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🚀 Voyager 1 Is About to Make Cosmic History! (lemmy.today)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/interestingasfuck@lemmy.world
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[–] 11 points 2 months ago (7 children)

The first manned flight of a hot air balloon was in 1783. I'm sure a lot of people thought flying would be a regular occurrence in the future. Maybe 100 years earlier it would have been an outrageous thought though.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    I knew someone would nitpick the dates and miss the point.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    If they hadn’t I would’ve, and it’s not a nitpick it’s an irritation that people just seem to have this weird obsession with acting like the things that we do today would just be impossible to imagine to people not that far removed in time from us now.

    For instance you also said you didn’t think that people would talk about leaving the planet 100 years ago, and yet Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon came out in 1865…

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  • [–] -2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Let me rephrase it for the pedantic. I can imagine FTL travel, but can we do it with existing technology? No. Could we do it in the future: it’s possible. Someone may develop a way of folding space, or we may figure out propulsion that gets up to 0.9x, who knows. That’s the part I’m getting at.

    Just like now, there were people back then that said “without a doubt, that will not be possible”. Human understanding is constantly shifting and growing.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    It’s not pedantic to point out that people in the 1920s absolutely thought about leaving the planet. I understood your point, as I said it irritates me when people act like people in the past had no clue what was coming or were too stupid to think of things like space or air travel. Leonardo da Vinci was designing “flying machines“ in the fourteen-fucking-hundreds. People were thinking about this shit.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    FTL is almost certainly impossible because the laws of physics limits the speed of information to the speed of light, which is why we can't use quantum entanglement to communicate information. So the only way I can see it happening is with wormholes, but we've never proven that they can actually exist in a stable form.

    We can still get close to the speed of light but the consequences for those doing so are pretty severe. If you wanted to go farther than the nearest stars, everyone you know would die from old age by the time you got back.

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