WestAir

Question: What are the effects of a stellar black hole that is traveling through the Milky Way at speeds greater than 99% of C relative to the Galactic disc? By that I mean are there any interesting effects observed by an outside or local observer? Will the stellar black hole appear normally or will its gravitational lensing effect become even more spectacular? Would an object in orbit of such a black hole see the Universe in hyper-speed due to the relativistic effects of .99C and the additional frame-dragging of space near the EH? Finally, if two stellar black holes traveling in opposite directions, each with a velocity of 0.99C relative to the Galactic Disc, collided head on, would the resulting deceleration allow the singularity to become visible to an outside observer before the ergo-sphere re stabilized? Author Note: Played some Space Engine. Started to wonder what would happen if I launched a singularity through the milky way at relativistic speeds. Curiosity...

If every particle in the universe immediately froze relative to all other particles in the universe, then was allowed to proceed from a 0 m/s relative to all other particles, would we encounter a "BIG CRUNCH" end to the cosmos?

If ATC Next Gen ever gets going, I'm hoping these drones will be able to utilize ADS-B Out. The system apparently allows every other pilot with the same equipment to see other aircraft's precise location in real time. Even if they can't be compliant with NextGen's equipment [Which is hard to imagine, since an ADS-B system is practically an upgraded Mode-S with a GPS], it would be fairly easy to ensure that commercial drones avoid flying into airspace covered by published SIDs and STARs, and avoid flying over VORs or other traffic-heavy corridors. Nothing is fool-proof, but I'd trust a drone to be collision-smart a lot more than I'd trust a C172 with two fuzzy radios, a transponder built in 1972, and a student pilot asking where the bottom of Class-B airspace is so he can fly under it.

I'm of the honest opinion that the educational system in America is so bad because K^2 used it all. Every last bit of it.

On the planes I use we have a radar that has ionization health risk warnings. They say the radio waves are strong enough to ionize. How is that possible?

The 3rd one I had a very difficult time finding a citation for. That said, the lack of empirical evidence doesn't necessarily affect my overall statement, due to the vast amount of unmentioned empirical evidence supporting it. Most people have heard about the B2 Bomber that crashed in Europe with nukes aboard, or the accidental dropping of the atom bomb in South Carolina that almost annihilated a small town, or the bomb that's still at the bottom of Chesapeake Bay. I could go on all day about accidental bomb handling but the three I picked were just the most interesting from a strategic standpoint, and I'm sure you've heard about many more incidents I haven't. I only mentioned a correlation between missiles and bombs and space agency rockets to make Peadar1987's statements relevant to the topic at hand. Maybe that wasn't a good idea.

Peadar1987, I'm actually surprised the only Nuclear Attack was in WWII. There have been 10 events in recent memory where either NORAD or the Russians have been in a position to launch. In fact, in '83 some of the Soviet early warning systems showed five US Nukes inbound to a Soviet Bunker. Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov actually waited it out to see if any nuclear blasts were reported before ordering a retaliatory launch. Nothing happened, and a computer system malfunction was later found to be the culprit. [source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident ] Another incident was is 1995 when a Norwegian scientific rocket launch was mistaken for a US Nuclear Trident Missile. Russian President Boris Yeltsin was brought the Nuclear Doomsday Briefcase and asked if he would retaliate with Full-Scale Nuclear War. This was the first (and only) time the Russian president ever opened the Nuclear Doomsday Briefcase. Instead of launching though, President Yeltsin waited until they could identify the missile. Had the President simply said "launch", the world as we know it would have ended in '95. [source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident ] An even MORE frightening event was on June 3rd, 1980 when a NORAD staffer received an imminent alert of over 220 incoming nuclear missiles on his computer screen. Alarms sounded everywhere as the Air Force collectively freaked out all across America. Bombers carrying nuclear bombs began taking off throughout the country. Someone woke up the National Security Adviser and told him that we were all going to die. Fortunately someone asked around and figured out that the 220 nuclear missiles weren't showing up on any other radars but one, and they figured out the computer chip in the staffers computer had malfunctioned and was showing 2's where it should be showing 0's. The computer chip that almost started WWIII cost only $0.46 cents. [source: http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/chapters/borning.html ] Just saying, it's surprising we haven't all been vaporized by now. The Government can barely handle a nuclear arsenal ; how can it handle a Space Administration?

