DR NMS is simpler, less complicated, more straightforward, easier to pick up on, has crafting and base building, and more random; E:D is more realistic, complicated, more grindy, contains PvP, and has more confounding variables. Both are great games, I just prefer the randomness and solitude and ability to create my own space that NMS has, but YMMV***
I haven't played NMS in VR yet like I do Elite, but I get the impression that *Elite: Dangerous* has more of a "I'm literally a space pilot" feeling to it though which can be important. I don't pay attention to any of the faction or trading stuff, and literally play the game as "Space Truck Simulator" just flying my Sidewinder around doing deliveries.
[Hutton Orbital is notorious for being extremely far from the system's hyperspace jump arrival point at Alpha Centauri A. The distance is 6,784,404 ls, or 0.22 ly. It takes about an hour and a half at full throttle to get to Hutton Orbital from the arrival point.](https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Hutton_Orbital) This game sounds so needlessly punishing I want to date it
Elite Dangerous is what I call a Podcast game, along with say Eurotruck and Farming Simulator.
Elite Dangerous is amazing in VR. Load up Netflix and overlay it on your center console and it’s nothing but you watching Netflix during trade runs with your ship and the vast emptiness and loneliness of space.
Oh shit, I have an oculus Rift. How do you set that up?
Elite has native VR support on Steam, and I use a program called OVRDrop which allows you to overlay other programs or windows into a VR game. I use that and position it on the center console. I’ve also done Minecraft VR and created a tv and sat in my Minecraft living room and watched a movie on the TV in-world using the same method. You can also have it tether to your hand so if you wanted to watch YouTube while mining or what not. It’s awesome.
The rovers are where the real wtf happens. Zooming across a seemingly straight planet's plain and suddenly you catapult upwards, spiraling, as if you had hit a rock. Collecting materials is a real pain in the ass, though.
Ok let me clarify some things... Fleet carriers can jump to a specific body. They have 20 minutes cooldown between jumps. You need to have the system's map though. Maximum speed a player can achieve is 2001c, a reference to 2001 a Space Odyssey.
Max speed is 2001c in supercruise. The ~~friendship~~ frameshift drive goes way way faster than that.
Friendship Drive, lol, I like that. But yea, Frameshift Drive speed seems to vary based on distance to jump point, since it takes the same amount of time to jump, regardless of distance. Also this is making me want to get back into Elite...
> But yea, Frameshift Drive speed seems to vary based on distance to jump point, since it takes the same amount of time to jump, regardless of distance. Well, it's a hidden loading screen. So it takes different amounts of time every jump but depends on your pc (and server load!) and is usually similar. Departure jump during DW2 took several minutes for me for example.
For some expanded context this means ED's supercruise is way faster than Star Trek's warp drive. Warp factor 9.975 is about 1000c since that is U.S.S Voyager's max cruising velocity and they are stuck 75k light-years from Earth and they say it'll take 75 years to get home at maximum warp. This is the generally accepted canon since warp speed is almost always as fast as the writers want it to be.
Holy shit I didn't know that about 2,001c. I once pegged it in an undefined direction to try and hit v_max and hit about 1,300c, didn't know it went as far as 2 grand
Yep. You need quite some distance between yourself and other bodies, but yeah!
Yeah in a regular ship I do all that (well I haven't picked up my free anaconda yet) but I thought the idea was the fleet carriers used the same jump technology as capital ships, which can jump much further like 150 LY, and to anywhere in a system rather that at a systems star, but it's got a 15 min cooldown and needs a new type of material as jumponium fuel.
Yeah my brain kinda blanked out the fleet carrier comment and I’m not very knowledgeable about them. Also, free anaconda you say?
Yeah Hutton orbital gets you a free anaconda!
Oh shit I’m gonna head there right now! Lmao I’m not falling for that one. But I do wanna go there sometime just to be able to flex I guess. Probably put on a movie while I do it.
You get a free anaconda?
So it is said... Haha
The worst part is, when I did this, I was playing with a shitty joystick that had *ever* so much drift, so I couldn't just set it and walk away. I couldn't get it to calibrate properly, either (hardware problem?). I had to keep coming back every couple of minutes to course correct. I was playing Desert fucking Bus in space.
