Upvoting because I’ve never seen this
but also I am now sad
But what’s the frame of reference?
The black hole in the centre of the universe.
Where’s the center ?
Ps: i know the answer… this was a joke
Wherever OP’s mom is
Probably where the big bang was, aka the one point all galaxies are getting away from.
I believe the current theory is that the big bang happened everywhere equally, like a stretch, so there is no specific spot we can point to where it happened.
I wonder if Fido knows how to handle that in his calculations.
Oh boy you’re gonna have good time learning about the formation of spacetime!
I’ll start you off. If space and time didn’t exist before the big bang…
Yeah I read about it when the other guy responded.
Guess you can’t trust everything they tell you in school!
good boy
Wtf this is terrifying
Is it though?
You’ve died, what’s there to be afraid of? You’re no longer a bag of chemicals what is there to feel?
In the comic you are still conscious. Forever. Not being able to move in any direction, the universe around you slowly drifting away. You will be swallowed by the darkness between the stars for a hundred billion years, all the while fully aware that you are completely and utterly alone with your own thoughts.
I guess. If consciousness alone is that unpleasant to you.
How long was the longest you have been alone with zero sensual input?
How long have you been a wantless senseless immortal spectre?
Eventually, she stopped thinking.
Is that a JoJo reference
I don’t like this
I was expecting to see a trail of ghosts left behind as the earth moves away.
There is the Great Ghost Cluster in the distant void, passing messages up and down its endless stream of ghost bodies in order to log world events at the speed of voice.
This is actually an awesome writing prompt: The older ghosts get updates from the younger ones, and send stories back from their own lives, like a long telephone wire…
That story wouldn’t get to the beginning of the line without being completely changed to be unrecognisable
That feels like practically a feature, when you have an eternity to fill and only a finite number of original stories with which to do so.
the question is what do they do with these stories
Yeah, and anyone who died at the same time within sight of each other.
to be a little pedantic, if you take in account the rate of expansion of the universe, and take as a truth that the ghost stays stationary in spacetime, earth would disappear in an instant
The spirit is already moving at the same speed and in the same direction as the earth when it exits the body.
That’s a fair point. So then one might expect the ghost to continue their motion tangential to the orbit of the earth, and so they’ll float away.
However, the theory of general relativity suggests that gravity isn’t really like other forces. It doesn’t push or pull anything at all; but rather its bends the fabric of time and space. Objects ‘falling’ due to gravity, or ‘in orbit’ around a planet are actually moving in a direct straight line in curved space-time. And this is why gravity still applies to massless objects such as light. So then, I’d say the ghost would still be affected by gravity - and that their main concern would be falling into the earth rather than drifting away.
😆 this comment really amused me, i guess the basic physics plus ghosts in the same matter-of-fact statement
It is a bit absurd. Isn’t it?
But that would imply that the ghost is a physical thing right?
Does it come to existence when we are born? Or does it appear when we die?
Does It behave like matter? If not, properties like velocity, inertia or energy wouldn’t apply.
The comic is really amusing to bring forth these questions
And it would still be gone in an instant
Nah, it won’t be perfect. Some, tiny divergent velocity will exist.
Depends on if fell to your death or maybe crashed into something while driving uphill.
I’m imaging in all these jumpers passing each other in the earth’s core now.
Would that not depend on your inertial frame? Like isn’t the entire concept of being stationary relative to spacetime not an actual thing? I’m not trying to be pedantic, BTW, I literally don’t know the answer to my question.
Yup. Same as the time travel meme that was on the front page recently, this relies on there being a fixed inertial frame which is not a thing in our weird universe.
There might be one, but there is just no way of knowing
No, there cannot be one. It’s been proven, I’m pretty sure.
which is all the more terrifying
This implies there’s an absolute center to the universe relative to which the earth moves but spirits do not.
Or you just maintain your velocity at death. With no other forces, that’s the way you head forever
But this character died stationary on the floor. Unless it’s the Earth moving away from her as part of its normal orbit, in which case she’ll get to visit it again soon
No because the sun and the earth are always moving in a line and an orbit in addition to their orbit.
The actual absolute position would resemble a curving helix or something. Nothing in the universe is ever in the same general location twice for our current understanding. Everything is moving.
