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.
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..
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
No, because the solar system is moving together along the outer edge of the cosmos Milky 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.
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.
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.
Yeah but you're likely to die around the same time as another person. As long as you can float as fast as you could run, im sure you'd eventually find a partner....
"the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws"
So do they just maintain their initial velocity or would we have a chance to discover the static reference velocity of the universe?
Also they would still be affected by gravity if they still exist in space. Gravity is not a force that pulls objects together. It is merely the act of going straight in curved space. Either they are in that space and they are going to move along it within the shape of that space or they are not in that space. Though really if they just moved in a straight line with no external forces they are going to be subterranean because a real straight line in our space is down.
We're talking about ghosts here, we don't know what laws they follow. That said, either you are right or they would be miles far from earth before being able to finish that first sentence.
What if a ghost is affected by gravity but not other "fundamental" force in the standard model? This will raise a lot of interesting questions. Is... ghost dark matter?
If the ghost is affected by gravity, but is able to pass through solid objects, then it will get sucked down into the core of the earth and burn forever. Which interestingly is what some people say is what happens.