/sigh As Q from Star Trek would say, just alter the gravitational constant of the Universe. Duh.

I find most people don't enjoy talking about subjects they're not extremely knowledgeable in. Sports, alcohol, women, politics, the workplace... you can get almost anyone to spend hours talking about those subjects. Once you branch out into more defined niche conversations (Astronomy and space, socioeconomics, history, fishing, gaming, etc etc) you need to be talking to someone who has some prior involvement with said subject. It's why when you first meet someone, unless you're at a place where persons from a niche group congregate (a convention, a show, etc) you probably don't start off by talking about general relativity or socioeconomics. And if you met your current group of friends from high school or the bar, chances are you still won't be able to relate to each others niche likes. My best friend played in an Orchestra. I can't entertain him in conversations about the Viola, Violin, or even the Piano. Likewise, he can't entertain me when talking about space or aviation. If I go to the National Aeronautics and Space Museum in Queens, NY, on the other hand...

How do you argue with someone who strongly, aggressively believes any type of radiation (radio waves included) is an an immediate health risk, and to assume otherwise is both insulting and ignorant?

We are mostly a service society. We can provide entertainment and services. [shows, movies, music, and entertainment goods.] Services account for a large bulk of our GDP and would be the easiest to mass produce. We will begin streaming reruns of "House of Cards" and "Breaking Bad" along with music from "The Beetles" and "Beyonce" using our best satellites. We'll charge your interstellar species $5/hour indefinitely. Please don't bomb or eat us.

"What will happen to airplanes if the Earth suddenly stopped rotating?" Same thing that happens to fish in the ocean. Are the fish all shot forward? Unlikely, because the ocean, as a fluid, isn't as rigid as the crust and will move along at its original velocity, slowing down due to the friction with the ocean floor. Fish will just go with the current. The same for aircraft. Air is a fluid, and it certainly won't "suddenly stop" because the chunk of mass below it does. It'll become an intense mach 1 wind all around the world, sure, but for things traveling a comfortable 320 knots inside it, they probably won't even notice a change. Unless you're also saying the sudden deceleration affects everything but man-made objects. In which case, the oceans and air and fluids and gases have no momentum and stop immediately. This one is more interesting, because aircraft traveling eastbound will gain a sudden headwind of hundreds of knots. Aircraft traveling westbound will gain a tailwind of hundreds of knots. Private, General Aviation, and commercial aircraft would be destroyed by the stresses of high-speed flight. Super-sonic fighter jets traveling eastbound that were not already flying at high speed will avoid being forced into speeds that would cause structural failure. All other aircraft would be torn apart. Though none of that would happen if the oceans and air were allowed to act as the fluids they were and keep their momentum during the stop.

Hey K^2, can the effects of the expansion of space between Galaxies on the propagation of information be compared to negative time values? If only because such regions can essentially become "white holes" where nothing can ever reach them due the the > C expansion rates? I may or may not have any idea what I'm talking about.*

If the planet stopped suddenly, everything will still continue to move at its current velocity. Skyscrapers, the crust, the oceans, the wall next to you. No, you *wont* be smacked by the wall next to you. Instead, you and the wall - and the street and your city, and your continental shelf for that matter will continue on at 463.83Km/h or slower into the horizon. There won't be any super-sonic booms because the atmosphere will roll with you like the fluid it is. What devastation will happen? The friction between the still mantle and super-sonic crust will cause a lot of things to glow, I'd imagine.

Imagining the effects of > C velocities is difficult to explain because it's impossible. It's like if you asked me "What would be the social ramifications on mankind if Earth never existed?" You'd probably look at me with an odd glare and go "Uh, how can humanity exist without Earth?", and there's our problem. I'm asking "how can you have a velocity past c?" The reason it's so difficult to imagine is because we know you can accelerate forever. You can do constant 1G accelerations till the end of time. At the speed of light, the entire Universe will have a volume of zero to you because you'll be able to transverse its entire length in zero time. You can go from the Milky Way to Andromeda in less than one Plank Time, to you. How do you go faster than infinite velocity? What are the effects of faster than infinity? I dunno - hard to explain. It's probably easier to discuss the social ramifications of Earth not existing.

