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Relativistic Spaceship
11–20 of 500 posts
Re: Relativistic Spaceship
#12Great visualization of the unintuitive nature of special relativity. It's kind of mind blowing to realize that if we could accelerate our spaceship at a mere 1G continuously, we could visit the center of the Milky Way in under 20 years (spaceship time), totally do-able in a human lifespan. Of course 27900 years would have passed on Earth, so you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about your vacation.
Re: Relativistic Spaceship
#13I had no idea you could achieve relevant amounts of time dilation so "easily" with relatively small (1m/s) of constant thrust - such that interstellar travel becomes somewhat viable provided you can continuously accelerate for the entire trip. Googling it, it would take approximately three years of observed time for a traveller to get to alpha centauri at 1g.
Could any somewhat-plausible technologies (fusion etc) get us to that point? I don't know how to do relatavistic maths, but it seems that directly converting mass to energy and ignoring relatavistic effects requires 50 000kg to accelerate 100 000 kg (with a constant relationship, as the C^2 cancels out) to the speed of light.
Re: Relativistic Spaceship
#14Great visualization of the unintuitive nature of special relativity. It's kind of mind blowing to realize that if we could accelerate our spaceship at a mere 1G continuously, we could visit the center of the Milky Way in under 20 years (spaceship time), totally do-able in a human lifespan. Of course 27900 years would have passed on Earth, so you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about your vacation.
I wonder what is a safe acceleration to get to light speed for long periods without hurtin too much
Re: Relativistic Spaceship
#15Great visualization of the unintuitive nature of special relativity. It's kind of mind blowing to realize that if we could accelerate our spaceship at a mere 1G continuously, we could visit the center of the Milky Way in under 20 years (spaceship time), totally do-able in a human lifespan. Of course 27900 years would have passed on Earth, so you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about your vacation.
I suppose you would also have to worry about surviving the trip - every atom in the interstellar medium would damage your ship, likely penetrating the entire way through, and electromagnetic repulsion would only work with charged particles.
Re: Relativistic Spaceship
#16Very fun.
What does y represent?
Re: Relativistic Spaceship
#17Great visualization of the unintuitive nature of special relativity. It's kind of mind blowing to realize that if we could accelerate our spaceship at a mere 1G continuously, we could visit the center of the Milky Way in under 20 years (spaceship time), totally do-able in a human lifespan. Of course 27900 years would have passed on Earth, so you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about your vacation.
I wonder what is a safe acceleration to get to light speed for long periods without hurtin too much
~9.8 m/s sounds pretty comfortable.
Re: Relativistic Spaceship
#18Yikes. At around 90%c, it's starting to look like a sunny day. Any physicists care to weigh in on the accuracy of this? I can search for the energy density of starlight in interstellar space... but how fast does one need to go to hit that "sunny day" point?
Re: Relativistic Spaceship
#19Very fun. What does y represent?
It should be the Lorentz factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor
Re: Relativistic Spaceship
#20This is something I've wanted to try in VR one day. Does anyone know if there is an app/game available for one of the popular headsets? Is there a technical limit to how realistic the effect could be?