161–170 of 273 posts
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I believe the OP was referring to relativity - the closer to the speed of light you get the slower time appears to tick. So if you could travel at light speed you'd arrive at your destination immediately from your reference frame, but much slower from another person's.
Then what’s up with all of those sci-fi chows where using FTL still takes some amount of time to arrive?
Make sure you press the "c" button in the bottom right. Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach. I think we'll have a holodeck before we reach another star. And maybe that'll be enough.
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Traveling at .1c within the solar system wouldn’t really be feasible due to the need to accelerate and decelerate. Not for meatbag ships anyway.
There's nothing about 0.1c or even 0.999c travel that's detrimental to meatbags. They would both feel exactly the same to the traveler. If your (for now) imaginary rocket could accelerate at a constant, gentle 1G, you could reach 0.1c in about a month (traveler's time), and you could reach 0.999c in about 44 months. Building and fueling such a rocket is the hard part.
If you're travelling between points in the Oort Cloud, 1G should be more than sufficient to hit .1c on the trip.
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Naive question: is accelerating at 1G continuously within the range of what we consider possible?
Amazingly, yes, in a few ways (the mechanics are possible). But no in as many ways. (Fuel, sustainability, tracking) The greater barrier is that the nature of the expansion of the universe prevents any real interstellar travel that has a "destination" in mind. Of course we might have some "FTL" or "near light speed" travel in futre, but if the universe is expanding infintely from every point in space at light speed,…
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Yeah if you have a body that can tolerate sudden jumps between reference frames you could pretty much explore the entire galaxy trivially, so long as you don't mind that few places will stay the same long enough to visit twice.
You wouldn't need a sudden jump. If you had a rocket that accelerated at a pleasant 1G forever, you could reach and stop at the center of the milky way in about 20 (your time) years, and you could reach and stop at the Andromeda galaxy in about 28 years. Play around with some of the online space travel relativity calculators--it's wild! Of course building and fueling such a rocket is what's totally out of reach.
We'd need a device that could efficiently transform several kg of matter to photons.
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Not out of reach if you get very close to light speed. Time would advance very slowly for you, so counterintuitively it is possible to travel 5000ly in your life time. Although for everyone else at least 5000 years will pass, so better say goodbye to family and friend. Hm, not sure if that is really less depressing... Also light isn't slow. A photon instantly travels to the end of time and yet it still takes a few mi…
One thing I've always wondered is what fraction of c is actually realistically achievable with current technologies? (Maybe with scenarios for manned/unmanned spacecraft.) Like are we at 0.1% or 0.01% or more orders of magnitude off?
The best speed for interstellar travel with technologies that current theory says should be within our reach can be achieved with a vehicle with a light sail pushed by a giant laser, that is powered by solar power. There is even a way to brake it when it reaches the target star. I forget what the predicted velocity was though.
This technology is basically the same as one that the Moties developed in the story, The Mote in God's Eye.
Yeah, that Googol often doesn't work.
I’ve been thinking about how to teach the size and proportions of the solar system to my kids, I’ve bought a couple of packs of blank RFID cards on which I intend to paint the planets over a starred background. And then walk with my kids the meters necessary to cover the distances before displaying them. What I don’t know is if there is a clever way to use the RFID tech, this website kinda offers an idea.
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Amazingly, yes, in a few ways (the mechanics are possible). But no in as many ways. (Fuel, sustainability, tracking) The greater barrier is that the nature of the expansion of the universe prevents any real interstellar travel that has a "destination" in mind. Of course we might have some "FTL" or "near light speed" travel in futre, but if the universe is expanding infintely from every point in space at light speed,…
If your travel involves the Rocket Equation the answer is no. If you are limited by the speed of light and the lifetime of human civilization then the expansion of the universe is not an issue. Traveling between nearby solar systems is very close to impossible, traveling between galaxies is outright impossible.