IIRC, the size of the observable universe is actually constant-ish and is based on the fact that light gradually disperses as it hits other stuff, and that space isn't actually 100% empty.

Observable Universe is the max distance away from which light can reach us without getting completely dispersed first.
Nnnnnnno, that's not quite right.

Light has a maximum speed. The universe is not infinite, and it's not constant in size. The universe - the whole thing, not just the observable part - is constantly expanding. However, it's not making more of itself at the edges like you might think; rather, every individual bit of space is pulling apart and more space is being added in between the bits that area pulling apart. Imagine drawing dots on the surface of a rubber balloon and then blowing the balloon up - more area, more universe. The speed of light never changes - balloon twice as big, light takes has to go twice as far, takes twice as long. The thing is, the rate of expansion is not constant. It's pretty slow right now, but for a few very very short bits of time at the very beginning of the universe, the expansion was actually happening far faster than the speed of light. The observable universe is the part of the universe from which light could have reached us by now. The thing is, because the universe expanded faster than the speed of light for a while, there are parts of the universe that receded from us faster than light could reach us from those parts, and those parts eventually got so far away that light can't have reached us from them simply because of the speed of light. The observable universe is the part of the universe that light could have reached us from. Imagine your balloon again, almost completely flat so it's not very big. Now imagine that there's an ant on it, crawling in a straight line as fast as it can. That's light. While the balloon is uninflated, the ant could reach almost any part of it in a matter of seconds. Now blow the balloon up really fast. Now the area that the ant could have reached is tiny, barely a tenth or a hundredth of the total surface area of the balloon. That's how the observable universe works.

But wait, you ask, what about the light that was there when the universe was inflating? What happened to it? Well, that's actually how we know all of this: the "cosmic microwave background" is all that primordial light from the big bang, just drifting around in space. We can infer the structure of the universe as it was before and during inflation by looking at the huge, scale-of-the-universe structures present in the cosmic microwave background. Like if you tie-died your balloon before blowing it up, you can look at the bit of dye and the crinkles in it in the little bit of the universe that's observable and figure out that the entire balloon was at one point all crunched up into a tiny bit and then tie-died.

The observable universe is expanding a very slightly less than a light-year per year. It has nothing to do with interstellar gas or dispersion or anything, and everything to do with the speed of inflation and the speed of light.
edit: augh, ninja edited.
 
So in the next update Sabrina's going to be imagining a grief-suffused Sayaka arguing with Oriko about physics? Eh, she's had worst asides.
 
While we're on the topic of super-deep science that has few or no immediate bearing on making sure Madoka safely enters the hospital without being run over by a cement truck, can any physicists tell me if Homura's timelooping (which proves that the Madokaverse has at least 5 dimensions) provides any significant evidence of a universe vastly different from our own?

And is there any way to tell if their universe is made out of anti-matter? If this magic circle works, I don't want to be responsible for the Biggest, Most Loudest, Most Earth-shattering Kaboom in Universal History.

Cuz, I mean, we gotta make sure that anti-matter cement truck doesn't hit our anti-matter Madoka. TV tells me that explodes!

@Godwinson
Nope, she's going to start pondering the secrets of the universe and get hit by a cement truck.
 
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Reminder that time streams and the hopping no thereof are also out of the scope of physics as we know them.
Yes, of course. I'm just making sure to note the distinction between Slider-ing and relocation along the same timestream.
So in the next update Sabrina's going to be imagining a grief-suffused Sayaka arguing with Oriko about physics? Eh, she's had worst asides.
Who is who in this metaphor?
 
While we're on the topic of super-deep science that has few or no immediate bearing on making sure Madoka safely enters the hospital without being run over by a cement truck, can any physicists tell me if Homura's timelooping (which proves that the Madokaverse has at least 5 dimensions) provides any significant evidence of a universe vastly different from our own?
I'm no physicist, but my first bet of a vastly different universe would be, well, magic existing.
 
On the topic of physics and magic. I have a small experiment I'd like to do that only has a teeny tiny chance for catastrophic failure.

