141–150 of 410 posts
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Light does not experience time at light speed - it is stuck in a static moment. So from our stationary perspective, light takes 111 years to come from a 111 light year distance, but from light's perspective it takes an instant.
Every time I think I’m closer to understanding matters of time and space...
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You can make the trip arbitrarily small from your perspective (in theory at least :) ). The issue is that by the time you've made it back home, it's 222 years later. Hence "you can't go home anymore". :)
If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back.
If you do it in a country that doesn't allow you to be declared legally dead when you are out of contact for a couple centuries, and if the institutions involved don't collapse, and if the interest on the account outpaces inflation, sure.
What percentage of the banks that were around 222 years ago have not failed?
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I wonder if we could work around the stronger gravity by using a spaceship as the anchor for a space elevator or skyhook? Both of those technologies are pretty far off, but so is getting humans to another star system.
currently we have no known materials that would actually be strong enough to support their own weight at the length of a space elevator on earth. double the gravity and the length will also at least double (possibly quadruple? not sure on the math here) so it may also be impossible to build a space elevator on one of these planets, at least without the use of active suspension (possible? theoretically.)
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most of the energy spent getting to that 400km low earth orbit is spent accelerating to very very fast lateral speeds. If you use a balloon to get your rocket up as high as you can before launching it you limit the weight of the rocket you can lift up there, and most of the weight of rockets is used to gain that lateral speed. The plane + rocket idea has been shelved for now, as reusable rockets have decreased the pr…
Isn’t that orthogonal to interplanetary travel though? If you go straight up far enough you’ll be out of Earth’s gravity well. You’ll still need acceleration to escape the solar gravity well, but you’ll never need horizontal acceleration necessary for Earth orbit.
Launching from stationary altitude doesn’t save much at all
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It would not take 4 billion years at the speed of light, it would take 111 years. That's what light-years are, the distance travelled by light in a year.
Ah, right. Basically I vote for firing a primordial soup probe to this sucker.
Do we have the right to interfere on a planet which may already have life?
Serious question - Do we have the capability to send human life there now? Obviously its going to be a one way trip. And it would require a generational ship. So could we build a ship that held 12 people initially, 6 couples, all who were allowed to have 2 children, so 24 people max, and could we load it with enough supplies to last over 100 years? Even if the group that eventually arrived had no way to sustain life,…
> potentially life-friendly Spoiler: it's not
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If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back.
> If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back. If you do it in a country that doesn't allow you to be declared legally dead when you are out of contact for a couple centuries, and if the institutions involved don't collapse, and if the interest on the account outpaces inflation, sure. What percentage of the banks that were around 222 years ago have not fail…
So it might not be that far fetched, assuming that the banks keep your accounts open after more than 100 years without use.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin...
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Or we could shift to an other side of the universe by "inverting" the mass of the ship where the speed of light is much higher[1]. Cosmology is so cool... too bad we do not have time for that: we cannot even cure the common cold! [1]: https://januscosmologicalmodel.com/pdf/2014-ModPhysLettA.pdf Cosmological bimetric model with interacting positive andnegative masses and two different speeds of light,in agreement with…
> Special Relativity can be summed up in the sentence: “We live in a spacetime which is an M4 manifold with a hyperbolic Lorentz metric of signature (+−−−)”. General Relativity can be stated accordingly: “The Universe is an M4 manifold with a Riemannian metric of signature (+−−−)” which is a solution of the Einstein equation:Rμν−12Rgμν+Λgμν=χTμν. It sounds like you get anti-gravity for free along the way to getting s…
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And how much time will it take a person to reach that speed at human-safe acceleration? And how much energy would it take?
Just under a year at 1g (according to google. I'm on mobile and would have to derive from F = ma on paper to solve). Energy is variable. I'd assume energy isn't relevant, as it's currently impossible, so we're taking that for granted. Not really that long.