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Navigation Using Wormholes Or At Lightspeed

Tunn11

Justified & Ancient
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Not sure whether this is the right place so Mods please shift this if there is somewhere better.

My questions for the team are as follows.

How easy or difficult would it be to navigate if you were travelling either at lightspeed or at a significant percentage of lightspeed?

Assuming travel through wormholes is possible is it possible to determine where the wormhole emerges? If so and it was at a huge distance what problems does this give? (all the stars would be in different positions compared to how they are seen on Earth not only because of a different viewpoint but also of their proper motion)

If you came out in a distant galaxy, part of the Virgo supercluster for instance would you be able to even determine where you were?

Part of my reason for asking is because I was thinking about the locations of homeworlds supposedly given to contactees by the UFOnauts, etc. If the locals asked where are you from and you actually had no idea wouldn't you be tempted to say something based on their level of knowledge? Therefore answers that seem nonsensical to us may be the result. The sky, may be acceptable to a stone age culture, whereas maybe Venus, Sirius (The brightest star) The pleiades (noticeable) The nearest star, or somewhere that you wouldn't know. After all if you've just stepped out of some awesome technology and an amazed local asks "Where are you from?" "Fucked if I know." doesn't sound that convincing.
 
Not sure whether this is the right place so Mods please shift this if there is somewhere better.

My questions for the team are as follows.

How easy or difficult would it be to navigate if you were travelling either at lightspeed or at a significant percentage of lightspeed?

Assuming travel through wormholes is possible is it possible to determine where the wormhole emerges? If so and it was at a huge distance what problems does this give? (all the stars would be in different positions compared to how they are seen on Earth not only because of a different viewpoint but also of their proper motion)

If you came out in a distant galaxy, part of the Virgo supercluster for instance would you be able to even determine where you were?

Part of my reason for asking is because I was thinking about the locations of homeworlds supposedly given to contactees by the UFOnauts, etc. If the locals asked where are you from and you actually had no idea wouldn't you be tempted to say something based on their level of knowledge? Therefore answers that seem nonsensical to us may be the result. The sky, may be acceptable to a stone age culture, whereas maybe Venus, Sirius (The brightest star) The pleiades (noticeable) The nearest star, or somewhere that you wouldn't know. After all if you've just stepped out of some awesome technology and an amazed local asks "Where are you from?" "Fucked if I know." doesn't sound that convincing.
If we have been visited by an interstellar intelligent race then it will have been one of many Von Neumann probes sailing between the stars in search of habitable and inhabited planets, and as yet we haven’t ruled out….


The contactee/cryptid/poltergeist/fae stuff is, in my opinion, an ‘intelligent other’ that has co-existed with humanity throughout history
 
How easy or difficult would it be to navigate if you were travelling either at lightspeed or at a significant percentage of lightspeed?
As a science fiction worldbuilder I can give you the answers I commonly use; they may not apply in real life, but it is all speculation after all.

At lightspeed it would be impossible to navigate, since no time would pass at all in your frame of reference. Only massless particles can travel at light speed, so you would need to convert yourself into massless particles such as photons or gravitons. Massless particles can only travel along null geodesics, so you would be constrained to travel along such a line until you reach your destination. Luckily massless particles can carry information so this form of travel is possible, although very difficult. You would need some kind of receiver at the destination to turn the information back into physical form, I think.

At slightly slower than the speed of light, you would perceive the universe as a highly distorted and dilated version of its real appearance, but this distorted vision should allow you to make slight adjustments to your flightpath en route. The closer you get to lightspeed, your journey will appear to take less and less time, so you might not have much opportunity to make significant course corrections. Better to know where you are going in detail before you set off - but since you are also travelling rapidly into the future because of time dilation, it would not be possible to anticipate exactly what would be there when you arrive.

