Could LIGO Find MASSIVE Alien Spaceships?

What Imperium Galactica 2 has taught me is that we need to divert 80% of resources to science for a couple of generations.

Hearing a scientist say things like "the known warp field solutions" is the best.

What a team. Thanks for making the world better.

The simulated visuals of black hole mergers always make me do a double take, because the resulting black hole seems so much bigger than it should be. I know why it is: the equation for the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole has the counterintuitive feature of radius scaling linearly with mass, in contrast with our everyday experience of fluids with near-constant density and thus volume that scales linearly with mass. But seeing that play out in simulated mergers still gives the impression of the sum being much bigger than its parts, rather than the reality that a lot of mass has been lost to gravitational waves.

Alien: "Oh please. We use worm holes now. Sub-speed-of-light travel is soooo last universe."

The last thing I want to hear from a LIGO person: "That's no moon."

How fast would I need to flap my arms for LIGO to detect the gravitational waves? If I went from stillness to flapping them at 99% the speed of light, would LIGO detect it?

As is sometimes the case, some of these concepts have been used in Science Fiction. Joe Haldeman’s “Mindbridge” used such a gravity wave generating space drive for his aliens. Larry Niven’s “Shipstar” was a small planet sized spacecraft that harnessed some of its sun’s output for it’s propulsion. The chuckle inducing bit though, is the term “Rama-craft”. Someone was inspired by Arthur C Clarke’s “Rendezvous With Rama”

i like how Dr O'Dowd always brings it altogether with the words Space Time at the end of each vid

I was more than 10 minutes in before I realized that RAMAcraft is almost certainly a reference to Rendezvous With Rama.

Ah, yes. Installing gravitational subspace sensors in Stellaris always feels good! Not as good as the tachyon sensors though...

Never thought I'd hear about aliens yeeting themselves across the universe at a fraction of the speed of light, hooning about causing wibble wobbling in space time. Great video, seriously an awesome explanation of LIGO and what it's used for.

Perhaps some Aliens use gravitational waves for communication, their ability to pass through basically anything can be very useful provided you have technology to detect tiny waves.

I would really like to rendezvous with such a RAMA

What's crazy is if we detect such a craft in another galaxy,that species may very well be extinct

Amazing content as always. Not sure if it's just me, but I feel like I actually understood close to 100% of the presentation here, so bravo Dr. Matt!

I always loved physics, and finding Space Time is one of the best things that happened to me. I look forward to every new episode, I usually watch it first thing in the morning (living in Europe it's often to late for me to catch it in the evening), and I literally have an episode playing every time I go to sleep. It's not only interesting, it calms me down, even on the most stressful of days, and there are a lot of those. So I just wanted to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for putting so much effort and love into the series. You guys are simply awesome and you enrich my life ❤

Tremendous how vast the universe is 😳

Arthur C Clarke still having influence from beyond the grave. A true visionary.

Love how matt is wearing the “it’s never aliens” shirt lol