Sounds like either heaven, or hell... O.o Maybe it's like some video games where, if you go to the edge of the map and keep going, you have the
illusion of movement (in your scenario there would be no visual cues since there was no visible matter, but you could verify your thrusters are on and
your ships computer would still compute distance increasing between you and the no longer visible stars behind you, or whatever particular star you
have your navigation computers locked onto), but then as soon as you turn around and travel a small distance, everything appears again as if you never
went anywhere once your reached "the edge".
I guess that wouldconfuse the hhell outta the navigation computers...
Or if this is a computer simulation, there may be safeguards set in place to prevent any thing from going beyond where matter has "naturally" expanded
into. For instance I remember one game where if you went out of bounds a 5 or 10 second countdown would commence and at the end of it, either one or
multiple invincible or very strong (not sure on some details it was a while ago) enemies would appear and either destroy you or if you could get away
in time, chase you back towards the map.
So there are many ways of accomplishing this. Maybe as you get away from larger amounts of matter and it is only you pretty much, time is effected by
dilation in a way so that you could never travel fast enough because the expanding universe behind you would be in "faster time" than you, allowing
it's expansion to "catch up" with you just enough that you could never actually gain any real progress in trying to "leave the edge".
(bigfatfurrytexan's post gave me the idea).
Or maybe an asteroid would "come out of nowhere" or any random thing (a different thing every time you attempt the voyage?) like your spacecraft
breaks down, or everyone (or the crucial members of the mission) gets some kind of "space sickness" and goes crazy. Maybe the physical separation from
large amounts of matter makes you go crazy. Maybe we are dependent on it somehow. There are many who believe we are dependant on the earth itself and
we would need special devices to "mimick" the conditions on earth if we are to ever leave it. We already have the idea of artificial gravity using
momentum and centrifugal motion, and I believe the astronauts today have devices that pulse some kind of frequencies matching the earth's "heartbeat"
or something.
So what if our galaxy also has some kind of frequency or something that we need. Apparently our last galaxy got swallowed by the larger milky way,
which, as a neighbor may be somewhat familiar, but this transition into our new home may be having some effect on our planet, or sun... I don't know
where we were when life spawned on earth so I don't know if life itself is being effected, positively or negatively by this process, but clearly it
was a loong time ago when we were a "seperate" galaxy. I don't even know if the sun or earth was created.
Will it be possible to create a device tremendous enough to mimick the natural conditions of our home galaxy? If it's just a frequency like the earth,
then we'll obviously the device used by astronauts to recreate that frequency is much smaller than the earth itself.. but there may be other things to
consider besides just frequencies. Things we don't know about yet. But with human ingenuity, and willpower, we may overcome that unknown obstacle as
well.
edit on 5/13/2014 by 3n19m470 because: added everything after "...confuse the hell out of the nav comps"