Speed of light broken...did not c that coming - Page 2

Not massive enough.

I would say, let them plug away on the Science, I want Engineering! I want cost-effective, "green and clean", safe Fusion Energy! I want to be able to go from here to Alpha Centauri in like a few months not 40 years [travelling at 0.1 x c]

...Says the Armchair Astronaut™ in me. By the way.. this if possible in 15 years would be awesome. I hope it will be max. US$100k a pop.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviatio...cbccdrcrd.html

Hardeehar---

I have thought of a possible explanation for our mysterious planet tres-4

The host star is on its way to becoming a red-giant, so if we roll back time a few billion years, we would find that its diameter would have been smaller, - there is the possibility that there were smaller rocky planets it is inner system that have been engulfed in the host stars expansion. So perhaps that system looked more like our own in that respect.

Perhaps the expansion of the star is heating up the gas (obviously-duh!) and this is puffing up the planet, but it is said that this planet is loosing mass in a comet like tail in its orbit, so I would guess that either this is a relatively new occurance for the planet, else it would have lost all its mass by now if it had been this way since the formation of the system, or

****grand idea****

it used to be a rapidly rotating binary star system and the smaller star (tres-4) has had so much of its atmosphere blown away from the expanding star its nuclear fusion has stopped because of the loss of mass, so that it is now mistaken as a planet, and perhaps its spiraling in towards is host??

And another thing....

When we are observing the spin of distant galaxies, we calculate that there is not enough mass in the galaxy to explain the rate of revolution, such that they should be flung apart.

For which we have invented the very elusive dark matter and dark energy, to keep things in check. Though noone has the faintest idea what this dark stuff consists of.

Funny that yet again, we have distant measurements of things that appear to be 'sped up' to be near impossible.

Then there is the increasing acceleration of the expansion of the universe. - which funnily enough we attribute to this dark energy stuff we have no idea what is.

All very well, but then we have this frame reference time/distance/velocity thing again.

So many 'wierd' things requiring 'wierd' explanations.

It would appear that every time we look into deep space, we are discovering things that appear to be sped up. Yet we make our observations of the universe by measuring things that we assume behave according to relativity, that we havn't been able to test anywhere except for here on Earth its close proximity, which we then use as a benchmark to describe the entire universe.

We assume that because we can test Einsteins equations very accurately here on Earth and i dont deny this, and that his equations are correct, that this law holds perfectly over the entire sphere of the universe. We dont know that, we assume it because the experiments hold up locally.

Yet it is not so much to wonder if while these equations work, could there be a slight correction factor required for them that has not yet been detected that might show that over universe size distances, that a small correction is needed to correlate what we observe in the form of photons reaching Earth, is not quite on a par with what is happening relatively over the other side of the universe?

Afterall, Suppose that for every 100 lightyears, there is a relative time correction needed that correlates 1 year on Earth to 1 year there relatively - such that we might observe the relative year as 3/4 of our year. Yet if our equations had the necessary correction factor, we would correctly show that relatively our local year is the same as the 100 ly distance away year.

Would such subtle differences have been picked up for in our measurements of relativity so far, given that we have only been able to make accurate measurements of relativity to within a few million miles of our own reference frame?

How many of these wierd anomalies do we need to discover before we question the possibility that while Einsteins relativity might be correct (and I believe it is), that there might be some subtle long range anomaly that subtly changes out perception of the passage of time over long distances.?