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The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years

(www.atlasoftheuniverse.com)
266 points algorithmista | 4 comments | 05 Sep 25 22:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.71s | source
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arkaic ◴[06 Sep 25 02:14 UTC] No.45145988[source]▶
For getting the feel of the milky way, I think there's nothing that is better able to simulate it than a video game, ala Elite Dangerous. I loved to navigate its galaxy map. The size of the Milky Way, the numbers of stars and distances between them are of scale in there if I recall correctly.
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1. mr_toad ◴[06 Sep 25 12:17 UTC] No.45148622[source]▶
Unsurprisingly with ~400 billion star systems, less than 0.01% have been explored.

If there were galactic empires like you see in science fiction, the amount of administration required to deal with that many systems would be mind boggling, the volumes of data would be staggering.

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2. manquer ◴[06 Sep 25 20:09 UTC] No.45152447[source]▶
This point is why I find series like Dune or even aspects of Foundation implausible .

At the scale of interstellar empires machines are have to do most of the administration. You cannot centralize so much bureaucracy without computers involved .

I understand the need for science fiction to focus on the human drama, but trying to have empires and be anti-machines is unrealistic.

3. AngryData ◴[06 Sep 25 22:30 UTC] No.45153503[source]▶
In the Foundation series the old empire's central planet Trantor was just one giant city that did almost nothing but administrate the empire.
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4. IAmBroom ◴[08 Sep 25 13:29 UTC] No.45168019[source]▶
"All these worlds are yours except Europa. We keep our old tax receipts there."