as i see it even if we traveled at speed of light we cant get far into universe

as i see it even if we traveled at speed of light we cant get far into universe, now if we travel at 10 x speed of light still cant get that far into universe..........

Did you mean to post this here: Could we see Earths past if we looked from far enough away?

no although i did make same comment into that thread, i was also wondering what people thought of this little problem, where by traveling speed of light dont get us all that far into the universe as it stands in this time, it also is getting larger all the time.

Heres another one to think about to how close are we to the edge of the universe as we cant be centre of universe one way must be faster to edeg than others up, down, straight ahead, back????? maybe thats 2 ways counts as four?? confused yet ?

Not confused at all...

The center of the universe is reletive to the observer. Right now that's about 16 billion light years in any given direction. For whatever reason, be it optics or something else, that is the farthest back any of our telescopes can see.

So to traverse the universe as we know it you would need about 32 billion years, traveling at the speed of light.

.
The Universe is believed to be the 3D surface of a 4D sphere. If time is that vector from the center of the 4D sphere outward to us and beyond then by going inward or outward from the current surface would take you backward and forward in time. I don't think this is the case, but no presentable data to that effect. [I probably just don't like it]

In any event by cutting a chord [straight line] through the sphere instead of on its surface you can increase you speed by a very significant percentage [but not multiples] if you go deep enough through the sphere.

I wonder if time might merely be the stretch factor of space? If you could contract space time might flow backwards? Does going faster than light cause space to jam back on itself?

We always think of time as being uniform, but realitivity teaches us otherwise. Makes me worry if history is truly a fixed quantity.

I agree with your point, If we can't travel at many multiples of the speed of light we are pretty much limited in how far we can go into the depths of the Galaxy and Universe. If we want to go to other Galaxies we are going to have to travel thousands or millions of times the speed of light.
.

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid
Not confused at all...

The center of the universe is reletive to the observer. Right now that's about 16 billion light years in any given direction. For whatever reason, be it optics or something else, that is the farthest back any of our telescopes can see.

So to traverse the universe as we know it you would need about 32 billion years, traveling at the speed of light.

Actually, you could travel anywhere in the universe in an instant if you could travel at the speed of light, as time slows for an object as it approaches the speed of light and effectively stops once it reaches it. So if you were to travel 10 billion light years at the speed of light, you wouldn't age a second. However, for all outside observers (those left on Earth), time passes at its normal rate. For the rest of the universe, 10 billion years pass.

Im sorry vor78 but that is theory.

For this post i am using the abbrievation TSOL: meaning The Speed Of Light

Actually you would age (well from what i was taught). Time is still relative to you. Photons (light) travel at I believe to be 186,000 miles per second(TSOL). Photons like everything else is ruled by a constant, TIME meaning, that at TSOL your journey would be instant... is incorrect.

If you want to travel 6ly (light years) at TSOL, It would take you 6years.
And yes you would be 6 years older, but due to time dialation everyone back at home would be alot older, im not sure of the exact figure.

E=MC2 - Energy is equal to the mass multiplied by TSOL squared.

So as you travel at a faster velocity you actually increase in mass.
Requiring more and more fuel. It has actually been calculated we dont have enough fuel available to make a speed of light trip (assuming the standard energy sources).

-

this leads us to other theories. There have been theories that if you were to tear a hole in "the fabric" of space time. You could use that to go anywere you need to go, or a similar principal a black hole. One of the latest theories ive heard of is creating gravitational dips, or wells to zoom where you want to go in almost an instant or alot faster . The current studies of gravity show it to be a 3dimensional grid but other people believe gravity is particle like..."gravitons", or perhaps a combination of both.

(Any mistakes sorry, little busy [including spelling ])

So dont give up hope there are many possibilities out there, but with the current accepted theories. Where not going anywere at the speed of light.

Vorta.

The Centre of the Universe HAS to be in a specific direction. However the Edge of the Universe is not where the Oldest area is.

