How far can one travel from the Earth? [ original research?] Since one might not travel faster than light, one might conclude that a human can never travel further from the earth than 40 light-years if the traveler is active between the age of 20 and 60. A traveler would then never be able to reach more than the very few star systems which exist within the limit of 20-40 light-years from the Earth. This is a mistaken conclusion: because of time dilation, the traveler can travel thousands of light-years during their 40 active years. If the spaceship accelerates at a constant 1 g (in its own changing frame of reference), it will, after 354 days, reach speeds a little under the speed of light (for an observer on Earth), and time dilation will increase their lifespan to thousands of Earth years, seen from the reference system of the Solar System, but the travelers subjective lifespan will not thereby change. If the traveler returns to the Earth, they will land thousands of years into the future. Their speed will not be seen as higher than the speed of light by observers on Earth, and the traveler will not measure their speed as being higher than the speed of light, but will see a length contraction of the universe in their direction of travel. And as the traveler turns around to return, the Earth will seem to experience much more time than the traveler does. So, although their (ordinary) speed cannot exceed c , the four-velocity (distance as seen by Earth divided by their proper, i.e. subjective, time) can be much greater than c . This is seen in statistical studies of muons traveling much further than c times their half- life (at rest), if traveling close to c . - wikipedia
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 16:04:18 +0000
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