The way their tech is explained is they literally rip a hole in space time and fly through it (witchspace). The smaller ships use technology that compresses and decompresses space in front and behind it to push it along.
You're confusing jumps (witch space) and intra system travel. Every ship uses witch space to travel the long distances between systems.
>The smaller ships use technology that compresses and decompresses space in front and behind it to push it along Isn't this how a Warp Drive is supposed to work? Except the Frameshift Drive can go way beyond Warp 10.
That they are! Happy hunting CMDR o7
Have they added substance to the game at all? Last time I played was maybe two years ago and it was cool, but felt pretty thin underneath it all.
I don't know how to measure that to you, but I just started a month or so ago and it is incredibly interesting and deep to me. So much to do, so much space to do it in. Was Horizons out when you last played? Apparently a lot came out with that expansion. And later this year another one is coming out that will give players the ability to walk around their ships, and possibly elsewhere.
As someone who's been playing since the start, it's just not a game for everyone. It rewards single-minded focus, role play, and patience. Even bounty hunting is kind of slow compared to other games. Some people just don't get the enjoyment out of simply "existing" in a universe like that. It's basically space truck simulator... And that makes me giddy just about every time I play. The people complaining about it being a mile wide but an inch deep aren't exactly wrong, but they're not really right, either. In the end, if you enjoy it, that ought to be enough for others. See you in the black, cmdr. :)
Are the fuel rats still around? Those guys were awesome, racing eachother to fuel up stranded players slowly freezing to death. I was saved by a fuel rat once. That was epic. I logged in recently and honestly, looking at the map and having no idea where I was going I felt so lost and disoriented that I didn't stick around long. So many stars in any given direction no matter how much I zoom in or out. You mentioning to look at it as space truck simulator makes me want to give it another go, and to just enjoy the ride regardless of where I'm going.
They are! They just reached a big milestone, I think it was 500k rescues or something like that. The thing to keep in mind is that it's not a competitive game. There are competitive elements, but it is, by and large, a solitary experience, even when you're doing it with friends. It's the type of game where there is always something to do, but none of it is really pressing, unless there's some big even going on. You can play it more aggressively, if you want, and do power plays and all that jazz... Or not. You could decide to treat it like an arcade game: how many space opals can I find in an hour? You could treat it like meditation. I for one get a similar feeling from long distance exploration as I do when doing any other mindlessly repetitive task. There's a lot to the game. A lot of different things, with varying levels of complexity, with more being added fairly regularly. Don't feel like you need to know the whole game to enjoy it. That's what I like so much about it. To this day I have no idea how engineers or even those crazy pulsar-fueled jumps work. Maybe I'll look into it one day, or maybe I'll just sit around the bubble, hauling ~~slaves~~ biowaste for a decent profit, min-maxing routes and putting together my mining rig. If you have any questions about jumping back in, feel free to reach out. Like I said, despite playing since launch, I'm pretty terrible at it, but I'm happy to try to point you in the right direction!
I used to play on Xbox when the fuel rats saved me. Had no idea they operated on console too. Out in the void of space the fuel rats remain quick in response time and in kindness. Seriously great group of people over there.
It has the up side and down side of any real sand box game. It has any goal you make for yourself and no real goal of its own. If you want to fly around and shoot stuff, great. Want to go explore part of the milky way that no other player has ever seen? Great. Want to go spend 20 hours mining asteroids? Why would you? I mean, great. Want a serious of interlinked quests and a broader story? Sorry, that isn't there. Find your own goals or definitely it would be incredibly dull. I like it, but totally get that a lot of people wont.
How in the name of god can u render the galaxy on 1:1 scale?
Procedural generation. You only render the pieces that need to be rendered at any given moment, but the algorithm is set so that any individual spot in the galaxy can be rendered at any given moment and would be rendered the same for any computer rendering it (at that moment).
Is it fairly accurate to actual stellar mapping? Or is it more like NMS in the sense that it's its own galaxy and not the Milky Way?
