small world: Wolf of the Blood Moon.

[halfeye]

I just came across this quote:

A creature living on its own in the core of a secluded planet thousands of light years away.”

This is supposed to be far? that's within the Milky Way galaxy. The universe is hugely huge, it seems a lot of people don't understand how bogglingly huge the universe is, a thousand light years is in the same house.

The webserial is okay I suppose, I wouldn't say it's anything special, but I don't loathe it.

[Peelee]

I just came across this quote:



This is supposed to be far? that's within the Milky Way galaxy. The universe is hugely huge, it seems a lot of people don't understand how bogglingly huge the universe is, a thousand light years is in the same house.

Amusingly, you're talking about people trigializing how big space is while you trivialize how big space is. Galaxies are hugely huge. Imean, i know little about the media in question, but unless its a Star Wars-esque "one ship fan fly from one end of the galaxy to the other in a relatively short time" type deal, yeah, that is indeed supposed to be far.

[Razade]

I just came across this quote:



This is supposed to be far? that's within the Milky Way galaxy. The universe is hugely huge, it seems a lot of people don't understand how bogglingly huge the universe is, a thousand light years is in the same house.

The webserial is okay I suppose, I wouldn't say it's anything special, but I don'r loathe it.

Can they travel the entire universe? Can they even travel the entire galaxy? If no to both of those, then a thousand light years is not "in the same house" to them. Distance is relative to how far you're able to travel. If I can't easily get somewhere 300 miles away that's far. But you'd never tell someone that 300 isn't really that far because the solar system is huge so it's really just the same house.

[DaedalusMkV]

Hell, if it's thousands of light-years away, it's entirely possible that even FTL civilizations might not ever be able to meaningfully get there. If you have something like a Warp Drive capable of going 20C (mind-bogglingly fast! Fast enough to make our stellar neighborhood function roughly like the age of sail give or take, if you treat star systems as 'continents'), you can reasonably go visit things in a radius of 100ish light-years of you. Which is a lot of things! For Earth, that means about 60,000 stars. There are probably something in the realm of a hundred potentially habitable planets in that range, pessimistically. That's enough to keep a civilization busy for a very long time.

1000 light-years increases that number to many millions, and the civilization with the 20C drive will likely take millennia to spread that far. You need to establish bases and settlements along the way to even attempt a 50-year journey, barring some sort of FTL generation ship setup. But that quote isn't 'a thousand', it's 'thousands'. And for a non-FTL civilization, that might as well be 'literally infinity far away'. Even for the 20C travelers, you're looking at a journey of 200 years to travel 4000 light-years, and that's assuming you can just travel in a straight line forever.

And 'thousands' doesn't even necessarily mean 'a couple thousand'. It could just as easily refer to something like, say, 15,000. Anything less that 30,000 or so is unlikely to be referred to as 'tens of thousands', by the time we're talking about 15,000 LY distance we need casual FTL on the order of Star Wars or Star Trek to even potentially cross the distance. If you aren't capable of dropping in to the next star system over for lunch and then heading over to Tau Ceti for a two-week vacation 15,000 LY is so unimaginably far away that it might as well be on the other side of the universe, and there are tens of thousands of star systems in between the starting point and the target point (roughly, assuming a 2 degree cone around the straight line).

Now, I know nothing about the story in question, but the Milky Way is so huge that even our galactic core is so immensely far away from us that the only way humanity will ever get anywhere near it is if we invent some sort of technology that violates the laws of physics as we know them. At sub-light speeds we could spend a billion years exploring the galaxy and never cover the distance to the middle of our own galaxy. And 26,000 LY, the distance to that point? Still a number I'd refer to as 'thousands'.

In short, if your Sci Fi is remotely hard, 'thousands of light years' is a distance so vast that it can barely be comprehended, much less crossed. The only way this really qualifies as 'in your backyard' is if it's a Star Wars grade setting and the author thought that you could get extragalactic without adding a couple of zeroes to the distance.

[halfeye]

It's a world with magic/Super-FTL, and a universe ending threat incoming, so I don't think my quibble is unreasonable.

A thousand light years is a long way, but compared to 13 billion light years it's less than 0.0001%

[Rynjin]

And compared to 1 mile it's really far. What's your point?

[Peelee]

It's a world with magic/Super-FTL

It would seem not super enough to make thousands of light years a trivial distance. Even Star Trek, famously a series contingent on FTL to explore the universe, used Voyager to establish that a trip of a thousand light years would take roughly a year.

Space is indeed big. And a light year is still 5,879,000,000,000 miles (9,316,000,000,000 km, for the metrically inclined). Almost six trillion. And, to give a sense of scale, let's relate it to time instead, that's easier to conceptualize: a thousand seconds is about a quarter hour. A million seconds is just the other week. A billion seconds is 1993. A trillion seconds is ten times older than the Pyramids of Giza. Each comma adds a lot of whatever the unit is. And a mile is a bigger unit than a second.

[DaedalusMkV]

It's a world with magic/Super-FTL, and a universe ending threat incoming, so I don't think my quibble is unreasonable.

A thousand light years is a long way, but compared to 13 billion light years it's less than 0.0001%

True. Compared to the size of the universe, a few thousand light years isn't all that far. But... Do you realize how much stuff is in a 10,000 LY radius of Earth? We're talking millions of stars. Even with instantaneous FTL, it might take thousands of years for a good-sized civilization to map out all of that. Much less occupy the space, or somehow figure out a thing is somehow occupying the core of a planet (which might very well not be noticeable from the surface, much less space!).

Thousands of light-years is just far. Period. Even if you can travel arbitrarily fast, the amount of something within that range is unbelievably immense. The amount of nothing, by comparison, is literally incomprehensible. Human brains weren't meant to fit that much. Sure, if the civilization has super-FTL and has been around for a million years? Yeah, mapping a solid chunk of a galaxy is totally doable and you need to start measuring in tens of thousands of LY to really be 'big' by those standards. And if the author wants you to start thinking 'other galaxies' distance you need to start measuring in millions of LY. But barring millions of years of records? A few thousand LY is still an absurd distance to cover. Mapping the whole of that space would be the rough equivalent of writing down every single detail of every moment of the lives of every human being that has ever lived up to the current point in history. It would be many millions of times more work than everything that humanity has ever done combined.

Space is big. Unimaginably big. Even relatively tiny chunks of space are still so big that finding any one specific thing within them is kind of like finding a specific grain of sand on the continent of Asia. Frankly, the author of that web-serial managed to get within an order of magnitude or two of 'appropriately big' at worst, and that's shockingly accurate by sci-fi standards. Star Wars simultaneously treats a fleet of 50 capital ships as a big deal and canonically features around 70 million occupied stars in its primary civilization, which means that A: The ultra-militarist space empire only had somewhere on the order of one capital ship per thousand member planets optimistically and B: Only something in the vicinity of 0.0003% of the galaxy is actually part of said galaxy-spanning space empire. Even its best attempts at 'big enough' are three orders of magnitude too small, and the meat of the story is closer to 7 or 8 orders of magnitude off.

[halfeye]

Frankly, the author of that web-serial managed to get within an order of magnitude or two of 'appropriately big' at worst, and that's shockingly accurate by sci-fi standards.

Science-Fantasy in fact.

An couple of orders of magnitude is 1.0%, as I said this is 0.0001, that's six orders of magnitude.

I'm not that bothered, I thought it was funny, it seems no one else is laughing. *shrugs*