"... on one of the golden worlds our long-range sensors have identified in Andromeda's Helius cluste

Five million years isn't a very long time in astronomical terms.

Five million years is longer than humans have been around in any recognizable form.

Or, you know, there's always the wild possibility that he won't. Stop projecting your own bullshit onto someone else.

I don't get it. Do you think everyone is going to be disappointed in Andromeda?

You're also going to be disappointed.

You're also going to be disappointed.

This thread long ago ceased contributing any positive vibes, but it did make me consider what incredible imaging we could achieve with telescopes in the Mass Effect setting.

On top of whatever advancements in telescope technology itself were made-- think lenses, software, etc... We could put one on the outer edge of the Milky Way and stare out into the night. Even better, we could build vast arrays, gathering crazy data. Maybe this is how Ai is supposed to have gathered such precise data from within the edge of Andromeda? We'll see.

I don't get it. Do you think everyone is going to be disappointed in Andromeda?

You'll be disappointed In others disappointing, disappointment In your disappointment.



Disappoint.



Disappoint....



disappoint.........

Okay, great, just let me know when I'm allowed to go ahead and have my own thoughts and opinions again.

And if I am disappointed, I'll be sure to follow your excellent lead and spend the rest of my life bitterly haunting forums of things I hate. Thanks for being such an awesome example.

No it doesn't.

There's some pretty cool stuff you can do when you have an entire galaxy to place your telescopes within.



For starters, imagine placing telescopes at East and West on a compass, and pointing them both North. Then do it with the Milky Way instead of a compass. The telescopes would then act like how our eyes work, giving us unprecedented depth perception when looking 'out' of the galaxy. The technical term for this is parallax - we already use it in astrophysics as a technique by taking pictures in the same direction every six months (ie, taking pictures of the same object, but from opposite sides of the Sun). I'm not sure what the effective range would be when using the entire galaxy, but at the very least it'd give us depth perception into Andromeda. (Andromeda is 20 times further away than our Milky Way is wide. Our own eyes are typically only 10cm apart, but they keep depth perception for considerably further than 20 times 10cm.)



Now lets' take things up a notch. You mentioned vast arrays, which is exactly the right idea. This is how you get crazy resolutions. Turns out, to get a huge telescope, you don't actually need to build a huge telescope.  You build smaller telescopes arranged throughout a larger area instead, and it's far more cost effective. (This is basically how SETI works, amongst many others.) An array built across the entire Milky Way galaxy - even with only relatively few telescopes making up the array, so long as they are working together - is exactly the method I'd want to use for extensively searching for planets in another galaxy.



(My gut says around 10 to 20 telescopes throughout the Milky Way would probably be enough, but that's a guess and I'd want to start asking around my university before putting out any concrete answers. For example though, the Very Large Array, on Earth, uses 27 radio telescopes in an array and manages to get highly detailed readings of the Milky Way core.) 



The controversial real life example of a planet in Andromeda that I gave in my previous post - it was only seen due to a micro-lensing event that effectively acted as a brief magnifying glass between us and Andromeda. Hence why it is controversial and hasn't yet been confirmed - the 'magnifying glass' we used previously has moved out of position, and isn't likely to return. So we do need some upgrades in the real world to start properly seeking planets in another galaxy - but having the entire Milky Way available to people in Mass Effect's setting allows for some damn good options

I looked this up and according to science, Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million years from Milkyway galaxy and will take light to reach from Andromeda Galaxy to Milkyway galaxy 2.5 million years This in spite of the fact that light beams travel 186,000 miles a second.