That IS cool I hope this doesnt end up another mathematical pipe dream like a whole bunch of other things out there Other than that, neato
So basically, as you're flying along at close to lightspeed, anything in front of you just jumps out the way? Wow - just like Midtown Madness
Its intresting, but, then, time travel is possible. The ammount of things like this that are proved wrong and then proved right again every 20 years, leaves me not very excited by this. Show me the ship thats ready to do this feat, and I'll be impressed.
Well, it obviates the need for a deflector beam as postualted in Star Trek. Yeah, if only... Only 300 more years to go...
Pretty damn cool Hmm, as they've got this far, maybe someone will come along and invent cryo freezing for us lot.
They have, its just the de-freezing without ending up with soggy dead corpses that they havn't got pegged yet
Still doesn't get over Inertia - how long would is take to accelerate up to that speed without becoming a large pile of squishy mush? In this Star Trek was right.
By my rough calculations, accelerating at a constant rate of 32 ft/sec/sec or 1 gravity it would take you just about 1 year (355.21 days) to accelerate to the speed of light. If you slowly increased your rate of acceleration over time to allow passengers to adapt to the increased "local gravity" you could probably do it quicker. Figure you will spend an equal amount of time decelerating to your destination, or maybe less since the passengers are now acclimated to a greater acceleration rate. Ok, so if Proxima Centauri is 4.3 light years away and you spend 1 year accelerating and one year decelerating, while travelling half a LY in each of those years, you would then have 3.3 years at close to C, for a total one way trip of 5.5 or so years. Long trip, but certainly do-able in a lifetime. I'm sure relativity screws up my math some, and the time dilation means that the people who saw our travellers off would all be worm food before they returned, but it's a start. Interesting. Could this be an explination for the anti-gravitational "Dark energy" that cosmology is trying to explain?
There's a thought... We know that neutrinos appear to have a mass after all (albeit a very tiny one; but then again there are lots of neutrinos out there), which could go some way to explaining the missing dark matter. But Felber's model could indeed account for the faster-than-expected expansion of the universe. On the space flight thing: although it would indeed take astronauts about 5.5 years to reach Proxima Centauri, time dilation effects at that speed would mean that as the ship approaches C, time on the ship would approach stand-still. Travelling 3.3 light years at C would pass in the wink of an eye. So taking into account a 355.21 day acceleration and deceleration, the astronauts will experience the trip to take less than two years. It is on Earth that 5.5 years would pass by --all very doable indeed.
So technically, you could go on for hundreds of thousands of years, but ANY trip would just take 2 years.
If you manage to get up to C, yes. There are practical limits though. No point reporting back to a Mission Control that ceased existing a few centuries ago. Also might make re-integration upon return a bit difficult. Then there is the chance that when you finally arrive at your destination, you've been overtaken by those newfangled FTL warp drives fifty years earlier...
See that's the thing - faster than light travel will probably only be useful for unmanned objects and experimentation, as it's rather difficult to send people to/from places that are so far away. Only transdimensional travel can give a practical way to cover such long distances, such as to barnard's star etc.
