WildWeasel
Spaceman
Space's third axis doesn't really make that much of a difference. It just makes it slightly infinitely larger.
Political Structure of the Confederation
- Thread starter Bob McDob
- Start date
Bob McDob
Better Health Through Less Flavor
BattleDog said:
That's what I'm saying - it's not big like modern America, it's big like the US after the Trans-continental railroad was built. Comparitively smaller, but still pretty freaking huge. You CAN'T fly from one end to the other of the Confederation in a few hours the same way you fly from Los Angeles to New York in six or seven hours. Judging from jump lines, my best estimates put travel from say, New Constantinople to Enigma at a week at the very fastest. Most people don't travel at the very fastest, because the large passenger ships are too large to fit through the most direct jump points - think the Intrepid vs. the Vesuvius in WingIV.
Also, not all jump points are created equal. It's much, much more direct to fly from Sol to Enigma than, from, say Sol to Nephele, because the jump lines lead in a slightly wandering pattern.
Space will always be mind boggling. It's larger than you will ever know, no matter how much research you put into it. This won't magically change in 600 years either. The Milkyway alone is 100,000 lightyears in diameter, and Confed has only explored a little over a half a quadrant, about 12500 square lightyear region. Space will always be a big place.
Here's something to give you an idea of how big space is. It takes about an eighth of a second for light to go around the Earth once, but it takes four years for it to reach us from the nearest star.
Let's reduce the 12,000 km diameter earth to the size of a quarter--2 cm wide. On that scale, Alpha Centauri, which is a bit over 40 trillion km away, would still be a whopping 70,000 km away!
Now, let's reduce the Earth's entire orbit around the Sun--about 300 million km diameter--to the size of a quarter. On that scale, Alpha Centauri is still 130 km away!
Let's take this one step further and reduce the entire Solar System out to Neptune's orbit down to quarter-size. That's a radius of about 35 AU. Even at that scale, Alpha Centauri would be four kilometers away!
Now, to get an idea of how empty all that space is, let's compress all the matter in the universe into a single mass with the same density as the Sun. The observable universe is estimated to have a mass of about 10^22 times that of the Sun. We'll ignore the fact that anything over three solar masses normally collapses into a black hole unless it's undergoing fusion as a star, and let's just lump all of this matter together into a single big mega-star with the same density as our Sun. That mega-star would have a diameter of just over 20 million times that of our Sun--about 30 trillion km, or just under three light-years in diameter! Yes, you heard right: all of the matter in the known universe, compressed into a ball with the same density as our Sun, would have a diameter less than the distance between our Sun and its nearest neighbor!
To put this in scale with the diameter of the universe, let's assume that the universe stretches out to the cosmic horizon (14 billion light years away) and no farther (it may be bigger but we can't see beyond the cosmic horizon because the universe is too young for light to have reached us from there yet). Reduce this vast space to the size of the Earth. At that scale, our mega-star with all of the matter in the universe contained in it, would be a BB, five millimeters in diameter. Imagine that--the universe as a completely empty space the size of Earth, and all of the matter contained in it is just a BB pellet.
Let's reduce the 12,000 km diameter earth to the size of a quarter--2 cm wide. On that scale, Alpha Centauri, which is a bit over 40 trillion km away, would still be a whopping 70,000 km away!
Now, let's reduce the Earth's entire orbit around the Sun--about 300 million km diameter--to the size of a quarter. On that scale, Alpha Centauri is still 130 km away!
Let's take this one step further and reduce the entire Solar System out to Neptune's orbit down to quarter-size. That's a radius of about 35 AU. Even at that scale, Alpha Centauri would be four kilometers away!
Now, to get an idea of how empty all that space is, let's compress all the matter in the universe into a single mass with the same density as the Sun. The observable universe is estimated to have a mass of about 10^22 times that of the Sun. We'll ignore the fact that anything over three solar masses normally collapses into a black hole unless it's undergoing fusion as a star, and let's just lump all of this matter together into a single big mega-star with the same density as our Sun. That mega-star would have a diameter of just over 20 million times that of our Sun--about 30 trillion km, or just under three light-years in diameter! Yes, you heard right: all of the matter in the known universe, compressed into a ball with the same density as our Sun, would have a diameter less than the distance between our Sun and its nearest neighbor!
To put this in scale with the diameter of the universe, let's assume that the universe stretches out to the cosmic horizon (14 billion light years away) and no farther (it may be bigger but we can't see beyond the cosmic horizon because the universe is too young for light to have reached us from there yet). Reduce this vast space to the size of the Earth. At that scale, our mega-star with all of the matter in the universe contained in it, would be a BB, five millimeters in diameter. Imagine that--the universe as a completely empty space the size of Earth, and all of the matter contained in it is just a BB pellet.
Bob McDob
Better Health Through Less Flavor
Make no mistake about it, space is really friggin huge - but then, Earth is, to a much lesser degree, granted, pretty large too, and how many people think about that? Blair's attitude in WingIV - about space being "just another junkyard" is probably how the majority of Confederation citizens feel. If any of them had a chance to see how insignificant they were, a la the machine Zaphod experienced in the Hitchhiker's novels, their brains would spontaniously combust. Still, after 400 years of living in space, romanticism and the idea of "the final frontier" tend to get thrown aside in favor of more immediete concerns.
Ice Hellion
Spaceman
Major General, I'm glad you mention the former headhancho of the universe, Zaphod Beeblebrox. I do have to say this; any life you run into in the infinite of space is just the product of a perverse imagination.