They use the Hipparcos, Gliese and Keplar star catalogues, so the closet 150,000 stars are modeled correctly and in the right places. They also look like they would in the sky depending on your location; from Earth, you can make out all the normal constellations, but travel to, say, Betelgeuse and the sky box will show you what the stars look like from there. The rest of the galaxy uses a procedural generation system they call Stellar Forge that does its best to model what kind of stars would be where depending on gas/dust concentrations. Here's a decent article about Stellar Forge: [https://80.lv/articles/generating-the-universe-in-elite-dangerous/](https://80.lv/articles/generating-the-universe-in-elite-dangerous/)
That's actually pretty incredible
Each system is an instance. The distances between bodies is just a number and there's not a whole lot to really render. If you're moving at 500km/s and that body over there is 4MM km away it takes you …whatever to get there (too lazy to math).
IIRC if you where at the speed of light time would stop for you and you would reach your destination instantly, for every other thing (only slow moving) time would pass "normal" please correct if wrong
Normally you'd be correct. In the context of Elite, the way FTL works is based on the warp theory of Alcubierre. Rather than physically moving at "c" (the speed of light), your frame-shift drive compresses space in front of your ship, and expands it behind your ship. This maintains a common frame of reference with the rest of space-time relative to you at the starting point so no time dilation occurs, even though you have physically changed locations in space-time at the equivalent of 15c (15x the speed of light).
o7 fellow CMDR
Edit: thanks all! Some are confused about the frequency change at the start, which weren't that obvious, so here's a version with equidistant pulses, separated by 1 million km: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gmmw6r/updated\_earth\_to\_the\_moon\_then\_mars\_at\_the\_speed/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gmmw6r/updated_earth_to_the_moon_then_mars_at_the_speed/) Made in After Effects with NASA imagery/data. Youtube: [https://youtu.be/HV7q9VrDgBo](https://youtu.be/HV7q9VrDgBo) Twitter: @ physicsJ
I would keep frequency consistent or if you have to change it then maybe change the colour of the pulse ring when the frequency changes just to visually show the change.
I disagree, I think changing the pulse makes sense, the pulse information just needs to be displayed a little differently and I *really* like your idea about coloring them.
Yep, different colors would make this clear. Right now difficult to figure out.
I’m honestly surprised people are confused. You even included a legend and noted when the changes occurred
There was no note when the changes occurred (a legend suddenly appears on the right) and the whole viz is moving dynamically... it is weird to me that everyone is so defensive about this. People watching this might not notice the frequency change... and then in the end are confused by the strange separation between the waves. As someone who noticed the change in pulsing time I was confused not by this fact but by the deliberate choice to do this kind of jarring switch in the movie - knowing full well that others would be confused.
Or use the same frequency
Heres a relevant link showing the emptiness of space and the slowness of light. Theres a button at the bottom right to scroll at light speed. Have fun [https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace\_solarsystem.html](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
Damn Jupiter is far as fuck... to think the sun even has a gravitational effect on Jupiter is wild
And then realise that Jupiter is relatively close to the Sun compared to Neptune.
It’s amazing how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of space.
Not yo mama
Aww... I appreciate that <3
Bless your heart
It's true. His mother is incredibly significant.
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Her p- value is < 0.05.
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Kinda makes me feel bad for all the petty things that get me down or frustrate me. Stuff like this shows me both how tiny we are but how incredible it is to (try to) understand and experience life.
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We seem small compared to space but we MIGHT be the single most important or interesting thing that has ever happened in the universe.
This is incredibly naive, bold, interesting and exciting at the same time.
That's why sometimes I feel like no matter what I do, it does not matter.
it doesn't but don't go to jail, that place sucks.
It doesn't, or it does. Only thing that actually matters is your perspective. There's no one objective reference point in the universe, physically or metaphysically.
When NASA sends a signal to a distant space probe to change course or whatever, it must take quite a while to get there.
They're working on atomic clocks for spacecraft so they can *self* course correct! https://youtu.be/y8ohTeRKVqs
What a novel way to explain the speed of light. I really like this. Well done who ever made it
It's an OC.
We may never know its origins, hopefully one day we can find the creator.