Due to Relativity and the faster you travel the slower your time passes, relatively. At the time of the big bang (and since) space has been expanding like a balloon. The outer edge is moving faster then the bits nearer the centre. Thus the Edge is Younger and the Centre is the Oldest piece of the Universe.

I wonder how long it would take in light yrs. to travel to the edges of the universe and how far those boundries are from us. From what I understand, it just keeps on going to no end like the energizer bunny

I don't have anything to say about intergallactic travel, but interstellar travel by humans is certainly possible providing you realise that time is only an obstacle to you if you're perceiving it. Reaching the speed of light is not necessary.

Say we had the following technology:
- The ability to place ourselves into a state of suspended animation via cryonics or other means, and be able to come out of this suspended state after a given time period.
- A craft that was flown by a computer and had a means to obtain, by ion wind or solar body gravity assisted maneuvers, about 1/10th the speed of light (~30,000 km/s).
- The ability to extract energy and construct nutrients directly from cosmic sources.

In a theoretical mission to Tau Ceti departing in the year 2100, the occupants of the craft will arrive at the Tau Ceti system in the year 2220 and arrive back on Earth in the year 2340 with all the collected data. Being in a state of suspended animation for most of this mission, only a fraction of this time has actually passed for the occupants onboard.

This is going back to the old ideals of setting sail on a ship to discover unknown land.

Now futher consider that humans have technology to extend their average life-times from 65 years to 650 years. Such a mission would only span ~1/3 of a life-time.

It's hard to realise all of this right now, but I believe one day it will be possible to visit other stars, and it can be done without attaining the speed of light.

local travel story
a girlfriend departed,went home,i lay in meditation/relaxing visioning her drive home,i visioned her home as if i was walking up to it,then into the house and into her room,in vision it felt as if i was there..she called me to tell me she thought she was going crazy,for a second she thought she seen me..i thought i was there,she thought she seen me..in seconds with out leaving my physical body..
are we not looking at the bright side of the moon
are we looking at the wrong vehicles
can we just project
can we wrinkle time
could the energy in the apex of pyramids
fuel an ascension into the heavens
could we be looking at the wrong space to travel in..a different plane
other dimensions
what do we know about the depth of the spiritual world.
what is that space like..
i lived with a ghost for a while,until his wife passed on..
he is documented in a book by jennifer lee,wife of richard prior..she played in the house as a teen when it was neglected..also norman son stopped in for the first time and he told us a story after he heard ours..
so this brings me to
how do our spirits travel not our physical body..
that all seems like there are just way to many educated minds at work looking to make and spend lots of money
look at the light side of the moon
let it shine
couldnt the aliens just be us..who once all could have been gods in a golden age
doors slammed shut du to a chaotic nature
ever since we have been kept on the dark side of the moon,for so many reasons..
made to think there are gods or aliens..
i am looking with in rather than strain these eyes..

It would take 100,000 YEARS just to get across our current GALAXY at the speed of light, and that's if you just ride straight on through. Stopping to explore other planets and solar systems could add a lot more time.

So exploring the universe itself would require an infinite lifetime, and even then, you'd probably have to be a lifeform beyond being a human, because otherwise, even if you could live forever, you spaceship might break down on you or you get hit by some big rock, or encounter some phenomenon in space never even seen before, etc......who knows.

What you'd need is a way to go from one area in space to another instantly.

OK. But how do you accellarate "anything" to the speed of light. As an objects speed increases so does its mass. The faster you want to go the more power it takes because the damn thing keeps getting heavier. At the speed of light it (it being a vessel or ship or piece of cake for that matter) would have infinite mass requiring infinite energy to propell it. Thats if Mr Einstein was rite of course and so far his track record is pretty good

i have seen interesting articles on time gates...perhaps i found it in the category or dimensional doorways?
maybe it was under vril ?????

Well you sure wouldn't be able to see exactly what was going on, not without making perceptual adjustments to compensate for your new rate of motion.