I wanna test if our magic influence over grief is affected by the curvature of spacetime. If it is we can vastly extend our range by manipulating spacetime, and if it isn't we potentially have grief powered time travel. You can see the applications.

We previously established that we can affect the mass of grief arbitrarily. So all we have to do is increase the mass of a teeny tiny bit of grief until it becomes a black hole. A black hole is causally cut off from the rest of the universe, so if we become unable to affect the grief black hole it means our powers abide by spacetime. It also means we have an uncontrollable micro black hole, which will promptly detonate with the force of a few big nukes (depending on how big we made the thing). So we should probably do this over the ocean or in space.

If our powers abide by spacetime the next step is to try and give some grief negative mass. If that works we have won the jackpot. We'll be able to make stable wormholes, albuciere drives, solve entropy etc. If we can't give grief a negative mass we won't become a goddess overnight, but we'll still be able to extend our range. Just make a thin line of grief and make it really heavy to simulate a cosmic string. Thanks to the curvature the ends of the string will be closer than they appear from a nonlocal perspective. So we can effectively extend the line beyond our 100m limit. Our range will be limited by how many strings we make and how dense we make them. Too much and we accidentally the whole earth.

If we do our black hole test and we can still control it, it means our powers are unbound to spacetime. This also opens up all sorts of forms of Fun™. A 'mundane' example would be to weaponize relativistic jets from our black holes. Just make a black hole and force feed it air in a perpendicular plane to the target. The resulting relativistic jets should easily extend past our range and we'll have a giant death ray. More interestingly, it means our power can transfer information faster than light. This potentially opens up time travel, or at least clairvoyance. We could also increase the electric charge of a black hole until we get a naked singularity. It'll be fun to see what happens to reality when that happens.

Obviously these tests require some safety precautions, so we shouldn't do them in warehouse-kun. Best case would be to get Homura involved and fly to interplanetary space. If we manage to screw up we won't hurt anyone and timestop can be used to bail us out of harms way.
 
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Hey, Urobutcher started it by bringing in actual physics concepts like the heat-death of the universe! If a writer wants to say that magic gets around conservation of matter or energy by bringing it in from the astral plane or something, that's fine, but if they want to say that it's enough to counter entropy on a universal scale, well... SciFi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale.


*whistles* Okay, I'm impressed. I was just going to say something like "assuming a thousand girls witch out per second (an outrageously large number that would depopulate Earth of teenage girls within a year) and the Incubators are running this scam on a trillion worlds" to estimate the per-witchout yield, but you went into way more detail.


We need a cliff-face to act as a backstop. Maybe that one Homura was dancing on at the end of Rebellion?


<British accent>It's a fair cop.</British accent>

Firstly, they don't actually need to affect the speed of the Heat death at a meaningful rate. If they produce one joule per million years, to the Incubators, that's an infinite improvement over the zero they'd get otherwise. They'd still be doing this if the result wasn't significant at all (which I believe it isn't). They're an emotionless species and therefore sociopaths as all emotionless individuals are by definition. By definition, an emotionless individual is completely incapable of seeing anything else as anything more than a resource to be exploited and is incapable of seeing their wants as important beyond using them to calculate how best to achieve their own wants. As such, if torturing every non-Incubator in the entire Universe to death would delay the heat death by a single second, they'd have no problem doing so. The fact that they willingly perform atrocities for something completely insignificant is part of their character.

Um, I could've sworn that the universe was infinite, that it was merely the observable universe that was finite, due to the speed of light?

I'll readily admit, though, this subject might be within my reach, but it's beyond my grasp.

Modern interpretations of physics tend to assume that the Universe is physically finite rather than merely observably finite. It's like the surface of a balloon that's being blown up.

Anyway, as eager as I am to do more science, we mustn't forget our priorities. And right now, one of our biggest priorities is Oriko's illness.


Now, there's a single hypothetical grief construct that would solve many of our biggest problems simultaneously.