We don’t know if her drift axes are centered on the sun or not. I’m going to believe that they are
I love these discussions, they’re not possible but I always learn something. Why would you believe that her drift axis is aligned with the sun and not the earth? What about the moon or Mars? Why do you think that the sun is special?
The sun would be the natural parent coordinate system of Mars, Earth, and (grandparent of) The Moon. So I see her centered on either Earth, the Sun, the Centre of the Milkway, Centre of the Local Group, etc. etc.
The speed at which she drifted through the wall wasn’t on level of thousands of km’s per second, it was on the order of a few meters per second.
This would admittedly rule out the Sun, since the Earth has an orbital speed of 29 km/s around the sun[1], and a spin velocity of 0.5 km/s[2], giving a minimum of 28 km/s. If we factor in orbit of the sun from the Galactic Centre at 240 km/s, giving 240 +/ 29, which is still too high for our range. If we factor in the speed of the Galaxy, then we’re just adding more zeroes.
What about the moon or Mars?
So, to come full circle on my comment: Yeah maybe, the relative speed of moon and Mars would be on the order of meters per second that we see in the panel. I just don’t see why they of all planetary bodies would be chosen for ghosts, instead of other natural origins.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_orbit
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_rotation#Angular_speed
3: https://www.universetoday.com/133414/distance-speed-suns-orbit-around-galactic-centre-measured/Yeah I thought that too, if the spirit isn’t gravitationally bound earth would move away from it considerably faster. This did get me to ask myself a good question. (This isn’t it) What if we assume the spirit in the comic is dark matter and preserved any momentum at the time of death? So Earth’s gravity is pulling on it but not enough to overcome the momentum the spirit had when it broke off from the body. The Sun and Earth could be special in that constructed situation. The question I thought was, does the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces have anything to do with keeping me planted on the planet?
Ghosts are not matter. Thus they must be energy. But they’re still not massless. Uh uh, ghost wishes are like magnetism and uh…yeah, ghost wishes change axial drift, but only relative to things the spirit perceives as greater… fuck I need coffee to make this work.
Not exactly. Things are moving relative to each other, but it really is all relative and local. There’s no central point in the universe that the earth is moving away from. The earth is moving relative to the sun. But relative to you, the earth isn’t moving. Relative to the earth, the sun is moving.
There’s no reason for her to move away from the earth unless she’s being accelerated by something. It’s not like the earth would zip away because it is moving relative to some distant, arbitrary point and she suddenly becomes “stationary”. There’s no universal “stationary”.
I guess where it gets messy is that the earth IS being accelerated to some extent by different things (other planets, the moon, etc). I’m not sure how much. So if she didn’t accelerate along with it at all, it would move away from her.
There’s no reason for her to move away from the earth unless she’s being accelerated by something.
Isn’t the Earth accelerated by the Sun’s gravity, while she isn’t anymore? If yes, she would keep going straight while Earth keeps following its circular orbit, which is equivalent to her moving away from Earth.
You know…I believe you’re right. If she somehow became totally massless.
Edit: no, as other people pointed out it doesn’t make any sense that she wouldn’t be “affected” by gravity even with no mass.
I think the existence of ghosts at all implies at the least some sort of spiritual plane or dimension that they’re partially in, or at the “worst” straight up magic wherein ghosts cannot interact with the physical world, even with gravity.
Being able to see may be part of that magic or a function of the spiritual plane as well.
That would, I think, be able to explain the events of the comic.
If instead we assume ghosts were entirely explainable by science, that could change things. We’d also have to account for the photons interacting with her and letting her see.
Edit: no, as other people pointed out it doesn’t make any sense that she wouldn’t be “affected” by gravity even with no mass.
That’s the assumption in my comment: “while she isn’t anymore” accelerated by gravity. I think that’s what we could infer from the trajectory on the comics.
again, straight compared to what?
there is no center of the universe, nor a universal grid that things can reference. one of the most fundamental tenets of astrophysics is that everything is relative and statements like “travelling straight” are simply nonsensical unless you specify what it’s travelling straight in relation to.
The… Earth and Sun.
Those are the reference frames.
You start by traveling with the Earth.
Gravity “turns off” for you.
The Earth then curves away as it orbits the Sun.You just follow the tangent line.
