Perdurable

\pur-DUR-uh-bul; pur-DYUR-\, adjective:
Very durable; lasting; continuing long.

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A scenario (culled in part from a screenplay): a ship several hundred years from now, equipped with the best sci-fi engines that Earth has ever known, sets out for a nearby (only a hundred light years away) planet. This is a necessary mission: say, a meteor is unquestionably going to hit Earth in a couple of hundred years, and they're getting something done now. The first mission sent is a scout - to be certain the planet is inhabitable before hundreds of civilization-ships (with similarly equipped engines) set out. The ship can move half the speed of light (they're fantastic engines, really), so the first ship will reach the planet in fifty years. But, of course, even current day physicists knows this is futile.

By the time they reach the planet, moving that speed, the Earth will be harboring a dust blanket and sporting a gash the size of Brazil. Time would bend around the ship, and well before they'd ever reach the new planet and send back the go-ahead, everyone would be dead.

This is what interstellar travel would be like: entirely disorienting for all involved. Anyone not on the ship beside you will be subject to a whole other timeline, and unless they too are moving at incredible rates, they will age and die very quickly from your perspective. Shows like Star Trek make little sense with this idea: no captain could ever have a continuing dialogue with another unless they move side by side--otherwise both would age differently, relative to their positions and speeds. In the scenario, the first ship would return from its galactic round trip to find spaceships so far upgraded from itself as to be entirely unrecognizable. A ship sent to scout would have rings spun around it by the ship that came next. It's like sending out a car moving 2 miles an hour toward a destination, and because it moves so slow (or, in the case of space, so fast), you have time to build a racecar and leave it in the dust long before it gets where it's going. Calculating interstellar travel will be a mathematical task for nothing less than supersupercomputers.

So where was I going with this... I'm not sure. But after watching that video on the tenth dimension, I'm left curious why there are not more higher-dimension travelers coming around to bop us on the head. It seems we might be able to travel across many of these dimensions (via wormholes and the like), but so far, we haven't experienced any travelers of any kind from any direction or any dimension beyond our own tiny three + one dimensional dust mote.

I'm curious if these dimensions (should they prove true) are merely building blocks for the fabric of the universe, or if they can be consciously navigated. Something tells me it'll be a long time before we know, and maybe never before we can empirically prove. But that doesn't mean I'm overly skeptical of the notion--it seems plausible.

It is ironic, though, that instead of the first dimension being what everything else builds on, it seems more organized (from how I've heard it explained) like a formidable tower of dimensions at the moment of the Big Bang, and either diminished into fewer dimensions or slapped the fabric downward from there.