1. It would stop Oriko from needing us to be in her presence constantly.

2. It would give Madoka a way to feel useful

3. It would compensate Sayaka for being unable to copy our powers

4. It would give Sayaka a reliable source of power for when she can't copy and will synergise well with her copying.

5. It would help solve our range problem

6. It would prevent the good we've done so far from being erased the instant we die

7. They provide an improved replacement for the stopgap of clear seeds

I give you, the Sabrinasystem Ring (other names negotiable, such as the Grief Lantern Ring or whaatever we decide is the best name for it).

This ring has the following properties:

A: They allow the wearer to maintain grief constructs in their presence.

B: They allow the bearer to cleanse grief

C: They allow the bearer to transmute grief into more rings with the same properties.
 
Firstly, they don't actually need to affect the speed of the Heat death at a meaningful rate. If they produce one joule per million years, to the Incubators, that's an infinite improvement over the zero they'd get otherwise. They'd still be doing this if the result wasn't significant at all (which I believe it isn't). They're an emotionless species and therefore sociopaths as all emotionless individuals are by definition. By definition, an emotionless individual is completely incapable of seeing anything else as anything more than a resource to be exploited and is incapable of seeing their wants as important beyond using them to calculate how best to achieve their own wants. As such, if torturing every non-Incubator in the entire Universe to death would delay the heat death by a single second, they'd have no problem doing so. The fact that they willingly perform atrocities for something completely insignificant is part of their character.
...Fuck, I don't want to start an argument again here. Suffice to say that I find the assertions made here and the logic behind it highly suspect.

I give you, the Sabrinasystem Ring (other names negotiable, such as the Grief Lantern Ring or whaatever we decide is the best name for it).

This ring has the following properties:

A: They allow the wearer to maintain grief constructs in their presence.

B: They allow the bearer to cleanse grief

C: They allow the bearer to transmute grief into more rings with the same properties.
I really, really, really doubt we can make that.
 
...
Take for example supernovae. They are an extremely rare occurence, only happening to 0,001% of all stars, and only possible since stars were able to acquire enough mass.
A supernova is a naturally-occurring phenomenon. In fact, rather than being improbable, a supernova is inevitable under the laws of physics, if you have the right mass of hydrogen in proximity.

The behaviors of individual sapient beings are not inevitable under the laws of physics. It's not the same thing at all.


My only issue with them is that you have to completely ignore normal real-world intuition and wholly accept the grapple rules. Like, the bit where you can pile arbitrarily large numbers of people into a single 5x5 grapple pile, where they can then all use their actions to move the entire pile their speed...
I dunno about in other Editions, but in 3.X/Pathfinder, only eight people can grapple any one guy. And that's hardly the only way to abuse the turn-based combat system to achieve ludicrous speed. A good GM would put their foot down and not allow it.

The main problem people have with grappling, I think, is that it's a multi-step action with a lot of rarely-used rules, which slows down the game. Like a lot of things in RPGs, it gets easier with practice.

If the universe were infinite, the Incubators would not be dealing with an energy crisis requiring the harvesting of teenage girls.

The universe does not have infinite space because the Big Bang's expansion happened at a non-infinite rate. The universe in real life is held to be non-infinite in space, but bounded and expanding faster than anyone will ever reach.
Thank you! I wanted to say something similar hours ago, but I'm stuck at work with only brief access to the internet.

Like Aura said, the universe can't have infinite size in finite time unless it expanded at infinite speed. Which is impossible. And if it had infinite size, it would have infinite hydrogen fuel, so heat-death wouldn't ever be an issue.

Also, said Post-Singularity Civilization looked at this magic shit and declared "This is against science. This is against physics. This is literally straight up magic and we cannot comprehend it with our goddamn hive-mind of hyper-intelligences who treat the Heat Death of the Universe as literally the only problem."

The fuck does our comparatively worthless child's scrawlings of physics matter?
This is the same alien race that found a girl with the potential to make wishes of cosmic significance and hurt or killed a bunch of people she cared about before letting her make a wish. They're lucky Madoka didn't wish them out of existence. We should consider the possibility that the Incubators aren't all that bright. :p

I remember that one from high school math class. It's an amusing thought experiment for a mathematician, but of no relevance to our discussion.

