• stoly@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    My grandma was born in 1917. I think of that sometimes to remember just how far back my connections go.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      My grandma was born in 1920. She died last year at 103.

      I know she couldn’t live forever, but she was the best person ever. Is it so wrong to want her to live to be 200 years old?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      30 days ago

      Mine was born in 1906! She remembered London being bombed in WWI. How weird is it that I actually talked to someone who remembered that?

          • SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world
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            30 days ago

            That’s what I was thinking! Pretty crazy.

            I have something similar but from ww2

            The story I was told:

            My grandmother and two of her brothers decided to emigrate to Canada when their neighbor found an unexploded bomb in the chimney.

            The nightly bombings kinda scarred her for life

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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              30 days ago

              My dad was a kid in London in WWII. I’m only in my late 40s, but he was in his 40s when I was born, so it’s a long chain.

              And we have a related WW2 story. My grandfather was an air raid warden, meaning he was out in the streets when the bombs were dropping to get people to safety (I wish I had an ounce of that sort of bravery). He told me once he was inspecting a house and the floor gave way and he literally landed on top of an unexploded bomb!

              They also lost four houses in the bombings. My dad had all kinds of crazy stories like sleeping on the Underground platform during a raid and getting woken up by commuters stumbling over him on the way to work the next morning.

              So I guess we’re lucky our ancestors made it out of there alive.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            30 days ago

            I’ve always wanted to ride on a zeppelin. I hear they are working on hybrid blimps but we will have to wait and see.

            I think it would be really cool to be able to have dinner on a blimp. Right now I think the focus is on cargo.

      • stoly@lemmy.world
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        30 days ago

        Mine told me that she was a child in her father’s Model T and that lightning struck and exploded a tree right behind them as they were driving. I always loved that story.

        • superkret@feddit.org
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          29 days ago

          He fled. My great grandfather came home an hour later, and found broken glass and a severed hand in his house.
          He didn’t find the intruder anywhere nearby, threw the hand in the nearest river, and cleaned up the house.

          Police never came, and you didn’t call them either, in Germany in 1918.

  • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    30 days ago

    In the lead up to the release of Episode 1, the Sci-Fi channel ran some bumpers of fans waiting in line arguing with each other. One of them said something to the effect of, “Given that this is a prequel, and that we know the universe is expanding, shouldn’t the crawler read, ‘A slightly less long time ago in a Galaxy slight less far away…’” 25 years later and that still pops into my head sometimes.

  • Madison420@lemmy.world
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    30 days ago

    The nearest galaxy is still crazy fuckin far.

    Over 2.5 million light years away assuming 3x the speed of light would still be over 800,000 years of flight time.

      • Madison420@lemmy.world
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        30 days ago

        It’s just a faster route to get through a hyperspace dead zone it’s a retcon but at least a somewhat logical one if you ignore the sapient hyperspeed space whales.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          30 days ago

          You also have to ignore the whole ‘falcons exist a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ thing.

          Me, I go with ‘George didn’t know what a parsec was. The ship goes super fast.’ I mean he’s not a scientist.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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              30 days ago

              Yeah, and I’m fine with that. I don’t need a “plausible” explanation for everything. Same with Star Trek. In Voyager, Tom Paris goes faster than warp 10, which is infinitely fast. And he doesn’t travel infinitely far. Or all that far at all. How is that possible? The writers said so. Why did he turn into a salamander afterward? Because that’s what happens when you go faster than warp 10. Whatever, as long as I’m enjoying it.

              Edit: also, as far as I know, the TV show with the most people with advanced degrees who have worked on it is Futurama and they never let science get in the way of a good joke.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      30 days ago

      That really depends on what you count as a Galaxy. If any cluster of stars that is gravitationally bound together counts, then there is a tiny (10,000 stars) galaxy that is orbiting The Milky Way that’s only about 10,000 light years away from us, which happens to be closer than the center of our own galaxy.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    30 days ago

    What will really bake your noodle is that it takes time for light to reach us. We are seeing light that anywhere from a few minutes to a few billion years old.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      30 days ago

      And when the light from Andromeda reaches us in 2.5 million years, you’ll all see my shower thought was right.

      • WrenFeathers@lemmy.world
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        29 days ago

        And in 2.5 million years when the light from your thought reaches the folks in Andromeda, they’ll be like…

        “Woah! Star Wars happened right here!”

  • Donebrach@lemmy.world
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    30 days ago

    This is probably the stupidest thing I have ever read. How is any of it related to itself or even a thought?