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Relativistic Spaceship

dmytry.github.io

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Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#491
Can anyone explain what is happening as you get a few nines in your velocity?

Yes, that's the microwave background being blueshifted, but why is it growing across the screen? Shouldn't the angle that's blueshifted be less and less as you go faster? At lower speeds we do see the starbow effect, passing stars going down the spectrum as the angle increases.

And what becomes of the stars as you're going fast enough? Yes, most of the energy is shifted out of view but don't stars emit some at such low energies?

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#492
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rest of the hail mary series?? Or Three Body? I have read two of the three body books, but I wasn't aware of a sequel to project hail mary, would be very excited if that's the case!

The rest of the three body problem series.

Ah got you, I think I still have one more to read.

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#493
post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recommendations on a mind melter?!?!? Something that is logically consistent is my only criterion (not much of a mind melter if it's incosistent within its own world) ... and the writing not being at a 10th grade level (distracting).

* spoiler alert * yes, the writing was annoying in parts (especially the Earth flashbacks). What I liked about it was 1) if you don't know anything about it (I didn't even read the back cover) the surprises evolve nicely; and most importantly, 2) it was a story of humans cooperating with another species rather than either subjugating or resisting subjugation

Yeah I totally agree, the surprises were great. I knew literally nothing except for the title and the author and that it could have something to do with space, as he wrote the Martian.

I hadn't read any Andy Weir before, but someone recommended it to me so just started reading.

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#494
post #439
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it without any expectations and without knowing anything about the plot. It was just recommended to me by someone, but I'm usually into sci-fi, stuff like Greg Egan. I really enjoyed it, but maybe I would have been disappointed if I was expecting more of a mind melter!

Any recommendations on a mind melter?!?!? Something that is logically consistent is my only criterion (not much of a mind melter if it's incosistent within its own world) ... and the writing not being at a 10th grade level (distracting).

I would say anything by Greg Egan!

My favorite is probably Permutation City, followed by Diaspora. His stuff can get heavy though.

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#495
post #415
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read project hail Mary over Christmas, and they deal with this problem too. Though I can't say much without giving away spoilers. A great read if you are a sci-fi fan!

Thank you for the recommendation! Started reading yesterday and I'm loving it.

Glad to hear, enjoy!

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#496

Can anyone explain what is happening as you get a few nines in your velocity? Yes, that's the microwave background being blueshifted, but why is it growing across the screen? Shouldn't the angle that's blueshifted be less and less as you go faster? At lower speeds we do see the starbow effect, passing stars going down the spectrum as the angle increases. And what becomes of the stars as you're going fast enough? Yes,…

These are good questions, but the answer is essentially "not in scope for this visualization". And, also, really hard to visualize with reasonably correct physics at higher "nines".

The tool does not deal with gravitation. We know that our local patch of the Milky Way (out to a few hundred lightyears) is full of kHz-Hz waves (LIGO, Virgo et al.), and nHz waves (pulsar timing arrays). Known sources at these frequencies are extragalactic, so there will be lots of these waves outside the Milky Way too. At significant boosts, these gravitational waves will impose visual distortions. The "twinkling" that pulsar timing arrays detect over the course of many months would be detectable over the course of much shorter periods of ship time.

Gravitational microlensing is likely to create uncomfortably hot spots (low-energy caustics from our usual point of view) for an ultraboosted spaceship.

We also strongly suspect there are lots and lots of black holes massive enough to impose a significant gravitational redshift on background light from the early universe, releasing far IR radiation from near the photon sphere (note, this isn't Hawking radiation, just delayed and redshifted background) that an ultraboosted observer should be able to spot.

(Work in this area is usually about considering what an ultraboosted massive particle does as it passes a massive observer. For example, in the 1970s the Aichelburg-Sexl ultraboost tried to capture what a neutral cosmic ray would do -- gravitationally -- to a spherical gas cloud along its path. In essence there is an exchange of momentum: the ultraboosted particle loses some, and small parts of the gas cloud gains some. Increasing the mass and structural complexity of the ultraboosted observer inevitably runs into inelasticities. That admits a hand-wavy expectation that even below the threshold at which subatomic physics of the ship becomes relevant, the ultraboosted spaceship is liable to become so very hot that its thermal spectrum masks practically all the light from everything ahead of it.)

As you raised in your final question, there is good reason to believe there is plenty of very deep IR electromagnetic radiation out there from all sorts of sources. Most models of cosmic inflation will produce gravitational and electromagnetic radiation with all manner of wavelengths, many of which are stretched to cosmological lengths. We don't really have a good view of any of that because presently we can't yet make a sufficiently cold ultra-long-wavelength (sub-30 MHz; cf. FARSIDE, LCRT, GO-LoW) detector and don't even have good ideas about how to look at astrophysical sources below kHz. There's probably lots of bodies (e.g. magnetic interactions with exoplanet atmospheres and gas clouds) that will become optically bright as the CMBR is blueshifted out of the range of human vision.

The visualization also does not offer up a physical observer who would feel variations in the galactic magnetic field (cf. the Sokolov-Ternov effect with enough "nines"), the cosmic neutrino background, and two-photon physics from ultraboosted CMBR and starlight interacting with the observer's photon shock front.

The visualization is pretty, it captures some gross aspects of being relativistically boosted, but as many scattered threads in the discussion discuss, it's probably not a useful hint about what one of our descendants might experience if somehow they could reach "a few nines".

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#497
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My second favorite sci-fi book of all time. Three body being the first.

Indeed. Have you read the rest of the series? It just gets crazier and crazier.

Yes, the trilogy is really a unit for me. Books 1 and 2 are really a single story. Book 3 is different but amazingly great.

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#498

I re-read this book recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero which has to be one of the most epic sci-fi novels ever since it is about a starship that gets its brakes damaged in a crash so their answer to every problem they face is to go faster!

I just finished reading Tau Zero after hearing about it here and also recommend it!

I expected relativity to play a role, but the time dilation the crew experienced was on a _far_ grander scale than I imagined. The book also left me thinking of favorite time travel/relativity classics like Interstellar and, going back, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (my favorite Star Trek movie).

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clearly not a solvable problem with current ideas about technology. No amount of ice, rock, magnetism, or Magic Unobtanium is going to make this practical. I'm not even sure about warp drives. Bending spacetime one way means it has to squish back the other way. The energy released might not affect the ship - possibly - but I'd be surprised if it didn't affect the spacetime it had just passed through. Some kind o…

The theoretical Alcubierre drive basically collects all of the material you would intersect with in a gravitational well ahead of the vehicle as you travel, which is great! ...until you stop, releasing all of that mass as a gargantuan amount of energy at your landing site.

Would make an effective weapon.

Re: Relativistic Spaceship

#500

Can anyone explain what is happening as you get a few nines in your velocity? Yes, that's the microwave background being blueshifted, but why is it growing across the screen? Shouldn't the angle that's blueshifted be less and less as you go faster? At lower speeds we do see the starbow effect, passing stars going down the spectrum as the angle increases. And what becomes of the stars as you're going fast enough? Yes,…

These are good questions, but the answer is essentially "not in scope for this visualization". And, also, really hard to visualize with reasonably correct physics at higher "nines". The tool does not deal with gravitation. We know that our local patch of the Milky Way (out to a few hundred lightyears) is full of kHz-Hz waves (LIGO, Virgo et al.), and nHz waves (pulsar timing arrays). Known sources at these frequencie…

This doesn't address the biggest question I had--why the CMB grows across the screen rather than shrinking into a searing point ahead.
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