A physicist would say that moving an infinite number of guests into new rooms would take an infinite amount of time, since you can't move the guest in room n until you've moved the guest in room 2n, who can't be moved until you move the guest in room 4n, and so forth ad infinitum. The solution is useless.

It's also not relevant because, as we just discussed, the universe is not infinite.

And is there any way to tell if their universe is made out of anti-matter? If this magic circle works, I don't want to be responsible for the Biggest, Most Loudest, Most Earth-shattering Kaboom in Universal History.
Are you detecting any gamma ray emissions from the border between our universe and theirs? If not, we're probably fine. :p
 
Now, there's a single hypothetical grief construct that would solve many of our biggest problems simultaneously.

1. It would stop Oriko from needing us to be in her presence constantly.

2. It would give Madoka a way to feel useful

3. It would compensate Sayaka for being unable to copy our powers

4. It would give Sayaka a reliable source of power for when she can't copy and will synergise well with her copying.

5. It would help solve our range problem

6. It would prevent the good we've done so far from being erased the instant we die

7. They provide an improved replacement for the stopgap of clear seeds

I give you, the Sabrinasystem Ring (other names negotiable, such as the Grief Lantern Ring or whaatever we decide is the best name for it).

This ring has the following properties:

A: They allow the wearer to maintain grief constructs in their presence.

B: They allow the bearer to cleanse grief

C: They allow the bearer to transmute grief into more rings with the same properties.
Uh. That sounds way beyond the scope of our abilities. Every time we try to make grief stuff that does things like that all we get is a headache and another update spent futzing about in a scrapyard.

Like, even beyond that metagaming tells us the GM isn't going to give us a "solve all these problems I obviously don't intend for you solve without great difficulty" button. Great difficulty might seem like "do more science" but in fact you should remember what's actually difficult for Sabrina- social. We can't punch it, we can't science it-

Dear Godoka we may actually have to talk to someone.

*Sabrina nervously sips tea*
 
This is the same alien race that found a girl with the potential to make wishes of cosmic significance and hurt or killed a bunch of people she cared about before letting her make a wish. They're lucky Madoka didn't wish them out of existence. We should consider the possibility that the Incubators aren't all that bright. :p
They aren't, when it comes to emotions. They fundamentally do not grok the things, and thus cannot comprehend the mindset that comes with them.
 
*sigh*

Alright. I'm going to put my physicist hat on for a post, and then we can leave behind the topic of cosmology behind us.

Is the universe infinite? Maybe. Anyone who claims to know definitively is flat out lying or wrong, for the simple fact that there is no currently accepted answer.1​

Additionally, to answer a misconception I'm seeing: The universe, if it is infinite, was never at any point finite. Infinity is a very difficult concept to understand stand, and your intuition does not work on it. It's true that something that is finite cannot become that is infinite. But if the universe is infinite, then it was always infinite from the moment of the Big Bang. Yes, the universe is still expanding. A helpful, if inaccurate way to think of it is that while infinite, it was a small infinity and expanded into a bigger infinity.

Now can you please lay off the topic and stop hurting my brain?

1​For the sake of completeness I feel beholden to mention the ΛCDM model of the universe, which is currently the most accepted model. It proposes that the universe is flat and thus infinite, but the consensus for it is new (like, 2010) and still currently being dickered over.

Edit: Also,
A physicist would say that moving an infinite number of guests into new rooms would take an infinite amount of time, since you can't move the guest in room n until you've moved the guest in room 2n, who can't be moved until you move the guest in room 4n, and so forth ad infinitum.
No, I would not. Entertainingly, set theory, the mathematical theory upon which the paradox is formulated, is exceedingly useful in, let's wait for it... cosmology.
 
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Dude, Oriko is an oracle. Transmission of information back in time is exactly as impossible as transmission of matter under physics as we understand them.
The giant Sabrina-shaped hole in her precog indicates she's not literally getting information from the future, because if she were, there would be no uncertainty.
 
