The closer you travel to the speed of light the slower time moves for you when compared to an outside frame of...

The closer you travel to the speed of light the slower time moves for you when compared to an outside frame of reference.

Given that this is a scientific fact it should be possible to build a 'time machine' of sorts that could bring someone forward in time. What you'd need to do is build a mag-lev train that completes a circuit around the circumference of a small heavenly body. The moon is a good candidate because of how close it is but really any small, round body will do.Ceres may also work as it is very remote. The low gravity of these bodies has the added benefit of assisting magnetic levitation. Shielding should also be built to prevent relativistic impacts with small bits of matter. Essentially you'd have a mag lev train inside of a long, empty, circular tube

The next thing you want to do is board the train and let it begin accelerating. Given that the track provides no friction and that space is a vacuum you could potentially accelerate to near relativistic speeds. If you could stay aboard long enough, through some kind of suspended animation or calorie rationing you could potentially 'jump' many thousands of years into the future.

My question to you Veeky Forums is this: Would you climb aboard sucha machine if you were handed a ticket? Would you go 1000, 10,000, 100,000 years into the future, knowing you'd never have a way back?

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Only one ticket?
Go big or go home, I pick 100k.

for what purpose?

Why use a train? Just go the classic route and fly circles around the earth in a spaceship.

There's a Queen song about this: '39.

And no I would not.

Perhaps it would be easier to provide continuous/repeated propulsion to a train.
A spaceship would need reaction mass to be refilled which would be hard once it gets going super fast.

Accelerating to relativistic speeds in Earth orbit would overcome the gravitation pull of the planet and send you flying off into interstellar space. An orbit isn't just flying around a planet it's lateral motion in equilibrium with a downward gravitation pull.

As well the amount of fuel required would be insane. With a mag lev train system you're simply using electricity to move yourself which is a lot easier to generate on that scale than getting hundreds of millions of tons of rocket fuel into space.

This type of system is not only theoretically possible we could really build one of these in 50 to 100 years if we cared to make the investment.

that's not how orbits work

How do you generate the force required to keep the train in it's circular motion?

Pic related is a cross section of how maglev trains work today. If you put the train in a hollow tube you could have such a system on both the top and the bottom of the train. It would be an engineering challenge to get the clearances right, but it wouldn't be impossible.

The energy could come from any number of sources. Nuclear or efficient, future solar systems would be ideal for their long term reliability.

as the train accelerates centrifugal force would want to make it pull upwards essentially and rip off of the track. The retaining strength of the magnetic field have to be constantly increased in order to keep it running circular.

The magnets in maglev train must produce a force strong enough to counteract the weight of the train.
In your hypothetical they're having to keep a train moving at relativistic speeds in a circular path.
This requires much stronger magnet.

What if you had the train do a toroidal corkscrew inside of the of the vaccuum tube?

yeah lets invest billions of dollars so that a handful of people would get to see the future while we would gain literally nothing from it

niggas what? You dont need fuel to orbit something, that's the whole point of orbiting. Also, this shit works at any speed, it just takes a while

I hope for your sake you're pretending to be retarded

How would this help?
You need fuel to accelerate it.

Cool post bro, mind if I copy paste it for further use?

Nah but seriously mate, does the moon use fuel to orbit earth?

just imagine what videogames would look like then

yes, just like the train

The two issues with the orbiting spaceship pointed out above were:
1. Spaceships use reaction engines so to continually accelerate the ship you'd need huge amounts of fuel or refill it while it's moving
2. You can't rely on the planet/moon's gravity to keep it in orbit. It's speeding up so it will leave the orbit.

The track structure could impart force on the train to keep it in a circular path and accelerate it.

1. solar panels
2. you can stop accelerating when you reach an appropriate speed for orbit


There's a reason this idea was first imagined using a spaceship

Nah I wouldn't, perhaps if I really fuck up my life, or when I'm old and all my friends have died off. I'm curious, but not curious enough to give up the life I have and start anew. I wouldn't go to far if I would go though, I'd go like 500 years into the future, when hopefully people can still understand my language, and the world has changed a lot but isn't completely alien.

>1. solar panels
What's your propellant? There's no reaction-less drive that's been shown to work.
>2. you can stop accelerating when you reach an appropriate speed for orbit
Which is going to be far far less than relativistic speeds.