If she is still affected by gravity, but passes through matter, she would immedietly fall through the floor and start orbiting the earth through the planet.
Without gravity she would no longer follow the earth’s/sun’s/etc. orbit.
but the question is what would determine the trajectory then, there is no universal arbitrary straight line, that’s a concept that just doesn’t make sense under physics as we know it.
Even massless particles gain an effective mass and thus interact with gravity/spacetime; according to everything we’ve observed and calculated so far the only sensible result is acting like light does, and weakly interacting with gravity.
Well, yea, idk how moving through spacetime without following it’s curvature would makes any sense. Which is what gravity is. Meaning the comic makes no sense.
If the only force no longer acting on her is gravity, she just instantly got a massive new vector
There absolutely is a coordinate system like that, in the comic it would be the spirit’s coordinate system with them at the center. There actually is an absolute center of the universe and it is you and me, and everything else in the universe is at the center of it’s universe (depending on your definition of the universe). That’s what special relativity is all about, each thing is at the center of it’s own universe and you have to translate any measurements between coordinate systems.
All the comic implies is that a sprit doesn’t follow null geodesics, but that’s general relativity.
There actually is an absolute center of the universe and it is you and me
I think that’s the observable universe, not just a specific definition of the universe. I believe the consensus is that the observable universe is only a part of the universe centered on each observer, and there’s no center to the “full” universe.
There actually is an absolute center of the universe and it is you and me,
Oh stop it you🥰
I think they simply became totally massless and is no longer affected by gravity.
Photons don’t have mass, yet they are affected by gravity.
Yea, you are right, I didn’t take the two extra seconds to think about it.
Easy enough mistake to make. We live in a super unintuitive universe.
Nothing is as terrifying as SpaceEngine.
Frankly. This… software rearranged my brain and changed me fundamentally.
There are no words to describe being lost in the 10^27 of space. It’s just too much, you will go insane and if you survive you will lose the ability to talk with people, lose every single thing that you thought matters. You will be alone even in the busiest of places, some part of you forever stuck in the 10^27 of emptiness between Galaxy Groups.
This isn’t a joke. Ignorance is bliss
It’s anxiety inducing in VR, so fucking cool
I don’t know if I want to try this or not now
Try it, the old version is free.
I think the steam version has had a few updates since then but it should be so different.
I always thought it funny that traditional ghosts can go through walls but are held up by the floor. Finally some consistency.
They’re just behaving as they’ve been taught ghosts are supposed to behave.
That’s because floors aren’t part of their finished business, but walls are.
Just implies that ghost have some kind of interaction with gravity. Maybe ghosts make up dark matter.
If you just had interaction with gravity, you’d fall through the floor.
The interaction is clear more complicated than just pulled down, it also causes interaction with normal matter but only in a direction of the acceleration from gravity.
So there’s just a long ass trail of ghosts floating in space?
At least some sections would be heavily populated…
No, because the solar system is moving together along the outer edge of the
cosmosMilky Way. I don’t know if there’s anything such as a cosmic absolute frame of reference for “no motion”, but (depending on what you’re motionless in reference to) you would likely never see another soul.If you were killed in a mass-killing you’d have other ghosts near you though.
Think I’ll go this one alone
Should be a comet trail of ghosts drifting behind the Earth. She wouldn’t be alone.
They would be pretty far apart though
Thank you, just what I needed. More existential horror. 💀👍🏻
Well do catch up on SMBC if that’s actually your objective. His bits are deeper on all that than anything I’ve read without some good drugs.
Odd how they chose gravity, but not the fact the earth is both rotating and revolving around the sun. Even more than that, the entire solar system is revolving around the center of our galaxy.
The way I interpreted it, is that gravity normally holds you on Earth despite all the effects you listed, and gravity not affecting this ghost, that’s the problem.
Gravity is just the pressure of all the ghosts keeping us down
The effect of rotation is visible in the first two pictures, she is floating sideways.
I always thought it was fun to imagine you are an immortal being and you get to walk around pranking people like jumping in front of a train but just bounce off or eating a sandwich with bleach but you are perfectly ok then one day the sun balloons and eventually the earth gets destroyed and you are wisked away then eventually trapped in the gravity well of a brown dwarf star and get sucked to the center for trillions of years.
This was an unfortunate way to start my day
