Space Fuck Yea

[dtea206]

 

[ShadowCaster]

The picture vs. the story is slightly confusing.. They say it has it's own sun... well, um... It kind of has two suns by judging how close our sun is to it. I wonder if that gives off some light as well.

That picture only illustrates how far the planet is from it's sun, the distance between the two suns are not in scale.

 

[tavin]

^^ HAHAH WINNER

 

[papajohn56]

Papajohn will no doubt correct me on this, or at least provide accurate figures and a layman's explanation, but time and space don't work like that and as speed increases, distance shrinks and therefore it would actually take considerably less than 600 years. (As in a few days.)

I remember Professor Brian Cox saying that travelling at 99.9999% the speed of light would allow us to get to the the Andromeda Galaxy (3 million light years away) in only 50 years. So by those figures it would mean it would take about 4 days to get to the new planet. (Although if you turned around and came straight back, the earth would be 1200 years older even though you've only travelled for 8 days - I think!)

This is called time dilation - the closer you are to the speed of light, the more time appears to change for you. This also introduces the twin paradox, so for instance like you said about aging:

Two twins are born at the same time, and one is sent on a mission to the nearest solar system to ours, 4 light years away and the ship goes a speed at 0.8c (80% the speed of light). The twin on the ship gets to the other star system and turns around immediately to return.

Once he gets back to earth, his age is 6 years old, but the twin who stayed on earth is 10 years old. Time dilation caused this to happen:

∆t' = time the twin on the ship experienced
v = velocity (.8*c)
c = speed of light
∆t = time the twin on earth experienced

plug in all the #s and you get ∆t = 10 ∆t' = 6

the closer you get to c, the more pronounced it is.

 

[-Matt-]

Yeah you'd have to get close to the speed of light to make it even remotely possible.

Even then it would take 600 years.

So then you'd need some sort of cloning or cryogenic system or make the ship large enough to actually live on for a couple generations.

Not to mention a ship that could actually last that long on only minor repairs.

Still pretty cool, though.

 

[davidne]