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[–] 12 points 2 years ago (3 children)

To be clear, even if you're moving at 1000x the speed of light, and have figured out a way around relativity so that you don't have time dilation (and so you can, y'know, go faster than the speed of light), galactic distances are still so vast that interstellar traffic is largely not feasible. Our galaxy--one of billions, trillions, or more--is about 2M light years across. Going all the way across the galaxy at 1000x the speed of light would still take 2000 years.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars

    It's a hundred thousand light years side to side

    It bulges in the middle, six thousand light years thick

    But out by us, it's just a thousand light years wide

    We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point

    We go 'round every two hundred million years

    And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions

    In this amazing and expanding universe

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If we somehow figured out how to travel at 1000x speed of light, I'm sure we'll be able to increase that number to 1 million, 1 billion, and beyond. Until we just stopped using "speed of light" as a frame reference because it would be a completely different method of traveling (like instantaneous through a wormhole or something).

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Americans will come up with some ridiculous unit for it, like 3 1/16 * 10^24 inches per lunar cycle

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Isn't warp just light speed? I was under the impression that warp 1 is the speed of light, and eg warp 7 being 7x the speed of light

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