Re:An extrasolar world covered in water?
by ryandrake on Thursday September 01, 2022 @04:29PM
(#32682678)
Yea, the calculators really help show how wild it is. I could outlive Earth's sun by simply accelerating away at 1.25G for ~35 years (ship time), not to mention how stacked I'd be from the workout of merely existing at 1.25G for half my life. The very concept of simultaneity is completely whack at such distances, times, and speeds.
Re:An extrasolar world covered in water?
by Melatonic on Friday September 02, 2022 @03:10AM
(#32687572)
But more importantly - will we be able to do that Superman movie trick where we just fly around the sun EXCEEDING the speed of light so we can go back in time?
Joking mainly. With this much time dilation it would be fascinating to just send out tons of probes in different directions at high speed and constant acceleration - this would massively extend their service life - and potentially also massively extend our knowledge of the universe as well. Of course relatively to the people on Earth it would take a long ass time.
Re:An extrasolar world covered in water?
by Brian_K_White on Friday September 02, 2022 @04:47PM
(#32695534)
"The universe just starts contorting itself to ensure nothing ever exceeds the speed of light."
This pretty well describes what it's like walking around in a game. Everything looks and acts pretty normal and rational up close, yet I can walk across a continent in a few minutes, yet each individual step along the way looked normal.
What the GP post is referring to is called a 'relativistic rocket'. You can find plenty of calculators for them, like here [1]. It leads to really mind-bending scenarios. For instance a single human could easily travel a billion light years within their lifetime, requiring "only" to travel at 1G acceleration for 40 years. Of course in that time a billion years would have really passed outside of our relativistic rocket.
If it ultimately turns out that there is no fundamental law of the universe that makes long-term rates of relatively low acceleration impossible, then the future will be a simply unimaginable place. Time itself will start to lose meaning as it becomes as variable as distance is today, at least for those able to travel.
[1] - https://www.anycalculator.com/starshipcalculator.html