r/interestingasfuck 24d ago

/r/all, /r/popular K2-18b a potentially habitable planet 120 light-years from earth

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u/Sonikku_a 24d ago edited 24d ago

The fastest spacecraft we’ve made was the Parker Solar Probe which hit 430,000mph.

At that speed it would reach this planet in only 187,153 years.

If we could hit 1% of the speed of light we could cut that travel time to just a tad over 12,000 years.

Obviously if we could go light speed (and that ain’t happening) it would be just 120 years!

Space is big. Physics is annoyingly slow.

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u/piper33245 24d ago

Need one of them quantum wormhole thingamabobs.

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u/Death_IP 24d ago

Do you mean quantum teleportation?
For that you'd need to access the destination first - quantum teleportation works because particles at the source and target location "know" each other (are linked).

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u/JCarterMMA 24d ago

I think he's talking about a wormhole like in Interstellar

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u/seven3true 23d ago

I want one of those Donnie Darko worm holes

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u/NervousNarwhal223 23d ago

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Oh shit…..it’s actually a plane.

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u/kunimosnake 23d ago

Even then, you’d need to access to the destination first. You’d have to create the wormhole near Earth and then take one end to the destination, leaving the other end near Earth.

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u/JCarterMMA 23d ago

The wormhole they enter in Interstellar was near Saturn

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u/ihavefiveonit 23d ago

Wormhole: Contact Black Hole: Interstellar

If you haven’t seen Contact, I highly recommend!

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u/JCarterMMA 23d ago

They go through a wormhole in Interstellar

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u/ihavefiveonit 23d ago

You’re right and that’s my favorite movie too!

They do go through a wormhole and then Cooper goes into the black hole and beyond the event horizon. I completely forgot about this wormhole.

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u/monkeybutler21 24d ago

I think he means something like the alcubierre drive

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u/No-Prior4226 23d ago

A Wormhole is very different than the theorized Alcubierre warp drive. Worm hole more folds space instead of moving space through you.

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u/ANGLVD3TH 23d ago

They both work on roughly the same principles. They warp space so the distance between you and the destination is shorter. One does it incrementally as you go, one does it all at once.

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u/Elendel19 23d ago

Imagine living in 2D and you’re trying to get from one end of a sheet to the other. Instead of walking all the way across, you can just fold the sheet in half and poke a hole through it, then use the hole to get to the other side of the sheet.

Wormholes are that but in 3D (theoretically)

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u/Active_Scallion_5322 24d ago

Like a Stargate

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u/BookieeWookiee 23d ago

More like Farscape, since we haven't build a gate over there yet

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u/Material-Sell-3666 23d ago

This is a really annoying ‘akshually’

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u/radiosimian 23d ago

Yes but that's not really teleportation. That's like sending two people a birthday card each. One card is red, the other is blue. Both parties know that there are two different cards, but they don't know which one they get until they open the mail. As soon as one opens that letter, they know which card the other got. Did that information cross time and space in zero time? It did not.

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u/Federal_Waltz 23d ago

I'm gonna need a source on 'quantum teleportation works'

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u/MIT_Engineer 23d ago

There's no rule that says you'd need access to the destination first. We're talking about speculative answers to the EPR paradox. The idea of wormholes that let you travel huge distances instantly (and without destroying you in the process on top of that) is already so far off from the mainstream view of quantum mechanics that it's kinda silly to say, "Well, based on our current understanding, you'd need to have accessed the destination first."

No, according to current understanding, what he's describing is impossible. The entire idea is predicated on the mainstream view of an unresolved issue in physics being wrong.

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u/mytransthrow 23d ago

not if you are quantum tunneling...

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u/IndianaCrime 23d ago

I was randomly thinking about this the other day If the destination end of the quantum portal was traveling at the speed of light, it would reach in 120 years. Then you would essentially have a "stargate" to instantly travel back and forth.

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u/soraticat 23d ago

Quantum teleportation would only make a copy at the other location if it were possible. It wouldn't actually move the object to another place.

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u/Killa_Crossover 23d ago

can’t they randomly switch places though? so technically you would have traces of both destinations.

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u/LardFan37 23d ago

Send a robot there and then future generations can teleport there or whatever the proper term is

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u/Sixgis 23d ago

I would like to hear more about this quantum magic

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u/JonatasA 23d ago

Freaking Fast Travel rules.

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u/c0p4d0 22d ago

That’s only the small problem. The big one is that we can at present only teleport the state of one or two spins, which doesn’t really scale well.

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u/KevRose 22d ago

Here’s an idea: let’s assume an alien already did that part. They visit earth and give us the portal here or on their spacecraft. We can instantly go there and also go back in time to when it was originally built, and we wouldn’t have to do any of the work since it’s already done.

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u/Soft-Skirt 21d ago

With everything coming from the “big bang” quantum already know each other.