I really, really, really doubt we can make that.

Uh. That sounds way beyond the scope of our abilities. Every time we try to make grief stuff that does things like that all we get is a headache and another update spent futzing about in a scrapyard.

Like, even beyond that metagaming tells us the GM isn't going to give us a "solve all these problems I obviously don't intend for you solve without great difficulty" button. Great difficulty might seem like "do more science" but in fact you should remember what's actually difficult for Sabrina- social. We can't punch it, we can't science it-

Dear Godoka we may actually have to talk to someone.

*Sabrina nervously sips tea*

Firstly, those problems aren't solvable by even perfect social, so trying to solve them with social is an exercise in futility. Secondly, assuming it fails, we'll have wasted zero time, unlike the vast quantities of time we waste every single time we fail social. As such, there is zero cost to trying. Thirdly, we've already achieved stuff we believed was impossible. Fourthly, without sciencing of this level, winning the quest is impossible, so sciencing of this level must not only be possible, but required.
 
Firstly, those problems aren't solvable by even perfect social, so trying to solve them with social is an exercise in futility. Secondly, assuming it fails, we'll have wasted zero time, unlike the vast quantities of time we waste every single time we fail social. As such, there is zero cost to trying. Thirdly, we've already achieved stuff we believed was impossible. Fourthly, without sciencing of this level, winning the quest is impossible, so sciencing of this level must not only be possible, but required.
It is not literally impossible unless your plan is to fight the incubators directly, and since I see them as mostly plot device I feel that's a futile waste of energy.

Second, we waste hours every time we try that kind of shit. It's not zero cost. And before you say timestop, remember that annoying Homura is a cost since if we do it too much she'll probably stop letting us use it for shits and giggles.

Third, the problems in question.

1. It would stop Oriko from needing us to be in her presence constantly.
It's implied there is a strong psychosomatic component to her ills. Improving her mental health could very well solve that problem.

2. It would give Madoka a way to feel useful
That's a job for a therapist or a Homu. It's not like Homura would let us put a grief ring on Madoka anyway- she would feel compelled to use to save people, and that would put her at risk, which in homu terms only translates to incoherent rage.

3. It would compensate Sayaka for being unable to copy our powers
It's not really a huge deal that Sayaka can't copy our powers. If anything her inability to copy ours is further evidence that our powers can't be copied.

4. It would give Sayaka a reliable source of power for when she can't copy and will synergise well with her copying.
She can call us and we can timestop airdrop someone to copy. (or just ourselves)

5. It would help solve our range problem
Feeds back into "I think we've been implicitly told by the GM that copying this power won't work" which ties back into my older argument "You cannot beat your grief range. It is your power limiter."

6. It would prevent the good we've done so far from being erased the instant we die
It's a quest- you don't plan for after you die except to stay in character, since the game ends if we lose.

7. They provide an improved replacement for the stopgap of clear seeds
It's a stopgap that works just fine, for now.

But beyond all that, let's go back to the power limiter topic. See, people have spent a huge portion of this quest puzzling over how to beat our range. But every single attempt has fizzled as if hitting a wall. A wall made of plot. See, at the beginning of the quest, it was floated to possibly wish for reality warping. Later on, I do believe @Firnagzen noted that if we'd made such a wish, our range would have been laughably short- something like 2 meters or the like.

Consider if we had that. How quickly would we find ways to alter stuff so we could alter stuff outside that bubble? Well. He'd just do what he's already doing now. Slam the door in front of us every single time we try, until we get the point that it is immutable. As such, I believe any such attempt to break our range is a waste of our time.
 
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Firstly, those problems aren't solvable by even perfect social, so trying to solve them with social is an exercise in futility.
Social includes getting meguca to cooperate with us and each other, so any problem that requires non-Sabrina meguca to solve would need to be solved with social. Extending Sabrina's power, if it's possible at all, will probably require a bunch of magic specialties that Sabrina doesn't have. You shouldn't just assume that something is either independently achievable by Sabrina working alone in a warehouse or it's impossible.
 
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