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We May Never Learn Aout Life Elswhere

JohnPaul said:
Because of relativistic time dilation, the time would seem to be less for the spaceship crew. At very near the speed of light, the spaceship could travel millions of light years within a human life time for the crew. Of course the time here on earth would still be millions of years, so there would probably be no one here to welcome them back.
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As I understand it--and I am certainly no expert on this subject--the relativistic effects are not too extreme below a velocity that is fairly close to that of light. I seem to recall that the problem with taking advantage of these effects by getting very close to the speed of light is that as you get closer to it, the amount of energy needed to keep accelerating starts to get fantastically large.
 
matchlight said:
As I understand it--and I am certainly no expert on this subject--the relativistic effects are not too extreme below a velocity that is fairly close to that of light. I seem to recall that the problem with taking advantage of these effects by getting very close to the speed of light is that as you get closer to it, the amount of energy needed to keep accelerating starts to get fantastically large.
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The increase in energy required for acceleration is actually an; illusion created by the time dilation. Low energy very slow acceleration which seems to take hours to us watching here on earth would occur in a fraction of a second to the time-dilated spaceship, so increasing the acceleration energy could crush its occupants.

The formula for time dilation is T = SQROOT (1 - v^2), where v is the speed of the spaceship, expressed as a fraction of the speed of light. You can see from this that at 1/2 the speed of light the time for the spaceship is about 87 percent of "normal" time, at 9/10 the speed of light about 45 percent of normal time. At the speed of light, time for the spaceship would decrease to zero.

Enough for now. I am sure you are fascinated by all this. There are other effects of relativity which could be real problems, but our engineering is a long ways from having to deal with them now.
 
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