Are people totally misunderstanding relativity and interstellar travel limits?

[SeekerOfTruth007]

I saw a claim that General Relativity made it so that accelerating a starship at 10m/s^2 for about 12 days would reach Proxima Centauri in a few days.

This person did the General Relativity equations BACKWARDS. In fact, it is not possible to reach proxima Centauri in less than 3.6 years even if you started out flying at the speed of light without acceleration time. Moreover, observers back on Earth would see you traveling for billions of years before you reach the destination. Actually, they'd go extinct, but that's another issue.

People do these equations completely backwards. It is not possible to travel faster than C no matter what anyone claims. i've actually discussed this with PhD and Multi-PhD level physicists before in the past, and there is NO CHANCE of ever reaching even the closest Star to Earth.

Star Wars and Star Trek are pure fantasy.

Updates

2 mo

To accelerate to 80% of the speed of light and then stop at the other end, you would need 4000kg of antimatter for every one kilogram of payload, and this does not count propellant nor scaling for propellant. This is an IDEAL calculation for 80% of C. A realistic calculation probably requires more like 16,000kg antimatter per kilogram payload and another 16,000kg propellant per kilogram payload.

Updates

2 mo

Higher dimensions, such as "hyper space" and "warp drive" do not work, because The shortest distance between the two points is still a straight line. You can't get there any faster than a straight line and a straight line in 4 or 5 dimensions is the same as a straight line in 3 dimensions.

[OneViewpoint]

Hold on there Luke Skytalker. Yes C (causality) is a universal constant. And yes, nothing that has mass can ever reach the speed of causality. But you don't need need to jump in yer Chevy and accelerate to infinity and beyond. That's for the common folk. Space has no mass. The smart people just fold space and never worry about acceleration at all. Nor deceleration. And yes general relativity allows for that. But there is the small matter of the energy required to fold space even an itty bit with an Alcubierre Drive. And controlling the thing. And fucking up anything that gets trapped in your warped bubble of spacetime. So it may be possible to reach Proxima Centauri almost instantaneously. But it's gonna be several weeks before we can give it a shot.

[SeekerOfTruth007]

IN General Relativity, space is made of virtual photon pairs (Energy). In order to bend space, it turns out you need exactly as much energy as the Space-time itself is made of, and this is a truly INSANE amount of energy. An empty drinking glass contains more of this "Zero Point Energy" than all the ordinary matter, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy of the entire Universe combined. There is NO CONCEIVABLE WAY to ever get enough energy or negative energy (if that even exists) to ever bend spacetime to produce a wormhole or "teleport" between spaces.

That too is a complete fantasy made popular by Star Trek.

I used to know how to do the math that proved this, but I haven't worked with it since 2008, so I forget things, but suffice it to say WE AREN'T GETTING OFF THIS ROCK EVER.

[FunkyMonkee]

Loads of people don't even understand how to use English! Why would they know relativity or time travel?
Since at least 1954, we've had the tech to travel to the moon in about 45:00, Mars might take a couple hours. Yet, for some reason, we're still using huge Roman candles and such!!
What is C?
According to what I just heard a few weeks ago, it IS possible to go faster than light!
Star Wars is fantasy but, we've already found the tech back in the `50's to do everything on Star Trek.

[SeekerOfTruth007]

That's conspiracy theory nonsense. I actually know the Dean of Physics and Mathematics at the local University and I've actually discussed this with the director of the LIGO experiment right here in Louisiana, and General Relativity does NOT allow anything to fly faster than the Speed of Light.

"C" is the constant that represents the speed of light, which we are pretty sure we've correctly measured and defined as 299,795,824 meters per second. In fact, we know the speed so perfectly that the Meter is defined in terms of this speed, and not the other way around. Similarly, "one second" is actually defined in terms of the Speed of Light, and not the other way around.

There is no evidence whatsoever for warp travel or wormholes actually existing in the physical material universe.

If you entered a black hole (Star Trek Voyager) and tried to pass over to a white hole (impossible) but let's pretend. You would immediately be spaghettified by the black hole and killed, then any atoms which somehow survive the journey to the white hole will be irradiated by gamma radiation and stripped of any remaining electrons.

In reality, Wormholes do not connect black holes to white holes. A wormhole, if it even existed, would be a 4th dimensional tunnel through space-time and would actually be a LONGER route than simply traveling straight thourgh space-time.

I actually read all of Stephen Hawking's books and I read Clifford Pickover's books on black holes and wormholes. There is no safe or reasonable way to use either of them for anything practical.

Even claims by (former) NASA scientists that claim they are working on Warp Drive are probably anti-soviet or anti-china propagandar, rather than anything actually scientific.

[SeekerOfTruth007]

The reality behind this concept involves the following:The Alcubierre Metric: In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a mathematical model showing that a spacecraft could theoretically travel faster than light by contracting space-time in front of it and expanding it behind it. The spaceship would remain stationary inside a "warp bubble," avoiding the rule that mass cannot travel through space faster than light. The Catch (Physics Constraints): To work, this theoretical model requires massive amounts of "exotic matter" or negative energy, which we have never proven to exist. It also raises massive radiation hazards and control issues.

==

We have never found a single particle of "Negative Energy" in the history of modern science. Even Anti-matter is still made of normal energy.

[FunkyMonkee]

Ask Steven Greer.

[msc545]

The only way anybody is ever going to fly these distances is on a generation ship where people live and die for literally generations, or unless we find some longevity drug that allows people to live for that many years without going mad, or people can live in hibernation for that period of time. None of these things seem particularly likely to me.

[Tomislav7]

@msc545 yes to the 1st part or they find a way to imprint human consciousness into robotics so their bones dont wither from lack of gravity or die due to aging

[msc545]

@Tomislav7 good luck with that. If you could do it, which is highly doubtful, that robot would just go mad anyway.

[Tomislav7]

And a group of people traveling on a ship for generations wouldn't? Try Noahs Ark but with seeds of all life being transported to populate a new world

[msc545]

They might. I don't know. I think if you you had to live with the same people and you lived long enough things wouldn't work out well but nobody has ever been able to perform this experiment. Nobody will live us long enough to do it at this time anyway.

[SeekerOfTruth007]

The hypothetical way to do that is to create a "world ship" by de-orbiting an ice moon from an outer solar system planet or kuiper belt object and put say 10,000 colonists on it, using the ice for nuclear fusion to power both life support and a giant rocket engine, and acclerate to perhaps one thousandth the speed of light or one one hundredth the speed of light.

Even this hypothetical has problems though, because micro-gravity will cause bones and muscles to decay over the SEVERAL CENTURIES TO MILLENNIA flight time. by the time the World Ship reaches its destination, the passengers will have evolved into freaking goo, or else died for one reason or another.

[Tomislav7]

Interesting and yes the bodies overtime may be resembling that of Octopus , shoot if aliens are real they may be something like that

[msc545]

I suppose taking an Uber is out of the question then?

[slatyb]

Perhaps they meant the time experienced on the starship. Of course if the passengers returned, much more time would have passed on Earth.

[NathanDavis]

so... Stars Wars is not real...

got it...

[fish5505_87]

That's what makes them great!