its all theory though.
your talking distance from looking at point a to point b which would be measured in light years, but if you could bend/fold space & take a tunnel/worm hole then the travel distance would become much shorter.
Take a sheet of paper for example, write A on the left side & B on the right side & say the distance in between in 100 light years. Fold that paper in half & punch through the paper from A to B - they are still 100 lightyears away
from eachother, but you would not travel for 200 light years to get there & back & time wouldnt accelerate either

Yes, but your speed doesnt actually exceed that of light, it used a short cut instead. There are quite a few options that are being offered to do this but as yet the all require extreme amounts of energy, exotic forms of matter or both.

That is exactly the issue that Forever War addresses.

Squads are sent out to different destinations basically to take and hold a planet until relief arrives, or theyre wiped out. For starters an issue that is raised is technology differences. A squad would hit an enemy base with technology that is maybe 500 years out of date in comparison to the garrison forces, or if they are lucky, they may hit a garrison force that set out 600 years ago and so the technology is 100 years advanced.

Its really hard to describe, but its not too difficult to grasp when reading the book. The whole premise isnt so much on the war and fighting, but the issues surrounding displacement. Any soldiers surviving a campaign would return to earth a few months or a year older, whereas earth has progressed in decades or centuries depending on the distance. When squadmates are reassigned to different campaigns, it is essentially meaning they never see each other again as even if they both survive a campaign, depending on distances they may return to earth a century apart.

Not to ruin the plot of the book for anyone that wants to read it, but some of the veterans at the end of the war use a ship travelling at near lightspeed between 2 points so that they could wait without aging for comrades. Each time the ship would turn around the crew would age 1 month, whereas they had skipped 10 years, which I thought was quite cool.

With your example of ship a and b in different directions, if A goes 500 light years away, when they arrive, yes, other will have advanced 500 years, but its not instant, everyone will have carried on back at earth, so ship Bs crew would have set off perfectly happily 5 mins later.


For a very real example of this, just look at the sun (not directly, thatd be painful) it takes something like 7 minutes for the light to reach the earth. So technically if the sun stopped shining we would have up to 7 minutes before we knew about it.

Quote from: Eggtastico

If I drive to London & back, i still age exactly the same amount as someone left back home?

Actually, no you dont, its just that the effect is insignificant at any speed attainable with current technology. You could drive to London and back Thrust SSC and it wont make a difference you can measure.

However, the phenomenon has been measured and verified against theory using atomic clocks and airliners, so weather or not you "buy" it, it has been proven to be so.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/Relativ/airtim.html


Most Sci-Fi which involves FTL travel either flat out ignores the problem, or gets around it using some sort of technobable with Warp drives and/or wormholes.

At the end of the day though, Sci-Fi is all about postulating the existence of something we dont have and seeing what would happen. The something doesnt have to be possible or consistent with current theory for it to be good Sci-Fi. Just dont ask too many questions and enjoy the story, if you cant do that I suggest Sci-Fi is not the genre for you.

doesnt really prove anything does it? its just a way of measuring time.
If I went to Australia & arrived the day after tomorrow, I wouldnt suddenly be 2 days older & wouldnt be 2 days younger when I return.
I was born at Y & the time ive been alive is measued from that point.

Quote from: Serious

Quote from: Eggtastico

its all theory though.
your talking distance from looking at point a to point b which would be measured in light years, but if you could bend/fold space & take a tunnel/worm hole then the travel distance would become much shorter.
Take a sheet of paper for example, write A on the left side & B on the right side & say the distance in between in 100 light years. Fold that paper in half & punch through the paper from A to B - they are still 100 lightyears away
from eachother, but you would not travel for 200 light years to get there & back & time wouldnt accelerate either

Yes, but your speed doesnt actually exceed that of light, it used a short cut instead. There are quite a few options that are being offered to do this but as yet the all require extreme amounts of energy, exotic forms of matter or both.

which is what I thought this discussion was about? I cant see how using a wormhole would shorten travelling time for 1 person & everything else age?
what if for example 2x ships set off in opposite directions 5mins apart to different destinations.
ship 1 travels instantly to 500 lightyears away.. now that would mean everything at Point A was 500years older & everyone on ship 2 more than likely dead of old age, but ship B left 5mins afterwards somwhere 1000 lightyears away..
now theres 1500 light years difference between the 2x ships.
Where does that leave us?

OK, one person goes through the wormhole, they havent gone all that distance because they took the shortcut, so they dont get the effects that it would provide. They then wait there for  the one who goes the full distance to arrive. They have spent most of their time relatively stationary so age at a normal rate.

