Time Dilation and Space Flight
Time dilation would make it possible for passengers in a fast-moving vehicle to travel further into the future while aging very little, in that their great speed slows down the rate of passage of on-board time. That is, the ship's clock (and according to relativity, any human traveling with it) shows less elapsed time than the clocks of observers on earth. For sufficiently high speeds the effect is dramatic. For example, one year of travel might correspond to ten years at home. Indeed, a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel through the entire known Universe in one human lifetime. The space travelers could return to Earth billions of years in the future. A scenario based on this idea was presented in the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle.
A more likely use of this effect would be to enable humans to travel to nearby stars without spending their entire lives aboard the ship. However, any such application of time dilation during interstellar travel would require the use of some new, advanced method of propulsion. The Orion Project has been the only major attempt toward this idea.
Current space flight technology has fundamental theoretical limits based on the practical problem that an increasing amount of energy is required for propulsion as a craft approaches the speed of light. The likelihood of collision with small space debris and other particulate material is another practical limitation. At the velocities presently attained, however, time dilation is too small to be a factor in space travel. Travel to regions of spacetime where gravitational time dilation is taking place, such as within the gravitational field of a black hole but outside the event horizon (perhaps on a hyperbolic trajectory exiting the field), could also yield results consistent with present theory.
Read more about this topic: Time Dilation
Famous quotes containing the words time, space and/or flight:
“All neighbourly content and easy talk are gone,
But there’s no good complaining, for money’s rant is on,
He that’s mounting up must on his neighbour mount
And we and all the Muses are things of no account.
They have schooling of their own but I pass their schooling by,
What can they know that we know that know the time to die?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and the heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)