NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Cel nav in space
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2005 Jan 7, 11:10 +1100
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2005 Jan 7, 11:10 +1100
Does anything (apart from electro-magnetic energy itself) travel at speeds close to c? ________________________________________ Frank Reed wrote: At 99% of the speed of light, time aboard ship would slow by a factor of 7. So for shipboard passengers, the trip would only take 290 thousand years. Hmmm... Still stinks. Ok, let's crank it up to 99.99% of c. That raises the time dilation factor to 70.7 so the trip would take merely 29 thousand years. Every "pair of nines" in that fraction of c adds a factor of ten to the time dilation so to get the journey down to less than three years of shipboard time, we would need to travel at 99.99 99 99 99 99% of the speed of light. You age three years aboard ship, everything else ages two million years (time dilation factor is 1000000/sqrt(2).