3 ms·
Humans could have lifespans in the millions of years in the reference frames of planets in the galaxy, assuming they spent most of their time traveling at accel
by centimeter 6y ago
Humans could have lifespans in the millions of years in the reference frames of planets in the galaxy, assuming they spent most of their time traveling at acceleration. I haven't done the math, but long-distance interstellar travel at >=1G could result in some pretty impressive time dilation.
Edit: here's a nice diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roundtriptimes.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roundtriptimes.png
- berkut 6y agoThe Sci-fi book Tau Zero by Poul Anderson has this as a core part of its narrative.
- m4rtink 6y agoAlso the setting of the "Right of Return" novel from Janusz Zajdel is like this. Humans have ships that can reach very high sub ligh speeds as well as totally safe hibernation technology. So you can go on long interstellar voyage and only age for a coulpe weeks or moths where you are actually active, the rest being in hibernation or time going much much slower for you due to time dilatation. There are even some scientists that will spend just a couple days per misdion awake to study an interesting phenomenon, being in hibernation for the rest of the journey! Of course if you have any friends or family somewhere they will be decades older or even dead by the time you get back. On the other hand if you have friends in the spaceflight community it is much less of a problem as you will be meeting the same people over your travels on various stations or missions as decades or even centuries go by. For that reason a lot of the space community is joung people who migh want to settle down once they are oldet (and never see their spacefaring friends agai) and centuries old academics who are having the time of their lives, studying the wonders of the universe every single day (from their perspective).