You're underestimating the energy requirements by at least several orders of magnitude. And that's ignoring the fact that space, especially near stars, isn't really vacuum. It's full of all sorts of particles: dust, hydrogen, particles from solar wind and so on. All of that has to be deal with as well. Accelerating something to 0.5c about doubles its mass - and that's all energy you have to provide, so if the "train" weighted 500kg, you'd have to convert 500kg of matter into kinetic energy. And that's just to get it started. To actually keep it going in circles, unless you put it in an orbit around a black hole(in which case it would be torn apart), you have to provide continuous acceleration since otherwise it'll go in a straight line.

>you have to provide continuous acceleration since otherwise it'll go in a straight line.
>what is gravity

It doesn't accelerate to near relativistic speeds...

...granted, neither would your train, given the energy involved to do that. Well, maybe it would, but you'd be well past your 100,000 year mark by the time it did, and no doubt something would take it out before then.

The mechanism isn't important to the question though, it's just if you had a time machine that could only go forward, 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 years, would you use it, and how far would you go?

I suspect this would depend on how much faith you had in mankind still being around in however many millenia.

wait, I'm a dumbass

Earth's gravity provides acceleration of about 9.81m/s2. The train would be going at 150 000 000 m/s and Earth's radius is about 6000km. So by the time Earth's gravity changes its vector by 9.81m/s, it'll be about 147 000 km from Earth with enough speed to leave the Solar System, the Milky Way and the Virgo Supercluster behind.

This.
To get 10x reduction in aging you'd need to be going 0.995c.
This would require a centripetal force F = 9.9mc^2/r so unless you're track is enormous you'd need some powerful magnets.

So this is where I admit that I barely understand this stuff and I'm talking based on high school knowledge.

But.... don't all speeds produce this effect? It just is barely noticeable at low speed, but over a very very long time you would still experience this effect, even on something like the ISS? Or are you guys saying that there's a threshold you have to get past?

Nevermind the fact that the train is gaining more mass, and that magnetic force only propagates at the speed of light, so you're going to get into some real shit well before you hit 0.995c (nevermind what happens when a piece of dust floats into its path, or to the people inside, should you attempt to accelerate too quickly - which you'd have to do to reach 0.995c before they died of old age. And I'm sure all this mass and energy going around the moon is going to have some additional side effects.)

Really think OP should just delete and start over with a time machine, or suspended animation capsule - otherwise you'll trigger Veeky Forums's autism and never get any real answers. (Not that this really should be on Veeky Forums at all, but Veeky Forums's not gonna like it either, so, /shrug.)

Yes. Relativity applies at all velocities, it just doesn't get important unless you're going really, really fast or need really, really precise measurements. The GPS satellites for example have to compensate for time dilation with their atomic clocks so you can accurately use their locations to calculate your own location.

Airline crew get like a millionth of a second over their career.

It's just that you aren't going to get anything really useful without approaching the speed of light more aggressively.

The satellites used for GPS (which are higher than ISS), gain milliseconds a day. Granted, that's enough that you need to do some relativistic math to make sure they don't start telling you Dallas is where LA is after a few weeks, but not enough to have any real effect on aging.

Ya gotta get to relativistic speeds to have any real effect, which, through any conventional means, would have you dead before you reached them, provided you were accelerating slow enough as to not end up as paste on one side of the train.

But again, none of this is pertinent to OP's actual question... Which is, for various reasons, actually less interesting than figuring how you pull it off.

Off-topic: Why don't we have a Science board? I vote that instead of having one, we somehow figure out a way to shoe-horn it into this one. Philosophy and science is a beautiful mix (although it probably enrages the STEMlords).

So I guess the issue with my spaceship orbiting earth is that you'd have to wait 10.000 years, just to get 10 years ahead of the rest of humanity, making it not really practical for OP's question.

I'm sure this is bait, but Don't do philosophy there though, get way too many "muh qualia" threads a day as it is.

Is this rhetoric, or are you really not aware that we do in fact have Veeky Forumsence?

If you used the maglev magnets for this train it's track would over 13 times longer than the distance to alpha centauri.
you need go fast
Gravity also has effect and I think you would age faster on a geosynchronous satellite.

The future is just getting worse, and it's only a matter of time before we collapse into obscurity again.

Fuck that trip...

Holy crap, things really have changed since I last came here. Disregard post I was stupid.

I still think it would be nice if we had a combo of the two, like some kind of special monthly event when our two boards merge for a day.

Stan Friedman talked about using a nuclear rocket to get close to the speed of light, and it would only take one year for the travelers to approach like 8-9/10's the speed of light accelerating at a 1 g rate.