Assuming travel through wormholes is possible is it possible to determine where the wormhole emerges? If so and it was at a huge distance what problems does this give? (all the stars would be in different positions compared to how they are seen on Earth not only because of a different viewpoint but also of their proper motion)
Well, that depends if you were responsible for manufacturing the wormhole in the first place. If you were the creator of the wormhole, it should be possible to plan exactly where and when the wormhole emerges, unless your wormhole tech is particularly unpredictable. Send a wormhole to Alpha Centauri and you should know exactly where, and when, the other wormhole mouth is located, and you can plan from there. If you arrive within a few decades or centuries of our current time period, the displacement due to proper motion should be negligible.

Travel more than a few thousand light years and proper motion starts to cause a problem, but we have the proper motion of most nearby stars mapped out for tens of thousands of years. Only a few so-called 'rogue' stars are travelling fast enough to make a significant difference to their location, and these are fairly rare in our galaxy.

However, it may be the case that the creation of the 'hole has an element of chance. Perhaps you don't know where the other end emerges, or maybe it is an old wormhole created by an ancient civilisation, or even a primordial 'hole left over from the Big Bang, in which case it might not be possible to determine where the other end comes out. A primordial wormhole might even emerge outside the Visible Universe, and you would never be able to recognise any other stars or galaxies. I'd guess that you might be able to recognise the location of a wormhole mouth if it emerges somewhere within the Local Group of galaxies, and possibly within the Virgo Supercluster, but this is not a guarantee (especially if the far end of the wormhole is temporally displaced).
 
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At lightspeed it would be impossible to navigate, since no time would pass at all in your frame of reference. Only massless particles can travel at light speed, so you would need to convert yourself into massless particles such as photons or gravitons. Massless particles can only travel along null geodesics, so you would be constrained to travel along such a line until you reach your destination. Luckily massless particles can carry information so this form of travel is possible, although very difficult. You would need some kind of receiver at the destination to turn the information back into physical form, I think.
Assuming the existence of such a receiver, a sufficiently powerful transmitter and the ability to reconstitute people from information (big asks I know), might it not ultimately be easier to send people star to star as radio messages rather than in space ships?
 
Assuming the existence of such a receiver, a sufficiently powerful transmitter and the ability to reconstitute people from information (big asks I know), might it not ultimately be easier to send people star to star as radio messages rather than in space ships?
Or AI humanoids that don’t need air, water and food but are so advanced they could stand on an exoplanet and describe their feelings, introduce themselves to the natives etc. Also no problems with catching space flu or giving their guests COVID
 
Assuming the existence of such a receiver, a sufficiently powerful transmitter and the ability to reconstitute people from information (big asks I know), might it not ultimately be easier to send people star to star as radio messages rather than in space ships?
That's the only way I can imagine travelling at the speed of light.
You would convert yourself into information, beam it via photons to the destination in a powerful laser, and reconstitute the information at your destination; the idea also requires a receiver of some sort at the far end.
There is a phenomenon known as a gravitational lens that can improve the focus of such a beam by a factor of about a billion; you need to transmit from the focus location so that the beam passes around the Sun, but this location is about 200 AU from Earth, way beyond Pluto. Each destination location has a different focus location.
Nothing about this concept is easy, as you can see.
 
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Or AI humanoids that don’t need air, water and food but are so advanced they could stand on an exoplanet and describe their feelings, introduce themselves to the natives etc.
Good idea. If you transmit your mind-state into a host body at the far end, that host body could resemble the local inhabitants closely and reduce the culture shock of meeting an alien. An old idea, explored in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, of course.
 
Good idea. If you transmit your mind-state into a host body at the far end, that host body could resemble the local inhabitants closely and reduce the culture shock of meeting an alien. An old idea, explored in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, of course.
Those ubiquitous grey aliens* that are so genderless and lacking in reproductive organs could very well be biological AI clones created by the AI space/dimension vehicle for planetary exploration. Rathe like some insects they don't drink, eat or excrete anything and have a limited existence time-wise.

* not a big believer in the grey aliens tbh, rather like the slender man they seem to be an invention of our own minds, albeit with a big helping hand from Whitley Strieber, but that is just a personal belief and not one borne out of any conclusive evidence
 
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