Irrelevant. It's a hypothetical scenario with the ultimate goal of learning what historical event people most want to witness.

Time 0 is still a time. It's the point where time and space began to propogate. I wouldn't travel before that, because I could not. Really I'm more interested in seeing if the Big Bang happened at all, and what it actually looked like to have billions of Galaxies spew out of something smaller than a penny. To the OP who said I'd be restricted to Earth - in technically the Big Bang happened "everywhere" because it's space that expands with time, and so at time 0 Earth was at the center of the big bang. Just saying... As for the first primates, I'm sure there were animals with a mutation that literally became the first "Homo" of the species. There is a first human, it happened, and they looked exactly like us. His or her parents might have been ever so slightly different (maybe just extra facial hair, who knows), but there is a line that was crossed, and I'd like to see it. As for the first language, that too. There was a point, somewhere in the past, where someone finally said (for the first time ever) that THIS means THAT. It could have been something as simple as their own name, and it was probably just one word with one syllable... but again, I want to see it.

I am not a fan of the 500 year limit on your theoretical machine. My very first, natural instinct was to say "Travel back to time 0 and observe the birth of the Universe in the big bang, and see just how much I can observe through the dense soup of matter." With 500 years on that limit, the single most interesting event I could watch [With enough pop-corn, of course] is either the French Revolution or the Colonial War (and birth of the US). Other historical events I'd like to watch is Amelia Earhart's last flight, the V-J Kiss in Times Square (Pure entertainment more than education), and maybe bits and pieces of the fall of Prussia. It's really not that interesting a period because it's the single most documented period in history. Events I'd love to see beyond 500 years extends to the nature of the Universe. The first primate, the extinction of the Dinosaurs, the birth of mans first actual language; None of which can I do with a 500 year limit on the machine.

You would make the Universe no grander than the Solar System so that enjoying all of it becomes possible? Is that not like throwing away an entire cake but one small slice, so that you can enjoy the whole thing in one bite? Terribly selfish.

Wouldn't this require exactly as much Dv or energy as it would to constantly levitate the crew via a permanently firing rocket engine? Like if you held a Satellite above Earth at 0 km/s velocity by just blasting the thrusters directly at Kerbins CoM to maintain your altitude. Sounds like a waste of fuel and energy.

I laughed out loud at this one. Sign me up.

If you had the power to change one law of physics in any way you see fit what would you change and why? If you could add a law or completely remove one, what would it be? I thought about this after watching one of those perpetual motion youtube videos and thinking, "Man the conservation of energy sucks. We'd be so better off if we could make energy from nothing." So I'd start my mad scientist meddling by removing the conservation of energy. I then realized that since life evolved in a world with the CoE, that many animals would have evolved to utilize free energy rather than playing around in the vicious food chain that we have now. You wouldn't even need food for energy, but just for nutrients. Another piece of physics I'd like to manipulate is the propagation of photons. I'd make them like a graviton: Unaffected by gravity. That way we'd be able to see what a blasted singularity looks like. What about you?

Interplanetary wars will be fought by single-shot rocks or missiles hurled at incredible, mind-numbing speeds. No armies, no battleships, no glamorous war heroes - just a planet killing rock about the size of your neighborhood and mathematicians smart enough to know when to sling-shot it. The same can be said for the future of intercontinental hot-wars. Technology makes destruction so absolute it becomes unusable.

Would we be a technological marvel if we were an ocean-barring species with the same intelligence & brain? If we lacked opposable thumbs? If Earth had no land but we were still mammals like Dolphins, could we do half of what we've accomplished? Electricity would be an impossibility. Combustion... etc all. With no opposable thumbs how could we manipulate our environment so freely? Technological intelligence comes from more than just a brain or sentience.

Not really relevant to the discussion though.