intergalactic travel - near time travel?

Question

so kookie idea from the old guy Steven Warren Merrill

Merrill einsinian relitivity sphere space ship

if 1 year = 100 at near light speed

1 if you had a spaceship going nearly light speed 1 year = 100

2 and had a "subway" train inside it going nearly lightspeed 1 year inside = 100 squared or 10,000

3 had it spinning around inside a sphere at nearly lightspeed then 1 year inside = 100 to the cube or 1,000,000 years or so for the person inside 1 year = 1 million years (and nearly a million light years travled at average life span of 100 years one could in a lifetime travel nearly 100,000,000 light years or be 100,000,000 years old - lol even older than me...)

ok now how flat, and how much energy you would require would obviously be a problem...

Answer 1

The real benefit to the passenger in traveling at near-light speed to get to somewhere far away is not that the passenger experiences time passing more slowly -- the passenger will perceive that his or her clocks run normally -- but that the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction will make the distance to travel much shorter. So if you travel fast enough to have a 99.99% contraction in distance, a trip of 100,000 light years (say a trip to the other side of our galaxy) will appear, when you're traveling at full speed, to be a trip of only 10 light-years.

There are some problems for passengers of flesh and blood, not the least of which is acceleration. Let's say that the passengers can withstand sustained acceleration of 3 g's (three times the force of gravity), meaning acceleration of 30 meters/sec/sec, which is about the same as going from 0 to 60 mph in 1 second. The speed of light is 300,000,000 m/sec, meaning that it would take 10,000,000 seconds of continuous 3g acceleration to get to near-light speed. That's about 4 months of constant thrust. When you get to where you're going, it would take 4 months of deceleration at the same 3g level to slow down and stop. That's a lot of fuel to burn, the more so because you have to use up a pile of fuel when you're speeding up to accelerate the fuel that you're carrying with you to burn when you're slowing down.

Answer 2

Mr Merrill needs to take a high school physics course. He's totally wrong.

Answer 3

0_0 i dunno... i don't remember studying this in highschool physics ( i would remember, b/c my highschool physics class was 1 year ago for me)

and yes, going to lightspeed is impossible. the faster an object goes, the heavier it gets. everything gets harder to move and u'd need infinite amounts of fuel to even approach .9 lighspeed =P