"I know Kung Fu"

Watch it again and pay better attention lol.

(hint the shuttle was dropped from the mothership a while after they were encamped, the movie showed this with news footage, speculating on what the object was that dropped down and the fact they couldn't find it, the 'dad' alien clarifies that it was the shuttle/command module later.)

The crt screens salvaged and shown in the house of 'dad' only showed data in their symbols and gui, just doing what screens do.
Anytime they used the interactive holographic interface there was an alien device visible making it.)

Actually for the people back home it will take 50 years to know you arrived safely, the signal sent back home saying "we arrived okay" will take another 25 years to reach Earth.

Anyway you can see the problem with relativistic motion for interstellar travel.

With the relatively short distances within our solar system it shouldn't matter, not much more then the fact astronauts are nanoseconds into the future form their perspective.

Just to satisfy my own curiosity and perhaps Mike's:

I'll take the average distance to mars from earth, 225 million km.
Travel time for that would be *calculator* 50 minutes at 0,25c from observers perspective.

Lorentz factor for 0,25c is *calculator* 0,968245837
Which means travel time for you on board will be a good 48 minutes.

Correction: (in general for my comment and partly for mike)

yes I made a mistake with my sleepy head at the time and only now notice it when reading back. But it's not backwards, for the people on earth a longer time passes then for the ones on the spaceship, thats correct. My specific numbers I used for my example are wrong though.
I am a scientist at heart so have no problem admitting my mistake.

Same star 25 ly away will take 25 years to reach at light speed from the perspective of people back home.
For the people on the ship the same trip will take:

For the speed I took 0,9999c (because 1c will freeze time and even closer to c just becomes ridiculously short for the crew as at lightspeed time=0.)
Why Einstein said lightspeed is impossible, any number of 9s after the decimal, perhaps but not 1c.
The lorentz factor of 0,9999c becomes 0,0141 which results in 0,3535 years for the crew.

So for long distances the argument still holds despite my mistake in the intitial comment.
The odds that we will run into very long distances to reach the nearest habitable planet (ours is getting kinda full.) in the future are large.

With a very close star like the 25 ly example it's already bad for the crew/passengers.
you only travel a good 4 months but your relatives back home aged 25 years.

@Mike
Actually no I did not have it backwards with time dilation look up the formula and look up the twin paradox, the twin on earth is older at the end then the one who travveled at light sped.
The faster you go the slower time moves for you, hence from your perspective time outside the ship will seem to move faster.


@jmood
If you read my comment thoroughly I exactly said that, apart from interplanetary travel simple light speed is more or less useless, I even mentioned it be great to have for things like going to Mars myself.

It all depends on perspective, relativity biting again ;)

Nah its not meant to take the fun out of anything if it did for you then my apologies for that.

Too me the challenge of overcoming said problems seems to be the fun bit.

Why are they still talking relativistic speeds, every astronomer knows that relativistic travelling at light speed even if made possible is pretty much useless unless you don't plant to go further then Mars, Titan etc.

We don't measure distances between stars in light years for nothing, the distances are so vast light speed is just slow and the added relativistic effects aren't to be underestimated either.

If we say build a sleeper ship because we detected a possible habitable planet around a star 25ly from here.
It would take 25 years to get there from the crews perspective, many more from earth's perspective, so much more it's likely we would send out a more advanced non relativistic ship say 20 years after the light speed one launched and still get there years before the sleeper ship ever does. (twin paradox)

Light speed relativistic travel is a waste of time except for near light speed interplanetary travel, but not interstellar, the whole problem with interstellar distances and relativity means we need to find a way around moving relativistically to get anywhere in space.

(on a side note, it would be boring to look out the window too, no stars whizzing past star trek like or such, just a infinitely small and bright light dead ahead and nothing but black in the side view and rear mirror.

@G, for interstellar travel it would change nothing about the inherent problems of traveling near or at the speed of light relativistically, your still using relativistic motion, just a different propulsion method.

@futurepastshow, while I agree this is not hyperdrive, I don't agree with the impossibility, in fact most serious research into propulsion for interstellar travel is looking in directions like alcubierre drive (kinda like the warp bubble in star trek) and something that from a tv show watcher's perspective could well be called hyperdrive is being researched. Any method that can make you not have to you use relativistic motion (causing time dilation and other side effects which pretty much makes the usefulness of it zilch for interstellar travel.) is of interest because we already know normal ways of moving are useless with interstellar travel regardless if we can move at lightspeed or not.

The Alcubierre drive is what you could for all intents and purposes call warp drive.
It doesn't look like startrek's drive, it doesn't use the sci fi lingo, but it is a bubble of space surrounding the spaceship insulating it from relativistic effecs such as the joy killing time dilation, it also means there's is no (slow) speed of light limit the bubble is a mini universe in essence, the normal universal constants do not have to apply to that bubble of space.
In effect the spaceship doesn't move at all relative to it's space (the bubble) thus no dilation or speed limit.
What is moving is one bubble of space within this huge bubble of space we call the universe.
There's no speed limit because we would be in control of the constants of this mini universe.
The problem with the alcubierre drive theory is the same as with all other interstellar travel idea's scientists have come up with so far:
It needs near infinite energy, same as relativistic lightspeed travel it would need about the complete output of energy that our sun emits during it's complete lifetime lol.

So before we go anywhere we would really need to find a better source of energy, an infinite one, and all of those are just in theory or even hypothesis phase right now. (zero point vacuum energy for example.)
Fusion won't do it, the sun is the biggest fusion reactor we got around and as said we'd need the output of it's entire lifespan.

If we had infinite power output capability a lot would quite fast become possible.
Bending space to avoid relativistic travel, alcubierre drive, wormholes.
It's all possible in Einsteins universe, provided you got the energy.

A well point being is that all research to go light speed with relativistic motion is a waste of time if we want to send humans into space.
The trick is circumventing relativistic motion.

O god, every time I see "bling" I wonder when they changed the word "kitsch" into "bling" and rappers and following like this stuff right? Big tough rappers who like kitsch.. weird world.

You'd have to pay me for me to be seen with this in my home.
Or allow me to remove and sell the stones ^^

Nature, long long long before anything resembling humans walked the Earth.

It's called asexual reproduction and in nature has several ways to accomplish this (hermaphrodites who knock themselves up, cell division in single cell lifeforms, outright cloning in some simpler multicellular life forms and some plants (break off a twig, plant it and it grows it's own roots and becomes an individual plant. some plants do this on purpose with help of hmmm English faltering: shoots? (long twig growing away from the plant along the ground, setting root and disconnecting from parent plant.)

So no one invented it/thought of it, we discovered things in nature doing it, like electricity and nanobots (retroviruses, viruses already were nanobots long before we dreamed of building our own proteine based micro machines. Nature usually gets to most things first ;) )

Felt like answering despite being almost sure you were being ironic.

Cheers!

@sanriver, what part of cellphone ->parts