341–350 of 500 posts
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Kip Thorne said it's theoretically possible. One end of the wormhole is on earth, the other is on the spaceship. Then you fly the spaceship and hop into the wormhole and arrive into the future on Earth.
You don't even need the wormhole. You just accelerate away to relativistic speeds then turn around and come back. It doesn't matter which direction you're going, just that you're going _fast_.
Great 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.
~850 years of ship time at max acceleration and the universe is 10^30 years old. At this point, only white dwarfs, neutron stars, and various stellar remnants remain. Galaxies have dissipated, and stars like our Sun are a distant memory. (If any still exist to remember them. Which is, I'll add, not out of the question. Life can cling to structures built around black holes, white dwarfs, etc., and extract energy from…
You could imagine a technically advanced society using it as a sort of penal death sentence. "You were not safe around our people, so we are sending you to the end of time."
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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.
My ship has a quantum shield that changes the location of incoming atoms; putting them just a bit to the safe side of the ship. Doesn't work with molecules though but that's coming up on v2.
Great 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.
Could use such a ship as a time machine (well, that only goes one way).
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Every proton would have the energy of a baseball. It's bananas. Granted, space is really empty, but it's not that empty, somewhere around a hundred atoms per cubic meter. Your ship might look like a very, very long shooting star. Probably dialing the speed down a touch would be worth it for whatever your shielding material is, but who knows? We're talking miracle engines here. I think in the "Valkyrie" ship-on-a-stri…
If you’re doing 2e8 m/s, your ship is long and thin with a 1m3 nose cone, and space has 100 baseballs per m3 then you’re being hit by 2e10 baseballs a second. How do I get an idea for what 20 billion baseballs (2TJ) feels like? Apparently bullets are about an order of magnitude more energetic than baseballs (800J vs 80J) so I guess I could try to build my intuition based on being shot ~2 billion times a second instea…
In the 90s, the show Special Relativity’s Funniest Home Videos would often have guys getting hit in the crotch 20B times with a baseball. Honestly, it never gets old.
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One nice illustration of "space is really big" is a fact that if you take the cube with the side equal to the distance from the Sun to the nearest star and fill it with water, then the mass of this cube will be roughly equal to the mass of the whole visible Universe.
Another good one for me is that a cubic light year or butter would immediately collapse into a black hole with a Schwarzchild radius larger than the observable universe.
Thus I would've expected the radius of the black hole to be necessarily smaller than the dimensions of the butter cube.
However, I now realize my mistake - in examples like squashing mount Everest or earth or a neutron star into a black hole, we're starting with masses that are stable/in equilibrium. This would not be the case for a cubic light year of butter!
Further, it looks like the radius is directly proportional to the mass. Given that mass grows cubic with respect to dimension, it's expected the radius of the black hole would eventually outgrow the cube of butter if made sufficiently large...
Great 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.
There exists nothing, even theoretically that you can put on the spaceship to get you that 1G continuous acceleration.
I don't remember exactly what is the maximum achievable delta V but if I remember well it is not a high portion of the speed of light, more like 60% of speed of light. And that assuming you have crazy things like carry a small black hole with you and use it to convert mass into energy at 40% efficiency.
What happens if I keep maximum acceleration and pitch up 90deg? The software seems to keep flying on the original vector. Is this a bug or is it intended to be a simulation of how light would behave under those circumstances?