Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[RedKing]

I'd do everything possible to work on an immortality serum. Because:

1. It's probably going to be longer than my remaining lifespan to get practical FTL to the point that the average schlep like me gets to use it.
2. Once you have an FTL drive, you've solved the main two problems with immortality: Where do we put all the people, and what do I do to fill the time until the heat death of the universe?

[Levi]

I'd do everything possible to work on an immortality serum.

You should do that anyway.  I'd give all my savings for it. 

[kaijyuu]

But what if the serum gives insanity, and we all turn into the Green Goblin?

[Levi]

But what if the serum gives insanity, and we all turn into the Green Goblin?

Still better than death!

And pumpkin bombs are cool yo!

[RedKing]

Plus, we could all go off and be crazy IN SPACE.

[Loud Whispers]

But what if the serum gives insanity, and we all turn into the Green Goblin?

Begin digging into space? That usually works when you're insane.

[MrWillsauce]

If you want to go FTL, all you need to do is throw spherical balls of dark matter into a furnace. Duh.

[i2amroy]

I wonder if there's much potential problem with collisions. Since, you know, by the time you see something you've already gone through it. Then again, with a singularity in front of you, it just might suck things up and make you go faster.

Yeah colliding with something could be a problem, but the actual chance of colliding with anything problematic is extremely tiny due to the fact that space is big. I mean Just looking at the volume of a sphere reaching out from the earth's surface to the moon's surface you have a volume of approximately 237,923,183,611,000,000 km^3. So, as an approximation, think of a spaceship that is the size of New York city (with a height of the Empire State Building). You could fit approximately 514 trillion of these Spaceship New York's and still only use up about half of the sphere's volume.

And even if everyone just takes straight line paths to wherever they are going, the fact that both the departure point and the arrival points move relative to each other depending on when your planned time of departure/arrival are means that people will be spread out in their travel paths, not even accounting for the rotation of the earth itself.

[Sergius]

There's also the fact that the faster you are going the more time dilates, if we aren't using FTL. If you're going .99999c you'll get somewhere much faster (from your point of view) than if you are going .9c. The rest of the universe will still pass time as normal and Earth would be a few million years in the future by the time you got to Alpha Centauri and back, but for you it could be down to days or hours.

Wait... isn't Alpha Centauri like 4 and a half lightyears from the Sun? Even at half the speed of light, it would take you less than 3 years to get there. At .99999c it'll take you just nearly the same amount of years than light. It's just that, from the POV of the traveller, you keep going faster and faster even if the "c" number isn't really going up. So, for outsiders, you just went 0.0001 faster, to you it might seem twice as fast.

That means you feel like you arrived in a week, or a day, or even a fraction of a second, while you took "real" time to get there from our perspective (so we all aged 4.something years or so, you didn't). Definitely not millions of years...

Basically, you're spending more energy/fuel to get there faster, but only relative to your POV, for all of us, it's just a waste

(if it takes millions of years in the first place {what, are you driving there? }, you are going nowhere near the speed of light, so relativity barely applies to POVs... so you'll be dust by the time you get there )

[Darvi]

Wait... isn't Alpha Centauri like 4 and a half lightyears from the Sun? Even at half the speed of light, it would take you less than 3 years to get there.

My brain just broke.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I was exaggerating. Let's say the far end of the Milky Way, then.

[Sergius]

Wait... isn't Alpha Centauri like 4 and a half lightyears from the Sun? Even at half the speed of light, it would take you less than 3 years to get there.

My brain just broke.

half of 4.5 is 2.25, which is less than 3...

EDIT: Oh yeah, sorry, my bad. I meant about 9 years. (for some reason I did it backwards).

[Sergius]

I was exaggerating. Let's say the far end of the Milky Way, then.

Oh cool, I thought all I had ever learned about space travel was wrong somehow... needed to reaffirm myself

EDIT: Sorry about double post.

[Darvi]

Yes, but halving  the speed does not halve the time that it takes to get across. Otherwise people wouldn't have to use vehicles to get somewhere on time.

[kaijyuu]

Wait... isn't Alpha Centauri like 4 and a half lightyears from the Sun? Even at half the speed of light, it would take you less than 3 years to get there.

My brain just broke.

It's really not that complicated. Acceleration is (effectively) linear from the POV of the entity accelerating. If you double the energy pushing you forward, you reach your destination in half the time.

The speed of light and associated time dilation affects your travel time from other's POV. Your origin and destination will see you as limited by the speed of light, as far as travel time is concerned.

It's relative. Hence, "relativity."