Evolution, what a killer eh? Who'd have thought it would be able to make eyes that are tuned to how light travels down here, on the very planet that evolved those eyes?

Originally posted by Vorta
If you want to travel 6ly (light years) at TSOL, It would take you 6years.
And yes you would be 6 years older, but due to time dialation everyone back at home would be alot older, im not sure of the exact figure.

Not really, own time of object moving at speeds near c slows down compared to time of stationary object. (departure place)
And six years in "object's time" would mean much longer time for stationary object.
So if ship would travel at speeds very near c for six years in ship's time it would have gone much farther than six light years. (if it really travels that fast compared to space)

www.fourmilab.ch...
www.walter-fendt.de...

Originally posted by stclaim
At the time of the big bang (and since) space has been expanding like a balloon. The outer edge is moving faster then the bits nearer the centre. Thus the Edge is Younger and the Centre is the Oldest piece of the Universe.

Wrong!
Space is expanding evenly and speed of expansion just depends on distance between "reference" points you use.

We can well see that farther objects move away faster than closer ones without it meaning we are in the center of universe because it's same on everywhere else.

Make some dots on the surface of air balloon and start filling it, you notice that dots farther away from your reference dot move away faster than closer ones and it's same without depending dot which you use as reference.

Traveling the speed of light will get us to see other solar systems, but to travel throughout our galaxy is something we are going to have to wait untill the next paradigm comes about, if anyone has any ground breaking discoveries then post it

Originally posted by wang
Traveling the speed of light will get us to see other solar systems, but to travel throughout our galaxy is something we are going to have to wait untill the next paradigm comes about, if anyone has any ground breaking discoveries then post it

Hi Wang. The imagination of Gene Roddenberry had some unfortunate effects. He studied restricted-access projects to come up with many of his Star Trek concepts. One of these was 'warp factor'. He made it into a means of relatively instant travel between stars (correct for the crew due to time dilatation), with no time dilatation effect for the homeworld (incorrect). Time dilatation is the slowing of time relative to a fixed observer: go faster and you age slower. Not just you, but your particles too. The original warp factor referred to in the real-world restricted-access project is not a space factor, but a time warp factor. If one attains a certain percentage of the speed of light, for example, 1 year would pass on the bridge but 7 would pass at the point of origin. Thus, warp factor 7. This is science, not science fiction, and is proven again and again at high-speed particle accelerator laboratories on Earth. Thus at close enough to light speed, one could traverse the entire Universe in the blink of an eye. One's homeworld would have aged by the effective warp factor, however. This complicates real-world exopolitics, neccesitating something like megalithic religion for political continuity in a spacefaring empire. We are talking about time travel into the future.

The effect of this from the point of view of the bridge is that you are traveling faster than C. At warp factor 4, you seem to be traveling at four times the speed of light. From the point of view of the Earth, you are travelling at some large fraction (99%+?) of the speed of light. From your viewpoint, you arrive at Proxima Centauri, 4 light years distant in one year. From Earth's viewpoint, the journey takes you four years. Weird but true.

At light speed, the warp factor becomes infinite. So light speed alone would open the entire Universe to human colonization in one lifetime- if you are crew. Accel, blink, decel. Other side of the Universe.

First, you have to come up with enough fuel to reach such a tremendous speed. Or some way to extract the neccesary energy from space itself.

The problem then becomes how to avoid being vaporized by dust, fist sized rocks, interstellar mountains, and the rain of radiation coming from the ship's nose as you plow into relativistic nuclei (space is not a perfect vacuum). You need a lot of radiation shielding in front. So a practical starship ends up looking more like a Moon than the Enterprise.

And when you get home, if you go far enough, maybe no one is waiting for you.

Now, this is relativistic physics as we know it today. If some kid comes along and rips the Universe a new hole, maybe we can do it differently. Miguel Alcubierre may have done just that.

[edit on 12-2-2005 by Chakotay]