You can cross the galaxy in about 12 years while accelerating at a comfortable 1g. Your newtonian mind cannot comprehend this.
What if my stop is at the other end? I don’t want to ride right on by and miss it.
Good point. You need to turn around and start braking at the halfway point, stretching the time needed to 22 years and a few months.
Are you telling me Star Trek Voyager lied to me?
Such a cute 10k light year bulgie wulgie UwU
I couldn’t help myself
It did come from the Milky Wang Gang.
( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)
The galaxy isn’t actually that small. It’s just really far away.
Someday far in the future when the two galaxies start to “collide”, someone is going to come across this tiny piece of meme data and be very confused.
Would work well with the Magellanic Clouds though. Itty bitty dwarfy-boos!
I honestly admire your optimism.
On a related note, the game Satisfactory is a sci fi factory building game set on an alien planet, and there’s a big ass spiral galaxy in the night sky. When I saw it I had to stop for a minute and think about the lore implications. Either this is millions of light years from Earth at least, or billions of years in the future.
Either way the fact I’m playing an indentured servant practically owned by a mega corporation hell bent on rapaciously expanding their factories throughout space is fucking bleak.
Now, maybe the artist just put it there because it’s pretty and spacey, but the devs are clearly massive nerds and I would 100% believe that they intended that implication.
That is bleak…
I mean I’m into it for the “as much as things change they stay the same” aspect, but I’d rather we rest with solarpunk than cyberpunk.
At the same time, because I’m not familiar with the media, I hope it’s meant to be billions of light years away or a physically impossible universe. Unlikely the galaxy would be able to maintain a spiral being close enough to see dominating the night sky in an average system, since both have huge gravitational fields and frankly galaxy merging is super interesting advanced physics… (no I’m not fun at parties ;) )
Idk. I’m big into sci fi, and big into real science, and most of that is cyberpunk dystopia… and I kinda get it because I’ve met people… people lead you to dystopic thinking. Because people suck.
But man I could see the solarpunk utopia just as easily, yet it doesn’t tend to make a compelling story…? It does but mainstream producers aren’t into it… maybe because they think it’s unlikely and unrelatable… and cyberpunk is likely and relatable… 😔
I really do prefer my hopeful speculative fiction much more these days, this is the one that sticks out the most to me recently: It Could Happen Here | CZM Book Club: The Lost Roads by Sim Kern, as well as the game Terra Nil. There’sa really healing quality to seeing someone else’s imagination of a better world.
Satisfactory is fascinating though. At first I was wondering why it was such a beautiful game. They made a stunning alien world.
Then as I slowly decimated the landscape and covered it in brutalist industrial architecture the message became clear about how the drive towards infinite growth is so destructive. Nobody made me do it, but to advance according to the company’s incentive structure I had to. I try to compactify and grow vertical, and offshore my big structures, and that’s arguably better, but then the vistas are always marred. You can actually use geothermal energy, but in order to get there you need petroleum for plastic for computers, and the byproducts of that basically guarantee you will be fossil fuel dependent by that point, and even then geothermal can’t sustain your whole operation. It’s an incredibly well constructed ludonarrative.
Also you can’t sleep. At all. There’s a bed but you can’t use it, you just work all through every night. I’m pretty sure the company has augmented the character with cybernetics to make them the perfect worker.
Then I saw that galaxy and I was like oh… oh no. We are the universe-eating scourge civ that Fermi was theorising about. We will destroy everything in our path.
Yeah tbh I couldn’t find a better picture, because as we all know internet search has gone to complete shit. Andromeda is 220 thousand lightyears across, so much bigger than MW, that was what I tried to reference in my title
Made by the Milky Way gang 🌌
Milky Way or the highway!
Nice argument, unfortunately I don’t care about laws of physics
I’m user slaaca, and this is my favorite meme in the Fediverse!
I love seeing a shitpost evolve from being shit to being actually kind of good
Aren’t we closer to the edge? I thought we were like 3/4ers the way out from the center bulge?
Bu-but the picture says 1 million light years across the milky way, which one is it?
Is there actually just nothing between the edges of The Milky Way and Andromeda? That’s terrifying
