I've been a bit sick lately with an infection, although I don't really have the time to deal with it as I got a lot going on, it's kind of made it hard to fall asleep.
So of course I'm here laying in bed now writing my 2nd post of the year on my phone and the 2nd one this week. I was looking at some space videos, always fascinating to me even though it's hard to wrap my head around some of the things. It's kind of sad however to come to terms with some of the realities of this universe. One of them being how far everything fucking is from us.
Maybe that's a good thing you may say if you're worrying about aliens visiting us and I don't disagree. But as pioneers and explorers it is a bit lame how enclosed in our solar system we are and the hopes to ever get to explore other ones are probably going to be many, many years in the future with technology we probably can't even begin to understand yet or may never understand as we just rely on AI to take care of the work and we just nod along and hop in a ship to go traveling.
I was watching this video recently talking about the smallest thing we can kind of calculate that it exists, the planck length and how it kind of blocks us off when attempting to look at it. Basically if I understood it correctly, to try and observe into that size you need to shine a light with a very small wavelength because if the wavelength is bigger than it then we won't see it. But apparently the loser the wavelength the higher the energy is of those photons you spraying at it, and the more you try to get there the more energy you spend to the point where you end up creating a black hole trying to see the smallest thing possible.
That's kind of crazy to me, it's like black holes are this giant closed sourced code that just tells us access is not possible further past this point. There's no way to brute force it so we just have to give up there.
Similarly on the other end of things, the furthest we can see is roughly 13 billion light years away and that's just at current times because things are moving away from other stuff faster than the speed of light. Meaning that some galaxies that we may still be able to see with the JWST telescope currently may be pushed away soon to never be seen again because that light will take longer and longer to reach our planet.
For all we know there may not be an end to our universe which makes things even weirder. Like what the fuck does infinity even mean, you know?
In the video they were throwing some comparisons of stars and stuff. That we can fit around a million earth's into our sun which already makes it hard for our brains to conceive. Most of us can't even comprehend what a million is. Thousands of thousands of something. Imagine a hundred one hundred dollars bills, that's easy, but then another 100 of that to get to a million. That's how big the sun is compared to us and our sun isn't even that big compared to some other suns out there. I mean look at this image for scale, what the fuck.
Apparently the 2nd largest one up there is supposed to go supernova soon and it's only 500 light years away so maybe we get some nice fireworks to witness.
Lightyears are another thing that are so hard to conceive. Like you can understand what they mean, how far light travels in a certain amount of time, but understanding how fast light is is very hard to understand for normal people because it's just so much faster than anything else we know.
Take speed of sound for instance, Roughly 330 meters per second through air. That's how you can kind of measure how far a thunderstorm is when you see it and count down how many seconds until you hear it. If it's a kilometer away it'll take around 3 seconds for you to hear it, easy, right?
Light travels a million times faster than that.
One trip around earth is about 40,000 km and light can go around it 7.5x in one second.
Now try and conceive that the nearest star to ours is 4 light years away. How are we gonna get there, ever?
I tried to like imagine with our current tech how long it would take. I remember seeing those SpaceX launches having the rocket go 20,000km/h, maybe they're able to reach higher speeds than that in vacuum, I'm not sure, I'm just rambling here, okay. I asked Google how long it would take to get to the nearest star at 20,000km/h which is already 100x faster than most of us have ever travelled in a car on the autobahn.
It would take 150,000 years.
Light travels 1 billion kilometers in one hour. Why? Why couldn't it just be 10x the speed of sound or hell even 1000 would've been okay but a million times? Meh.
Maybe we aren't meant to go out exploring.
Oh well, think I'll end my rant here. Guess AI evolution is one of the few things for us to look forward to in our lifetimes and what Elon and Trump tweet at each other.