The other person goes the entire journey at near light speed, that means they do end up getting to the destination later, but the time dilation effect on their age means they are younger than the person who went through the wormhole.

This doesnt mean that both have experienced the same amount of time, the second has experienced a lot less time due to time dilation.

doesnt really prove anything does it? its just a way of measuring time.
If I went to Australia & arrived the day after tomorrow, I wouldnt suddenly be 2 days older & wouldnt be 2 days younger when I return.
I was born at Y & the time ive been alive is measued from that point.

A clock is a way of measuring time, if you change the local conditions so that it ticks slower then it experiences less wear and thus effectively doesnt age as quickly. This applies to everything in a locality where the conditions apply, including humans. This has always been so, and always will. If you dive into a plane and fly to Australia and back but your identical twin remains here you would look the same, the effect would be minuscule, less than a thousanth of a second. But you would still be younger than him. The higher the speed and longer the distance the more  the difference in ages. Go off for a hundred years at close on to the speed of light and you might be a year older, he on the other hand has aged a century.

He has the experience of that century though, while you only have the experiences of a single year. Dont confuse this with getting younger either, its not that effective. The best you can hope for is to stop yourself getting older.

I dont like the premise of technology hitting a brick wall;

Bob lives in 1907 and decided to travel the circumference of the earth by horse and rafts.
Then in 1909 Jack decides to do the same, but he uses a new fangled car and a sailing boat.
Jill has been following their progress for years. In 1912 she buys good maps and arranges travel by plane and car.
A few months later they all reach the finish line because Jill, bless her heart, gave the other two a lift.

500yrs is a long time to go on earth without some significant advances that would make preceding technologies redundant.

Been done a few times. In one a group of astronauts leave Earth for the three Centauri suns. Going at sub-light speed, which, coincidentally, takes them exactly 500 years, which they mostly spend in suspended animation. When they get there they find that they have been overtaken by technology and the whole place is already occupied by people who have been living there for hundreds of years. The people have constructed a civilisation while waiting for the arrival and their society has changed considerably from the one the Astronauts left. Being incompatible with the new way of life their hosts have they then use a time travel get around to return to Earth just after they had departed.

Far Centaurus, written by A. E van Vogt back before 1960 and printed in a compilation of short stories called Destination: Universe! I still have a copy and its well worth reading for the ideas that are in there.

Lets face it - were still basically no better than monkeys with machines that flash lights in our faces.

We will never see any of this. So just watch it on TV and enjoy it.

Maybe, but I think we are slowly getting closer.

Eventually a fully self supporting off world colony will be a possibility, just expanding the ISS enough would give that. People there will have to take precautions against the effects of zero G but we are enhancing those now. Having self supplied havens will help to avoid issues like a big disaster killing us off.

Beyond that we need are a form of cheap transport to space for people and long buckytubes for space escalators to transport materials. The second is just time and development, the first might be theoretically possible now. Even without those its just a case of how much its worth to do it and determination.

It may be that its impossible to travel faster than light, but we should be able to produce large enough ships to be self sustaining worlds in themselves. Those might take hundreds of generations to reach even the closest stars, but its an option.

Science Fiction, get it?! Its a FICTION

Star Trek - uses WARP drive. (That is a fiction) - They do not break the laws of relativety, they are ignored becuase WARP drive creates a warped area of space around the ship which allows the ship to be propelled through normal space at faster than relativistic velocity. Its the shap of the warp field and the energy needed to create it that controls the ships speed.

The only realistic part of the this is the energy level needed, and nothing short of Anti Matter engines can supply the power to travel faster than light...warp drive.

Battlestar Galactic, Star Wars, ask the viewers the suspend the laws of relativety instead of giving an fictional alternative they exist in a fictional universe where light speed is possible.

Farscape, Babylon 5, Andromeda, all exist in a Universe where a seperate (dimension, sub-space, slipstream) are accessable by some means through which travel is capable, thus allowing travel faster than light.

Stargate & StarTrek also use wormholes, these are points in space connected to other points in space (the theroy/science I dont get, but its seems popular) This allows for faster than light travel through the wormhole...again this is a Fiction.

I am happy to suspend believe and enjoy the story/message or action the writers are trying to create when I recognise a fiction. Instead I continue to hope and dream oneday some of these fictions could become a realitey.

Just like, the quantum coupleing, personal communicators (mobiles), non-invasive drug administration (compressed gas forces the drug into the skin - Hypospray), Better and faster computers....research continues into Bio electrical circuits and optical circuits, etc.