there are no limits?

Question

when i think about the universe i dont think limits everything people have done was beyond the limits people can manipulate alot of things to get a better result then what is narutal so when einstein says nothing can go faster then light i say nothing that we have right now can go fast. once we have a dicens sphear then things will go alot fast population will explode space travel will happen daily and mankind will inhabit multiple galaxys. with a bigger population there will be a better chance of inventions furthering space exploration. this is a great vision but not one that i expect to see in my life time. any one have a different vision of the future?

....kit kat....wow...i never said that the universe would be explored in one life time just like rome wasnt built in a day.

people are top of the food chain and as far as i can see we are going to stay unless some thing happens to kill only humans insects where here before us and they didnt get to the top of the food chain so they are not going to.

Answer 1

The universe is vaster than you can imagine.

If you put the earth on a football field and consider the football field to be the universe you would need an electron microscope to see the earth. The universe is HUGE, it is IMENSE, and the scale is so hard to explain. Light reflected from the moon hit the earth in a few seconds, but to reach the earth or moon it had to travel 8 minutes. It can take a radio signal 4 hours to reach Saturn, which is why we can't control the Cassini space probe directly.

Our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centuari is over 4 light years away! That is a huge distance.

As you approach the speed of light your frame of reference remains constant, but with respect to an independent frame things change. This has been proven on airlines and with the space shuttle although the effect at orbital speed is so small that you need an atomic clock to notice it.

As you approach the speed of light your mass increases, your length in the direction of travel shrinks, time slows and you will need increasingly more energy to keep accelerating because your mass will increase. So near the speed of light you will have nearly an infinite mass, squashed to almost nothing with time slowing to a crawl and you will weigh an near infinite amount.

The speed of light is a limit as we understand physics, but that is limited to the standard 4 dimensions we know of. Einstein’s theories called for at least 11 dimensions and String Theory calls for up to 20 dimensions. Gravity could be a force expressed from another dimension; if so than understanding it could give us clues how to get around the speed of light problem.

Experimentally we have already sent a signal via a laser beam faster than the speed of light through a solid using a quantum tunnel effects so we have some proof for String Theory. We would need to align a huge number of strings to use their instant transportation, but that could be one short cut.

Einstein himself thought that we could leave the standard 4 dimensions and use another way to travel across the curvature of space time; thus traveling huge distances without having to exceed the speed of light.

Then how does dark matter and dark energy enter the equation; do they even have an effect? Can we use the power from them to beat Einstein’s limit? There is an old saying “the more you learn the less you know.” It is true because as you learn more you find you have more questions. We need to keep plugging along on physics and wait for a genius with the ability of Einstein, Galileo or Newton to put it all together. Maybe some future genius could solve the problem or find a way to circumvent it entirely. The ships on Star Trek don’t travel faster than the speed of light, they warp space time and that warped bubble goes faster than the speed of light so the ship itself gets around the problem. Maybe we can invent a warp drive or we can find a way into hyperspace.

Until then the only way we will ever cover that distance is with generations ships; ships where the crew grows old, marries, has children, teach those children their jobs to replace them when they die and so on.

The Voyager spacecraft were, until last year, the fastest man made object ever. They are heading out of the solar system and have been doing that for over 20 years and they haven’t reached the edge of our solar system yet!

There are limits. For example the universe was born in the big bang 13.7 billion years ago. If matter can’t exceed the speed of light then that means the universe has a radius of only 13.7 billion light years. There is also a known death of the universe, it may be a hundred billion years in the future, but thanks to entropy the universe has a finite life span. The Earth has a finite lifespan as well, in 2-3 billion years the galaxy Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way. If our little planet survives that in then in another 4 billion years the sun will die and collapse into a white dwarf after boiling away the surface of the earth.

Answer 2

For anyone to really see the whole universe, you would need wormholes. My vision is that they will expand Quantum foam into big wormholes that you can carry around in your case or something. Than just walk through and pop. Even with this awesome idea, it is still EXTREMELY unlikely that it anyone will see the whole universe. Plus, by the time we learn how to do this stuff, the universe will start crunching. So we better learn fast!

Answer 3

We are stuck at the light barrier, maybe get out to the Gas Giants with semi-perm habs, but then all die of a virus or internecine strife.

Answer 4

ir ally doubt that we will ever se thw whole universe..we need more than one life time..plsu there might a supirior species that will do wat we have done to OUR world. plus insects will he the supirior spiecies in a a couple hundred of years.