this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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100000 years from an outside perspective, but because of time dilation you could make it take arbitrarily little time from your reference frame.
I liked the character's from Project Hail Mary perspective. The fact that we experience less time the closer we are to the speed of light is almost like an invitation to explore the stars.
Another things that gets me is the time experienced by black holes. We would think of the black hole at the center of the galaxy as some enduring, permanent thing, but with so much gravity, from the black hole's perspective it may only exist for a fraction of a second.
I don't fully understand how the science and theory works around all that ... all I understand is that it is so unbelievably far away that in order to cross any of those distances or even think about crossing those distances, it begins to break our normal understanding of speed, distances and time.
Actually, the distance doesn't do weird things. If you traveled at slow speeds (up to like several thousand kilometers per second) time dilation and length contraction would still be negligible and your timing of how long the journey took would mostly line up with someone on Earth.
But if you're traveling a significant fraction of the speed of light those effects become non-negligible. That's where our normal understanding of a universal notion of objective time and distance breaks down.
The equations of special relativity are actually very approachable if you know algebra, you should play around with them and plug in some numbers!
Another great example of both scale and speed. Even the near stars are far.