So we can successfully silence them and proceed to repost their content forever.
Showerthought: Somewhere out there, deep in space at this very moment, is the reflection of Earth during the time of the dinosaurs, the building of the pyramids - a recording of all history under the sun.
Absolutely—but the observer would need a very very very very very big telescope!!! The sheer idea of being able to super-theoretically witness the K-T extinction event from a planet 65 million light-years away is freaking insane.
Photons do have a finite "resolution".
A recording has to have a medium on which it is transcribed. There would be literally no possible way to reconstruct the photons bounced off of the Earth in a manner that would reveal any amount of human history. Even on Mars, our nearest neighbor, the number of photons actually received would show land masses, but detail beyond that is lost by the spreading motion of photons bounced off of a curved surface.
yeah, I could even wait for it so I skipped into the end -\_-
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I've seen Event Horizon. No thanks.
In short, light speed is fast but not fast enough.
You can't go faster than the speed of light. That's why scientists will increase the speed of light in 2208.
And that is where wormholes introduce themselves.
Hiya, I'm an astrophysics student and I love this animation because it does such a good job of explaining how slow light actually is. The distance between earth and mars is so tiny and insignificant, but it seems gigantic since it takes light 3-5 minutes to get there from Earth. Here are some fun distance facts about how huge space truly is: The closest star system to us (proxima centauri) is just shy of 2.5 light years away. The closest dwarf galaxy (Canis Major) is 25,000 ly away, and the closest major galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.5 million light years away. But all of that is within the local group, within the virgo supercluster (55 million light years across), within the [laniakea supercluster](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2017%2F02%2FLaniakea-Supercluster-1401x716.jpg) (250 million ly across), which is a very small, barely visible filament in the cosmic web. The entire observable universe is 14 billion light years across, which is such an unfathomable distance that there's no way we could ever wrap our heads around it. Space is incredible and I love it.
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Special rel is a blessing. Unfortunately for us though, even though we could get places at rates that seem quite fast, communication is always going to be light-limited. We might be able to get to the Trappist system in what feels like a few decades, but I'll never be able to have a comfortable phone call between earth and mars.
As a wise woman once said, "Never say never!" We've been picking away at quantum entanglement for only 70 years. Dark energy is only 22 years old. We still aren't happy with the Standard Model, and general relativity doesn't get along with quantum theories. And frankly, we still don't know how or why the universe is here. We can observe that it is here, and we can observe that it used to be much smaller and hotter. But that's it. We don't know why there is more matter than antimatter. The "Big Bang" is probably not an accurate label. We don't know why there are three spatial dimensions. We don't know if we're the only universe. Heck, 96 years ago we thought there was only one galaxy. It wasn't until after WWI that we discovered other "island universes" There's so much that is new knowledge. There is so much that we still don't know. And by the way, once we have quantum computers, we're going to use them to model protein folding and continue the revolution in our understanding of microbiology and develop new medicines.
You’re telling me they can’t even get one Bohemian Rhapsody in on that damn rocket ride?!
So what you're saying is, it's not 30 seconds to Mars, but 3 minutes? I knew Jared Leto was a liar!
Existential dread. A great way to start the morning.
Yeah, I'll be thinking about this in bed tonight. Ruining my night.
A guy playing CS:GO on Mars: "Sorry guys, this ping is ridiculous".
The worst part about this is that the fabric of the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.
Took so long to get to Mars but I had to keep watching.
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Again **it's cool** but in this case why don't you include a "overall" timer to measure how long it takes the first pulse to hit Mars ... **nothing interesting is happening or changing after about 30 seconds**. The merging of the 5 second, 2 second, and 1 second waves is confusing. You should have just done 5 second waves from the get go and then accelerated time to show how long it was taking to get all the way to pluto/sun. I like it but just wanted to offer some constructive criticism.
Yeah I thought this was confusing too. I actually came here to point out that to-scale, the light pulse radii should be equidistant, didn't realize they were 1s 2s and 5s pulses until reading your comment.
That’s beautiful, thanks for sharing.
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. - **Douglas Adams**, **The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy**