[Star Trek Viewer]

If you accelerated at a fairly low rate -- say, 1 g, or the force of gravity -- you'd get close to light speed so that you could travel 1,000 light years in 30 years of shipboard time.

See: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclo...pacecraft.html

This is without the benefit of warp or any other FTL technology. In a sense, you'd be traveling 33.3 times the speed of light, by your own time-dilated standard.

You'd be 30 years older than when you left, but everyone you knew would have been dead for about 900 years or more.

Given this, would you want to be an astronaut aboard such an interstellar spacecraft?

[TGElder]

I saw a movie following this idea from physics. It's based on Einstein's theory of relativity. That your relative time moves at a different rate than that of the people back home on earth. I forget the mathematics of the story. We watched it in High School science class about 26 years ago. But the basis of the story was that traveling at or about the speed of light you get to Alpha Centauri, and back in about 7 years, while the people who you've left behind on Earth are all dead and gone by the time you get back. It was a real thought provoker. Made you think about the real nature of the universe, and not some SCI-FI gobbledygook, technobabble.

[omegaman]

Originally Posted by Star Trek Viewer

If you accelerated at a fairly low rate -- say, 1 g, or the force of gravity -- you'd get close to light speed so that you could travel 1,000 light years in 30 years of shipboard time.

See: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclo...pacecraft.html

This is without the benefit of warp or any other FTL technology. In a sense, you'd be traveling 33.3 times the speed of light, by your own time-dilated standard.

You'd be 30 years older than when you left, but everyone you knew would have been dead for about 900 years or more.

Given this, would you want to be an astronaut aboard such an interstellar spacecraft?

Absolutely.

[Captain Tom Coughlin]

I don't know, 30 years in a spaceship might make you crazy.

[janeway72]

Crazy enough to go back in time and go and rescue your own spaceship and take it through a Borg Trans-warp conduit. You're probably right! It would make you crazy!

This is the main part of physics that I have never been able to get my head round. Maybe there would be a way round it in the future or else the theory is wrong. Since we have never travelled anywhere near the speed of light, I guess it's a possibility.

[Zardoz]

hmm or the Hesline Curve from Planet Of The Apes.

[FanWriter45]

Actually, it's a fact. We've accellerated particles to near the speed of light, and they last far, far longer than those which decayed almost intantly. We've also conducted experiments with clocks that are relatively stationary on Earth, while others were jetted around the world, only to come back 0.000000001 second slower than when they left... If you have a GPS, the system DEPENDS on the clocks in the satillites running at a slightly faster rate, in order to compensate for time dilation while in orbit. Otherwise, directions to your GPS would drift at a rate of about 7 miles off per month.

Remember this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kA9fN43MX8&NR=1

[horatio]

The last TV sci-fi that picked up the idea of time dilation was Moore's Virtuality. As pointed out, you could travel with quasi several times of light speed at already .7 or .8 c whereas the disadvantages are that you will be on a "museum trip": travel twice 100 light years to visit another planet which might feature life in let's say 2 years and 200 years will have passed on mother Earth.
The other problem is that at such high velocities, you need pretty good navigation computers that can plan the trip very precisely.

[Zardoz]

Originally Posted by horatio

The last TV sci-fi that picked up the idea of time dilation was Moore's Virtuality. As pointed out, you could travel with quasi several times of light speed at already .7 or .8 c whereas the disadvantages are that you will be on a "museum trip": travel twice 100 light years to visit another planet which might feature life in let's say 2 years and 200 years will have passed on mother Earth.
The other problem is that at such high velocities, you need pretty good navigation computers that can plan the trip very precisely.

HAL 9000:"I am fully functional, and ready to help navigate Horatio."

[horatio]

I can't pinpoint it, but something tells me to not trust that computer.