Thread: Are We Alone ?
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Old May 17th 21, 04:09 PM posted to alt.astronomy
R Kym Horsell[_2_]
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Posts: 111
Default Are We Alone ?

In alt.astronomy Bast wrote:
wrote:
Amazing how the whole point of this thread continues to be missed,
that distances are FAR too great for any practical travel between
stars, even in the very unlikely event of traveling near light speed,
or of any communications. All experience so far has confirmed this.

You mean,......SO FAR
It was not that long ago the same thought about being impossible was said
about beng able to travel at speeds of over 30 miles per hour......
Until it happened.
If I have missed the point that some people willl always refuse to believe
that limits are only something thet has not been figured out yet, then you
are right.
Wait until we discover that light actually can travel faster than "C", and
it's medium is actually the "stuff" we now wrongly call "dark matter".

....

Sounds a bit speculative.

We know the speed of light in a vacuum is faster than the speed of
light in a material with a refractive index 1.

But we also know the vacuum is nowhere near empty -- there are virtual
particles, mostly electron/positron paris, jamming around any photon
trying to motor along. If you had a "real" quantum vaccum then you
might find photons moved faster.

Another paper I skimmed recently proposed the speed
of light in certain directions might be different from c because
we live in a simulation that has a discrete grid of space and time,
presumably to save on storage space in the computer system that's running us.
If a photo travels parallel to the grid squares it might travel at
c but if it travelled across the diagonal of the squares it might
be able to travel at e.g. 1.4 c. Maybe hard to measure if this idea
is true but it's the first proposal I've heard of an experiment
that might support whether or not we are simulations.

--
The quantum vacuum as the origin of the speed of light
Marcel Urban, Francois Couchot, Xavier Sarazin, Arache Djannati-Atai
21/2/2013
https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6165

The quantum vacuum as the origin of the speed of light. We show that the
vacuum permeability and permittivity may originate from the magnetization
and the polarization of continuously appearing and disappearing fermion pairs.
We then show that if we simply model the propagation of the photon in vacuum
as a series of transient captures within these ...