Faster than light travel in science fiction movies: why doesn't the spaceship hit any stars or planetary bodies? Does it travel right through the stars / star systems?
Stars and rocks are the least of their worries.Contrary to popular belief, large objects are actually very sparse in the universe. These could be spotted and gone around with no problems.Even asteroid belts aren't actually that dense. Many unmanned spacecraft have traversed our own asteroid belt without having to plan to get around them. It would be near impossible to hit one without aiming specifically for it.The real problem would not be large objects but incredibly small ones. I'm talking about individual atoms.This here is what happens when protons collide at 99.9999991% of the speed of light:They smash up into their component quarks. If a ship travels into a large group of ions at near the speed of light, the very atoms that it is made up of will blow apart. The ship isn't going to last very long.There are two solutions to this problem:The first is to say that the ship emitts ionising radiation to ionise (knock electrons off to cause them to become charged) any lone atoms in front of it. The ship will have some way to generate a magnetic field to repel these ions, preventing collision.The second is to suspend your disbelief because Star Wars is a fictional story, not a science documentary.
How does a flat earth affect me as an individual?
In daily routines, no effect.Walk outside and say to yourself “the Earth is flat.” Then change your mind and say “the Earth is a sphere.” Did anything change? Do you need to do anything differently one way or the other? Nope.But say you wanted to do something way out of the routine.Get a great sailboat and sail around Antarctica. If you believe the Earth is flat and that Antarctica is a great ice wall that hems the edge of the disk we live on, then you had better provision yourself for a journey of around 78,000 miles. Let’s say a sailboat can go about 100 nautical miles a day (or 115 miles). You had better supply yourself for 678 days or 1.9 years and then add on whatever safety cushion of extra supplies you want.But in reality—that other world we actually live in—the coastline of Antarctica has been charted and it is around 11,165 miles. What a relief! You are going to save time and money! You only need to provision yourself for 97 days and whatever safety cushion you prudently decide on! (You could save even more time by cutting across some of the bays and inlets.)Here is an image of Antarctica in 3-D resolution from satellite images. (Yes, satellites can and do fly around the Earth by way of the poles.)(Image source: September 2018 New York Times article—New Antarctica Map Is Like ‘Putting on Glasses for the First Time and Seeing 20/20’.)
Is it possible that atoms are tiny universes, whose quarks are billions of galaxies? And our universe is an atom to infinitely larger universes?
Interesting Question. It ~is~ possible but then again we know from astrophysics (thank you Hawking) that "Black holes have no hair" (lol in french). This amounts to essentially them being elementary particles. This sentiment was echoed by Brian Green in his famous book the Elegant Universe* and it's more interesting equal The Fabric of Spacetime* Thinking about the rubber sheet analogy, we discover that falling into a black hole puts one "outside" the universe. This is because the spacetime curvature becomes infinite--perpendicular to the undisturbed "grid" of deep, empty space, meaning that this hole (2D) extends to the very end of the universe itself (there's some reasons* why we will make the assumption it is in fact finite, even though the question presumes that). If we add in the appropriate dimension giving us three we find that it's just a giant void, and you invert from being inside the universe to going outside, smashed on a small patch of the boundary of the universe. The Holographic Principle states that all the information about this black hole is encoded on it's surface, and they have used this same thinking to apply to the entire universe. It's a big theoretical questions to understand the boundary conditions of the universe, one that may never be solved.But the important takeaway is that there is an unusual relationship to the universe as a whole and black holes, which we have already established are just bizarre gargantuan elementary particles. So... what if the universe is just a giant electron or neutrino?++ Important Disclaimer: Not a Physicist++*inks to come soon
Is it possible for the universe to be an organ of an intelligent organism?
Interesting Question !!This reminds me of an animated movie "Horton hears a who"that I watched in my college days. It's about an elephant "Horton", who chances upon a microscopic community of people (so called) on a speck of dust and how Horton tries to help them out.I was quite fascinated by the concept of people living on a speck and what if it were true. Our world is between two extremes.On one end is the mighty cosmos, where in comparison,we are a tiny speck and the other end is the tiniest of the particles that constitute us.So, each one of us could be either of below two or both.1.The intelligent organism hosting millions of other worlds.2.The tiny specks in the vast ocean of cosmos.P.S. Do watch the climactic scene of this movie that depicts this beautifully.