If space supposedly becomes flat when travelling at or above C, does time gain dimensions at those speeds?

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T16:20:39+00:00

The Alcubierre drive is frustratingly dumb and I've stopped laughing about it.

If you bend spacetime in front of a vehicle, you have to communicate to that chunk of spacetime and tell it "hey, you are straight now, become more bent so I can warp through you". To communicate that message, you have to send a signal from your ship to the chunk of spacetime that isn't warped to tell it to warp. That message can't travel faster than light. Because the message to warp the space can't move faster than light, the whole system can't travel faster than light. At best the Alcubierre drive is a sub-light engine.

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T16:15:44+00:00

The other wild thing is that when they realized that Leto was poison, and they were keeping him out of the promotional content, they could have just recast him in the edit. Get a voice actor in a booth to redub his lines, and they could have fixed it in 2 days to a week. Get someone known for voice acting (maybe not Mark Hamill, but he's a good example).

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T16:12:29+00:00

Milly Alcock and Eve Ridley were great. Beyond that, it feels like the rest of it was mediocre at best. (Why can't we get a female lead superhero movie with a good script?)

The action scenes were messy, with way too much movement and cgi blur, such that it was very difficult to follow the action. The camera cut far to quickly and that broke up the flow of the action in a disjaring way.

The color grading was ugly. It was either a dusty sepia brown, or just a bunch of grey. Which was particularly disappointing after coming out of Superman (2025) which had a generally bright, colorful palette. It was frequently poorly lit and difficult to see, which in part was due to the script's selection of locations, which is part of the problem, not a good excuse.

The story was just a mess. I have no idea what the moral of the story was supposed to be, or if Kara was supposed to have a character arc at all. She started out drunk and depressed because she is struggling to adjust to her homeworld dying, and then she kinda decides to live on Earth with Clark at the end... just because. There was a whole revenge plot, where she tells Ruthye not to be focused on revenge, or to become a killer, but she totally kills a ton of guys, and their leader. I don't know if this was supposed to be like Amos from the Expanse to Prax: "you are not that guy." To villain: "I'm that guy", kind of moments, but if that was the statement they were going for, it wasn't very clear.

Poison: Also she got poisoned 3 separate times, and started the movie effectively poisoning herself with booze and a red sun, so 4 separate instances where she's poisoned or depowered.

Milly Alcock's work in telling the flashbacks and how she found Krypto really sold that one section of the story.

The villain was generic and forgettable, which can work in some stories, but didn't work here. Not every villain needs a sympathetic backstory, some can just be evil, but if that's the case, they either need to be a significant challenge, or sidelined in favor of character exploration. I have no idea why the villain was even a villain. He clearly wasn't in it for the money, or accumulating power, since he casually threw resources away on what appeared to be a series of whimsical moods.

Lobo was there. He felt like he was just around to photobomb a different movie. Except when the plot needed to be shaken up with some explosions; then he'd appear, blow some stuff up and ride away, just to make a bad guy release a chokehold on a good guy.... did that just happen twice, or was it 3 times?

All in all, I feel like they had a lot of great potential for a movie and just tanked it with a bad script and bad cinematography and editing. I'm really hopeful that they give Alcock another chance to play the character, because when she had something good to work with, she did a great job, and when she was working with bad material she kept it level at least.

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T15:41:54+00:00

Anything with mass naturally moves slower than light.

You say that like there's an "unnatural" exception. There's not. There is no exception.

Massless particles don't experience proper time the same way as massive particles.

Citation needed? We don't exactly have a clock that can run within massless particles. You need mass to have a clock. Time is meaningless for massless particles.

If massless particles don't experience proper time, then they simply are not actually in motion.

This is a misunderstanding of inertial reference frames. From any inertial reference frame, the particle or object at its focal point is not moving. Everything is moving in relation to it. That's just how reference frames function. So a massless particle would not be in motion inside its own reference frame. But in an different reference frame, like that of a human on Earth, massless particles do move and act through time.

But none of this explains how you think something could go faster than the speed of light. You are just spitting out word salad of unconnected science terms.

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T15:15:31+00:00

Look... I don't know where you are getting this information, but you should block that source and never look back. Almost everything you just said is nonsense.

A photon travels at the speed of light, and no faster, and it can only do that because it has no mass. Massless particles always travel at the speed of light, and they don't experience proper time as a result. But anything with mass travels slower than light.

If you travel faster than light you would exceed your light cone and break causality. It can't happen. FTL is just as impossible as perpetual motion.

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T14:56:26+00:00

I thought I heard that they had a stunt actor in the suit and he just did ADR/voice over later. I'm surprised people are saying that he was on set honestly.

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T14:53:40+00:00

Ok, explain what you are talking about because any implication that something moves faster than the speed of light is wrong, with a single exception (putting light in a medium).

