Two supermassive black holes are locked in an orbital dance at the core of the distant galaxy OJ 287. This diagram shows their sizes relative to the solar system. The larger one, with about 18 billion times the mass of our sun (right), would encompass all the planets in the solar system with room to spare. The smaller one is about 150 million times the mass of our sun (left), which would be large enough to swallow up everything out to the asteroid belt, just inside the orbit of Jupiter.
Man, getting to explore the universe would be fucking cool
Cool, but only if you could somehow do it very quickly (which would violate the laws of physics) or had some sort of suspended animation system you repeatedly went into. Even the nearest star to us would take you well over 4 years to reach at the speed of light.
As for OJ 287, it would take you five billion years to get there. Longer than the Earth has existed.
Or if we divorced ourselves from biological life!
It’s not totally settled that practical FTL is actually impossible. There’s possibly loopholes that can potentially be exploited, such as the Alcubierre drive that attempts to to shrink spacetime in front of it while expanding spacetime behind it. So while it itself moves at a slower speed, it traverses through an artificially shortened distance basically.
It’s all still sci fi at this point of course, and probably isn’t practical due to enormous energy requirements. (like, you’d basically need a star or something to power it as far as we know) But, we’re still pretty far from understanding what dark energy is, so things could potentially change at some point in the future. shrug
No reason not to let the kids dream though, they may be the ones studying these things in the future.
Wasn’t there a simulation, that shown it will work? Provided we somehow obtain insane amount of energy or exotic matter.
Not sure. All I’ve heard is that it’s still theoretically possible.
You must be fun at parties.
I’m sorry you don’t find data to be beautiful.
I found it very interesting!
Thank you.
Why do you think we all get wet over Trek!