this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
141 points (96.1% liked)

Ask Lemmy

27262 readers
1667 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Everyone has something they can't stop themselves from nerding out over - but often it's hard to find people to talk to about it. So go ahead, share your interests, and tell us about them!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

The idea of time. It’s insane to me to think about events happening at different times in different places. Or for the same event to take different amounts of time depending on your reference points.

The sun is 8 minutes away from us, so we are looking at it 8 minutes in the past. If it were to suddenly disappear, it would take 8 minutes for us to find out. That’s mine-blowing to me! It’s like the past, present, and future are all happening at the same time.

Nobody cares to humor me when I bring the topic up lol

[–] sep 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So facinating, even gravity is affected by those 8 minutes. Iow we would rotate around a missing sun, for 8 minutes, same as with light.
This is all also related to relativity, that someone else wanted to talk about in this post, i am just saying ;)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It is also very weird that gravity is affected the same way!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll humour you! Time is fascinating and malleable and really quite intangible.

So, if you want, fire away with anything you find fascinating about the concept of time!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sometimes I feel like we’re living inside a firework. Like we’re just on an infinitesimally tiny fragment of an explosion that happened billions of years ago. Perhaps in another scale the entire universe is created and destroyed in the blink of an eye.

If a being were the size of a galaxy, how would our solar system appear to them? Would it look debris swirling around in air? Yet it spans countless lifetimes in a few seconds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I love this.

It's so weird that we exist at all.

Like, what even is the universe? Why do we happen to exist within this bubble of chemistry and physics?

One thing that always struck me is how anyone can act in selfishness given how lucky we are to exist in the first place. Why squander this opportunity to do something amazing? We should all be living in idyllic peace and comfort. Otherwise, what's the point?

We might be the only ones to ever be aware of our existence. Like you said, in another scale we might appear and be snuffed out in an instant. Why condemn our already uncertain legacy?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've thought about something related.

In one point of view, time traveling to the past can create paradoxes since it alters events after that moment in the past, which could cause you to never time travel to the past after.

After some thinking, I got the feeling that the fixed-point theorem was connected to this. As long as whatever you do in the past causes you to time travel to the past again and do the same thing in the future, the paradox doesn't happen. What you do when you time travel is like the input, and what you do when you time travel again in the resulting future is like the output.

When the input and output are the same, everything works out.

After searching about this on the internet, I saw other people have thought about and discussed this.