I think, if anything, /phil/osophy and /rel/igion need their own boards.

>/rel/igion
I am okay with this, would clean up this board a lot. I'm fine with philosophy chat being held here though.

I think I'd only jump 100-300 years, because it's extremely likely that humans are still around, and probably in a better position than we are now. Plus I will get to experience possibly centuries of technologic advancement and world politics.

A thousand, or even ten thousand? Hell no, I wouldn't even recognize it, and it may not even be here.

But yeah, I'd do it.

Would you rather jump to a future where humans have become dumber or one where they have become smarter?

The centrifugal force would kill you. It's a dumb plan.

If you wanted to spend all of human production for the next 10,000 years on you traveling into the future using relativistic time dilation you would want to build a regular old spaceship, accelerate it at 1g towards some nearby black hole, slingshot around it, and then decelerate at 1g.

It would still probably use up more than a decade of your life doing it though.

The nearest black hole is 1600 light years away so - a weee bit more than 10 years.

stop being dumbass pls

Once you reach orbit, the only fuel you need is the one needed to make small changes in direction or coming down to land/brake.

Once in orbit, you're going to free fall, if you've reached a stable Low Earth Orbit, the fuel is used only to maintain it not to accelerate. Acceleration is done by the gravity.

>it's an user doesn't know anything about orbital mechanics episode

Depends on how fast you're going, since this specifically concerns aging from the viewpoint of a traveller accelerated to relativistic speeds.

>reaching something 1600 light years away in 10 years

Special relativity, bitch. The speed of light is the only thing that's absolute, things such as distance and time depend on your point of view and how fast you're going. For an outside observer it would, indeed, appear that the trip would take a little over 1600 years. But from the traveller's point of view, it can take arbitrarily short time. And for particles travelling at c, it takes no time at all. It all depends on your point of view.

Actually you can traverse billions of light years in one human lifetime by going at 1g continuously. I did the math once.

user are you well? Are you having a stroke?

Problem with that is, as you move faster, you gain more mass, and thus you need more thrust. Photons have no mass, but if you want to say, move a single proton, that has mass, at .99c - well, to get an idea of how much power you need, just for that, look at the LHC.

And now you want to move a whole person and his spaceship - and that just ain't happening. You end up having to convert the whole solar system to energy, and even then - you'd need some way to port all that energy to the ship.

That's why, when they talk about things like the Shelink drive, they talk about driving microchip sized probes, rather than people. (Even then it's an absolutely ridiculous amount of power.)

It's also why, if something the size of the space shuttle was moving at even .7c, and crashed into the planet, it would have so much mass that it would obliterate the Earth. (And also among the reasons angry super-tech aliens are scary.)

Granted, you can bypass some of this bullshit if the Alcubierre drive turns out to be a thing, or whatnot.

That's not true. They'll accelerate fine from their reference frame.

The reference frame doesn't change the energy needed to accelerate the object.

>You end up having to convert the whole solar system to energy
I don't think you'd need that much. I saw some calculations and it was more like 10 statue's of liberty worth of fuel.

You'd need a ridiculously large track to make it work, probably with a diameter greater than the whole solar system. Going at 0.99c would mean the lateral forces would be massive unless the curvature was extremely gradual.

Time dilation is utterly negligible at orbital velocities.

You'd still need something like 99.99% of the spacecraft's launch mass to be propellant. 1G can get you to lightspeed relatively quickly, but realistically no spacecraft can keep it up for long, it requires a LOT of propellant to do so for any length of time.

EmDrive bruh.

>ITT: Veeky Forums blows it's cover to remind Veeky Forums that reality is not as simple as it sounds...

Not OP, but can we still do the "jump to the future" thought experiment, trains?

*trains aside

88 mph

We could always just travel into space to defeat space parasites instead of just being on the moon.

See my answer here

How many thousands of people did she just murder with her one tiny laser beam?

Like I said before, space parasites.

a.pomf.cat/sxiyfx.webm

Parasites make up a tiny part of an ecosystem, like, inherently. How could an entire fleet of super powered warships be parasitic? What planet sized organism are they parasites of?

It represents chinese.

>How could an entire fleet of super powered warships be parasitic?

Well you see, to them, we're the parasites.

>What planet sized organism are they parasites of?

Suns, they use suns to create more of them.

>Suns, they use suns to create more of them.
In absolutely no way are they parasites then.

Fucking human propaganda.

>he thinks suns aren't sentient
When were you born, the 21st century?