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by teekert 829 days ago
I’m not religious but my fav “that’s oddly convenient“ fact is that just by going fast enough you can cross the universe in a human lifetime because of time slowing down. As a biologist I find that much more fascinating than all those poor “irreducible complexity” anti-evolution arguments. Perhaps a physicist feels the other way around.
2 comments

Well, you can cross the universe in any amount of time. The human lifetime isn't special in that regard. A photon crosses the universe in zero time, and anything with non-zero mass can get arbitrarily close to zero time.
As I've seen this point made in the past, it's that travelling at a constant 1g acceleration the subjective time for an astronaut would be about 45 years in traversing the observable Universe (~14 billion light years).

That is, a comfortable and familiar acceleration gives a human-lifetime-equivalent journey (subjective time).

If you're planning a round-trip, you'll find rather more time has transpired on what used to be Earth.

<https://www.universetoday.com/129086/far-can-travel/>

> If you're planning a round-trip, you'll find rather more time has transpired on what used to be Earth.

Or less, depending on the rotation of the universe as a whole.

Or no return may be possible at any speed/acceleration given the expansion of the universe.
Given that the outbound journey is already technically challenging, that's very nearly quibbling, despite cosmological accuracy.
That 1g constant acceleration requires practically infinite amounts of energy
True.

However it is also the specific context in which the lifetime-universe-traversal concept emerges.

> A photon crosses the universe in zero time

That is not consistent with my observations.

Multiple universes, perhaps, depending on your cosmology/eschatology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero