You and the Cosmos

From here to there, and back!

Kanook
Oct – 2009

Suppose you were Mr. Gates and suppose you removed some of your paper
wealth and commissioned the design and construction of a space vehicle that
would allow you to reach the end of the expanding universe, just how long
would your trip across the cosmos take – now remember we’re just supposing.
Well experts who get paid to suppose these scenarios have figured out (with
a lot of supposing) that in a normal lifetime (yours) you should be able to
travel billions of light years. It seems they have even taken into account the
fact that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, which says that it is
expanding at such a rate that the distant regions are running away from our
reference point that the light from the objects can never reach us.
Juliana Kwan at the University of Sydney says that because of the
“mysterious” force labeled ‘Dark Energy’ that even with rockets or other
mechanisms that could take us to within a rats whicker of light speed, the
Universes expansion rate would leave us behind – so it appears you’re going to
have to overcome an age old law of moving about faster than light!
It has also been calculated, by brains that move about supposing a lot faster
than mine, that the limit on the light from our Sun only reaches out some 15-
billion light years, and according to previous calculations by Jeremy Heyl at the
University of British Columbia, a super-advanced rocket could eat up most of
this distance in a human lifetime, that is if it accelerated at 29.5 feet per
second, per second, which means if it speeded up every second by 29.5 feet.
It is said that this would feel roughly like a comfortable 1g, whereas a craft
could get 99% of the way to the expansion “horizon” – and regardless of the
vast difference would ‘only’ use up 50 years of your life. This keeping in mind
that “time” would pass slower for you than those left on earth because of the
theory of relativity, a minor detail.
Kwan and her group suppose that the trip “might” even take less time,
whereas based on the latest cosmological values for “Dark Energy” and ‘other’
parameters show that your trip could make the journey in only 30-years.
Coming back (another 30-years) has its own problems, whereas any
uncertainties in the strength of “Dark Energy” could cause you to miss Earth
by millions of light-years. Where if you fell asleep at the controls or your on-
board computer suffered a burp and your deceleration was just a milli-second
too late, or too soon would cause you to overshoot the Milky Way – in other
words you’d be “lost in space”.
Let’s suppose you didn’t fall asleep and your on-board computer was wide
awake and you hit the nail on the head, well you’d be in for another small
surprise. 70 billion years would have passed at your home, whereas the Sun
would have died along with the sandy beaches on Earth, and most certainly
your “pet rock” would be gone. Your speeding off to enjoy the light of the
Universe and your return would leave you wondering, “where in the hell is
everyone?”
Just Suppose!