That was beautiful.

I find that kind of thing inspiring, and awe-invoking.

Everyone should watch this.
*quality
*doublepromote

Double-Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, May 12th, 2016 12:01pm PDT - doublepromote requested by ChaosEngine.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by ChaosEngine.

I fully agree!

I also loved the mind-boggled little chick at 2:07. Little things like that make this just hilarious.

It's not quite true to say it would take thousands of years to reach our nearest star. If only people weren't pussies about the small matter of exploding hundreds of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, we could use technology that existed in the fifties to accelerate spacecraft to as much as a tenth of light speed. Proxima Centauri in a matter of decades, no problem.

There's no reason to actually do that; nothing to be learned, nothing to gain in terms of technology or resource exploitation or potential for the future, but god damn it, it would be cool.

Interesting. Does that account for the limits of the human body in terms of (long-term) exposure to G-forces from all that acceleration?

I'm sure we could use nukes to propel a craft to very high speeds very quickly, but I'd wager that limiting the acceleration to human tolerance would require that to be spread out over a much longer span of time.

A quick google search suggests that nobody really knows exactly how much we could handle in terms of long-term exposure to acceleration G-forces:
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6154/maximum-survivable-long-term-g-forces
(apparently the highest load we've ever tested on humans is 1.5G for 7 days -- without doing any math I'd wager we'd need a lot faster acceleration than that for a lot longer span of time to get to even 1/10th of c)

Well just for fun, the math says ~24 days to .1c at a constant 1.5G. Obviously in practice those figures are a nonsense, but you can get there. The Project Orion people thought so, at least.

Then you simply coast for a few decades, turn your ship around, and start throwing the nukes out in front of you to slow down. Hell of a way to make an entrance at your destination.

If I'm doing the math correctly, the universe is expanding at around 46 miles per second, which is around 165,000 mph. Is there some reason why humans could not overcome this speed limit? It doesn't seem that exceptionally fast (no where near as fast as the speed of light), and if you accelerate slowly to it, like over several days or weeks, the g-forces involved wouldn't be that extreme, would they? The video didn't really explain why we could never go fast enough to overcome the expansion rate.

Also, I thought most theortical physicists like Stephen Hawking believe that in the future technology could advance enough to allow us bend space-time and hence travel "faster than the speed of light" without actually travelling faster than the speed of light, basically like folding a piece of paper and sticking a pin through both sides. When you lay the paper down flat, the two holes will seem quite far away from each other, but when you fold the paper, the holes are right next to each other. Our current understanding of physics doesn't rule out the possibility (at least from a mathematical perspective) although generating the energy necessary to perform such a feat would of course be problematic.

Gee, as if I didn't need reason to be even more depressed these days...

And, um, correct me if I'm wrong... But isn't the nearest star called the sun? It would take thousands of years to reach it? O.o

What I can find said at 1g acceleration it will take just over 1 year (ship time, slightly longer to outside observers) to reach the speed of light.

That's 46 miles per second per megaparsec (roughly 3.2 million light years) not for the whole universe.

The local group is over 3 megaparsecs across....I can't find how far the nearest group is, but it's likely >thousands of megaparsecs away, meaning if it's just 1000 away, that's 46000mps (miles per second) added to a trip that would already take 3200000000years at the speed of light. 31,536,000 seconds per year X >46000mps= >14506560000000 extra miles per year X 3200000000years =>4.6420992e+21miles, or >789606940 light years, or >263 megaparsecs of expansion during the 1000 megaparsec trip (if I did the math right, and that's not compounded by the second as it should be, that would make those numbers far larger). This means if we only ever get to 1/4 light speed, expansion already is faster than we'll ever go, and every day there's more space to expand, so it's expanding faster.

Even if we somehow managed light speed and the excessively long trip, after well over 4 billion years at light speed, we would have long since ceased to be human and evolved into something else ....and that's the closest groups, farther away is already well out of reach even at full light speed.

EDIT: about the wormhole thing, 'could' means they haven't ruled it out yet, not that we do, or ever will have the ability, or even that physics allows it.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Really great. What about wormholes?

+1 for the Tardis at 6:40

Why not mention races traveling towards us ,could be use as stepping stones .Both ways.

The speed of the expansion of the universe is known, its the hubble constant. And the further away points in space are from us, the faster they are accelerating away.
The closest galaxy to us is 25.000 light years away. A light year is 6 trillion miles. So, its 25.000 x 6 trillion miles. So,no,we are not gonna get there. And for sure not outside our local group.

This video is wrong.
Over a long enough time, you could travel anywhere in the universe. You just wouldn't be able to get back.

You can't reach something that is moving away from you, faster than you can travel towards it.

The closest major galaxy to us is 2.5 million light years away, a light year is 6 trillion miles. So it would be 2.5 million x 6 trillion miles. The scope of the universe is freaking huge.

The conclusion, that we are somehow living in the best of times, life of the universe wise, is suspect. We can't possibly know that there isn't larger scale structure beyond the limits of our observable universe. We are content with what we can see, just as some hypothetical people in the far future probably would be.

Also, don't most people internally substitute "here be dragons" whenever they hear "dark matter/energy"?