[tmountain]

"If our ship travels 20,000 light years in 40 years (from the perspective of those on the ship) then that would take a "real" 20,000 years from the perspective of those on Earth"

This part just breaks my brain. I've been reading about this stuff for decades, and it just does not compute. It's also a little funny because there's basically zero incentive for the folks on earth to send astronauts away at near-light speed, as they'd never realize the benefits of the mission.

[ANewFormation]

Yip the reality that the speed of light is fixed, but the 'speed' of time is variable is just so intuitively absurd.

This is the reason that I find things like the Fermi Paradox no more than mildly interesting.

It implicitly assumes we have a sound understanding of the fundamentals of the universe yet each revolutionary discovery we make soundly refutes that assumption.

And with the vast number of 'known unknowns' and an unknowable number of unknown unknowns, it seems ridiculous to imagine we're anywhere near the end of revolutionary discoveries.

[floxy]

>there's basically zero incentive for the folks on earth to send astronauts away at near-light speed, as they'd never realize the benefits of the mission.

s/earth/Milky Way/