- #1
beniliusbob
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Why do really fast speeds keep you from aging or "feeling time"?
I started reading Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead" yesterday and I was struck by the fact that being able to communicate instantly with any point in the universe (as one can in Card's sci-fi world) is completely at odds with the ability to travel at near-light speed (as on also can in the Ender series).
I know, it's science fiction, but I want to know if there's something in REAL science that I'm overlooking that makes this scheme at least moderately plausible. The thing that gets me as that, in Card's world, you can transmit 3000 years worth of communications to someone who has only "felt" eight years of time.
So my real question is, what is time dilation supposed to be like? If you are traveling through space at super super fast speeds, why is it that you experience less time than someone on Earth? How is it that their 20 years is your 1 year, or whatever? If you were traveling at 0.99 of light speed and someone was sending you messages with some kind of laser communicating device, and hence the messages would catch up to you, how would "experience" those messages, if you were traveling for a period long enough for ALL the messages to arrive (catch up), but that the messages spanned over more Earth-time than "space traveler" (relativistic) time?
Thanks for any help you can give!
-bn
I started reading Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead" yesterday and I was struck by the fact that being able to communicate instantly with any point in the universe (as one can in Card's sci-fi world) is completely at odds with the ability to travel at near-light speed (as on also can in the Ender series).
I know, it's science fiction, but I want to know if there's something in REAL science that I'm overlooking that makes this scheme at least moderately plausible. The thing that gets me as that, in Card's world, you can transmit 3000 years worth of communications to someone who has only "felt" eight years of time.
So my real question is, what is time dilation supposed to be like? If you are traveling through space at super super fast speeds, why is it that you experience less time than someone on Earth? How is it that their 20 years is your 1 year, or whatever? If you were traveling at 0.99 of light speed and someone was sending you messages with some kind of laser communicating device, and hence the messages would catch up to you, how would "experience" those messages, if you were traveling for a period long enough for ALL the messages to arrive (catch up), but that the messages spanned over more Earth-time than "space traveler" (relativistic) time?
Thanks for any help you can give!
-bn