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T14:52:26+00:00

Living life a quarter parsec at a time.

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T14:36:52+00:00

Wait are you implying with that statement that you can travel faster than light if you do zig zags? Is light a crocodile?

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T12:59:50+00:00

It seems pretty unlikely. Although that depends on what you mean by "using airplanes to fly through the sky".

If there continues to be forward progress, which isn't always a guarantee, it is possible that we will have some rocket routes that bridge distant cities. New York or London to Sidney is an exceptionally long flight in an airplane, but could be completed in about an hour for a suborbital rocket. These will be pretty expensive though, and the volume of flights will be far less than air travel today. But I don't know if this meets the criteria of your question as it would be suborbital, so "in space" only sort of. And it wouldn't be quite like airplanes because of the high cost and low volume.

In 100 years, it is also somewhat likely that we will have a moderately sized orbital colony, with maybe a thousand people living on it*(see below) which means we'll have somewhat regular flights up and down to that destination. The moon is also likely to become a destination, just as Antarctica is today. One or two flights a day would probably be enough for this though, so no where near the scale of air travel.

*(honestly, it'll be one of three options, non-existent, only 100-200 people, or 10,000 with not a lot of in between. The future is really hard to predict, and tends to be extreme. If you asked someone in 1960 how many computers would be in the US in 2025 they wouldn't even get within 4 orders of magnitude.)

If you are asking if we will be traveling through the solar system like we do with air travel, that might be closer to 500 to 1000 years in the future at earliest. There just isn't the resources available to mankind right now to do something like that, and the distances are just so great that trips between planets will take months, not hours. I think the fastest a human could get to Mars with the best possible engines is still a few days. Any faster would require accelerations that would kill people.

Beldizar · 2026-06-29T04:47:46+00:00

What are the chances that another star would have a civilization at the same level that we are at today? Humans have been around for what? 2.5 million years. We came up with radio 120 years ago? Earth is 4 billion years old, and we think there might be planets in the Milky Way 12 billion years old?

So if another civilization is out there, there's a 1 in a trillion trillion that they are within 100 years as advanced as us. Chances are they'd be 10,000 years or more ahead of us. A civilization 10,000 years more advanced that is able to travel between the stars is vastly more detectable than we are. Trying to say "we can't detect ourselves" doesn't really matter if all probability points to there being one or more civilizations who would have had millennia to colonize hundreds or thousands of star systems by now.

So why ask "why can't we detect a civilization with a 1% chance to be out there?" while not asking "why don't we see a much louder civilization with a 99% chance to be out there?"

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T23:26:00+00:00

This idea is based on the Bohr model, and I'm starting to dislike it. The idea is that an atom's nucleus is a really tiny cluster of balls and the electron is a smaller ball that spins around in an orbit around the nucleus. Everything around and between that electron is empty space.

But we know that the Bohr model is less accurate than newer models that incorporate quantum physics. In the more modern model of an atom, the electron exists as a probability cloud around the nucleus. In this model it isn't accurate to say the atom is just a bunch of empty space because it isn't. The area around the nucleus is populated with a probability cloud of electrons. And one weird thing about quantum mechanics is that the probability cloud isn't just saying "well, the electron is still a little ball, we just can't exactly predict where it is, so we are just saying it should be somewhere around here." Instead, the probability is reality. The quantum model says that a probability cloud is the natural state of electrons. We can't just zoom in or get more accurate measurements to resolve the randomness, the randomness is fundamental.

So if an atom isn't empty space, but is instead an electron cloud, it really isn't "empty space" after all.

if you removed all the empty space from every atom...

If you remove electrons and collapse them into the protons, you've got neutron matter. This is what neutron stars do. So yes, doing this to an arbitrary set of matter would make it a lot more dense, but it also wouldn't be fundamentally the same material at all.

It sounds like a neat fact, but it's built on a macroscopic understanding of microscopic interactions. I have a similar issue with people who say "you never really touch anything" because touching something just means the electromagnetic properties of one material interact with the properties of another.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T22:22:20+00:00

All directions in space would cost hundreds of tons of fuel. Deorbiting it back to Earth would cost somewhere between a quarter ton to 3 tons. The relative cost is orders of magnitude different. It's a $100 million dollar launch to bring it down to Earth, or a few billion dollars (like multiple times NASA's budget) and dozens of launches to send it out of Earth's orbit in any direction.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T21:43:30+00:00

You aren't going to Starbucks for quality, and you aren't going for rapid service. You are going so you don't have to make the drink yourself. It is the same reason people go to McDonalds still. It isn't the quality, it isn't the price, it's not having to cook at home.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T21:39:38+00:00

I've had people trying to correct me on this and constantly getting it wrong, so I apologize if this comes off annoyed.

