this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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From a certain point of view.
Well then you are lost.
If you are fast enough, certaunly you experience few time in the journey, only for the observer on Earth it last a lot of years.
https://skullsinthestars.com/2012/09/10/relativity-ten-minutes-to-alpha-centauri/
They forgot about time it takes to accelerate...
https://skullsinthestars.com/2012/09/10/relativity-ten-minutes-to-alpha-centauri/#comment-15040
I once did the calculation. If you accelerate at a lovely 9.81 m/s^2 you reach light speed in about a year or so. So if you time it right and decelerate with the same rate you can reach about any place in the nearby universe in about two years.
Just need to figure out this pesky energy problem. And hopefully not collide with cosmic rays on the way.
nice! I thought it would take longer than that!
- Captain! We miscalculated! There's a Hydrogen atom on our path!
- Oh shi-!
*Explosion.*
And to time it right, you need to either not reach light speed, or have some external help to decelerate. Every clock or circuitry you bring with you also slows to a halt
Your comment reminded me of that one dude in The Expanse who tried to slingshot through the gate....
I mean it depends on how you reach the speed of light. Straight up propulsion correct but then you cant get the energy required for that, if we can somehow figure out a way to bend space to create a "warp" bubble the internal zone should act as we expect, but the energy requirements there are still fucking enormous and im not sure that would be feasible without us inadvertently creating a singularity that we could never escape from so there are just problems inherently there for either method lol
If you do use a warp bubble (we'd need to figure out negative mass, which likely doesn't exist), your local time will not dilate nearly as much, so the subjective time for the traveling observer might actually be a lot longer
Would it dilate for either observer, though? If the purpose of it is to just fold space time in essence shrinking the distance traveled I dont think we would see any significant time dilation occur for either point of reference as in that hypothetical scenario you would be using the fold in space time produced by such a drive to make two points in space closer together so in theory you never travel significantly close to the speed of light and time should flow pretty much "normally" for both points of reference. What I do wonder is would anything that gets touched by the horizon of that bubble/wave be effected, and such a drive would have to cause massive gravitational waves like a boat that moves through the ocean, what would be the effects from such a drive functioning in that manor be to anything near it or that it touches. And I'll state I'm in no means a physicist by any means so I could be completely of the mark here any many ways lol
What I'm saying is that warp drives are well within the science-fiction category, and not really applicable to the meme. In a warp bubble, you're never actually reaching a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Fair enough
Certainly, but it's only an physical example of the relativity of time. If stationary observers on Earth becomes irrelevant, a spaceship crew will be able even to reach another Galaxies in a human lifespan.
Well if you accelerate over the course of 1 second, you’d experience 30,591,067 g’s of acceleration.
Now for some reason NASA doesn’t have that figure on a time of useful consciousness chart, but I think I could do it
Anybody can do it, it's surviving it that's the problem.