A JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
Hop aboard this constantly accelerating spaceship and let's journey to the end of the universe.
Alright, this is going to take some concentration and is not for the faint of heart. To climb aboard this spaceship requires dedication and the realisation that things as you know it will never be the same again.
It takes the fastest thing in the universe – light – 2.5-million years to travel to the nearest galaxy and back. That's a long time. Human's would have to have invented, not only a spaceship capable of travelling that fast and far, but also some magical way to keep the crew young and healthy.
It seems unlikely then that humans will ever travel further than perhaps our own solar system.
But what if there was a trick that could allow us to do it? Well, Professor David Kipping from YouTube channel, Cool Worlds, thinks there is. Cool Worlds is a Lab at Columbia University where Kipping is an assistant professor of astronomy. He's a smart guy.
His theory, basically, is to use a spaceship that constantly accelerates at 1G. Using this craft, the professor takes us on an incredible journey, first on a round trip to Alfa Centauri, our nearest star, to explain how time works. Using complicated equations, this round trip to Alfa Centauri would have taken seven years for you and the crew but 12-years would have passed back on Earth.
This is where it starts to get interesting. Professor Kipping then takes us further and further away, with remarkable results. A round trip to the edge of an area called the Local Fluff, just beyond Alfa Centauri, would take the spacecraft 13-years to complete. Back on Earth, though, your kids would be older than you. You see, for them, it would be 13 plus another 50-years.
A trip to the edge of our galaxy and back would take 41-years in our incredible spaceship. That's a 100,000 light-year trip, but the Earth would have witnessed a hundred millennia pass by and would likely be unrecognisable.
Eventually, if you carry on travelling, you would get to the point of no return, and things get weird and complicated. This is a fascinating video that will have you glued to your screen. Professor Kipping is a sublime narrator, with the ability to speak to the layman to make these complicated ideas easy to understand.
It's an emotional rollercoaster, very informative, and will make you see things differently. Our blue planet is a mere speck in the incomprehensible size of space but, with the professor, a journey to the end of the universe is possible.