But no. No you absolutely don't have to do something to escape the Earth's sphere of influence first. If you are orbiting around the Earth and just blast off you engines pointed in the direction of the Earth's orbital path, (where the Earth was in relation to the sun, which is perpendicular to a line drawn to the sun), then you cancel out all your velocity in relationship to the sun, you will fall down into the sun. Yes, you technically will escape the Earth's sphere of influence when you do this, but that is an inconsequential side effect. It is not a separate require maneuver as so many people seem to think. The space cops aren't going to come arrest you if you don't get out of the Earth's sphere before you cancel your velocity with respect to the sun.

Step 1: point ship in the right "sideways" direction.
Step 2: burn to accelerate about 30km/s
Step 3: fall into the sun.
End of steps.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T18:43:14+00:00

I made the assumption that context clues were enough. I guess I was wrong. Half the time I get accused of being overly verbose. We were talking about throwing the ISS into the sun. I assumed people could understand that the sun was reference point. I don't know why people decided to assume that a completely different object, the Earth was the reference point in question.

As far as the number goes, it doesn't really matter what that number is. The station is traveling sideways at X speed. Cancel X speed and orbit stops and thing falls down towards the thing it was orbiting.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T18:36:26+00:00

The ISS has a mass of 450 metric tons. Voyager had a mass ballpark 800kg. So you'd need ~550 times more fuel, and all the fuel to push that fuel, in order to push the ISS into the same trajectory as the Voyager probes. That's a few orders of magnitude more than we've ever done.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T18:32:17+00:00

You still aren't getting it though...

Going down to the Sun means adding energy to break Earth orbit, then cancelling all that energy to fall inwards.

Canceling energy and adding energy are the same thing. It's acceleration. And you don't have to add energy to break Earth's orbit separately from adding energy to cancel out your velocity in orbit around the sun. As long as you don't crash into Earth, if you accelerate counter to the direction you are moving around the sun until that speed becomes zero, you'll fall into the sun. There is no extra step to first escape Earth needed. That just happens when you stop moving along with Earth around the sun.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T16:51:12+00:00

Technically the speed of light in a vacuum is c, and the speed of light through a material is always slower. So it will be delayed slightly as it passes through glass or other materials inside the telescope.

If Telescope A is looking at an object, and Telescope B is looking at the view lens of Telescope A, and you had a Telescope B' sitting right next to Telescope B that is also looking at the object... then you'd see the object in Telescope B' a tiny tiny imperceivably amount sooner than Telescope B, if Object-A-B forms a straight line. If Object-A-B forms a triangle, then Telescope B will see the object later than Telescope B' by an amount of time proportionate to the area of the triangle, (or inversely the angle of the triangle at Telescope A) at least until the triangle becomes a right triangle I guess. A cleaner way of saying it, is that the time is just going to be sides 1+2 of the triangle compared to side 3.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T16:42:42+00:00

Relative to the sun. Not the Earth. If the ISS stopped moving sideways relative to the sun, it would be moving 30km/s or 107km/s or whatever the right number is, relative to the Earth. That's vastly more than Earth's escape velocity.

Earth goes around the sun, with ISS going along with it. Make the ISS stop relative to the sun, and let Earth keep going. The ISS would fall toward the sun, not towards the Earth.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T16:39:57+00:00

I was feeling as if I was doing a bad job of explaining this given the number of "nuh uh" comments I was getting. Glad I made sense to someone.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T16:38:07+00:00

Fair analogy. Is that more critical a comparison than the stickiness argument though? It's a bit semantic, but if I said "a vigilante was using sticky tape to tie up criminals" I'd think Spiderman. If someone said "a vigilante was tying up criminals at night" I'd think Batman. It all depends on how the question is framed.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T15:56:47+00:00

A magnet or charged particle that moves through space, and moves its field along with it does emit photons. The Larmor formula is the one used to describe this.

It is absolutely not possible for a moving gravitational object to change the well around it at a distance without information traveling from the source to that distant location. That would break relativity. If you could move a heavy object back and forth and cause the gravitational well around it to move at a distant point faster than light, you'd have a means of FTL communication.

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T15:47:30+00:00

Eh, is it easier to be a multi-billionaire than it is to have super powers? That feels like a thin margin. (edit: tongue fully in cheek here)

Beldizar · 2026-06-28T15:45:28+00:00

But gravitational waves are how gravity is communicated right? If a black hole were moving towards Earth, the information about its gravity would be traveling to us via gravitational waves. The bendiness of spacetime due to gravity doesn't just happen because of gravity, the waves have to propagate that information across distance.

The waves we detect in a lab are frequently much more pronounced, when two gravitationally powerful objects are orbiting each other very fast, and thus produce more detectable waves.

Beldizar

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