If we can't travel faster than light how would round trip intergalactic travel happen without returning home millions of years in the future?
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answers:
Proud Deplorable say: That would be impossible
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Big Spider on Your Pillow say: Why come back
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nineteenthly say: It wouldn't.
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aladdinwa say: It couldn't.
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Jeffrey K say: Nothing can travel faster than light. It is a law of physics, not an engineering problem.
By going near the speed of light, astronauts would age just a few years on an intergalactic trip, but earth would age millions of years. There is no way around this.
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Clive say: Obviously it couldn't. That is why sci-fi writers almost all use the convenient fiction of hyperspace to be able to write interesting stories with space travel in them. One of the few who didn't is Arthur C Clarke, which makes the few times he wrote about interstellar travel interestingly different.
There is the possibility of wormholes in space, which could be a shortcut, but that's still only theory. (The idea of hyperspace is effectively being able to create your own wormholes.)
Also consider what else special relativity tells us. Time slows as you get faster, so if the spaceship went at a significant fraction of the speed of light, maybe it COULD get back before the astronauts all died. But when they came home, it would be to a very unfamiliar future Earth.
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Paula say: You have twigged to it.
To travel a significant distance (eg 100,000 light years) will take millions of years.
We are very far from being able to do that.
We can not even get to Mars - 30 light minutes away. And going to Mars with present technology will take 4 months (one way).
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Ronald 7 say: We need not think of coming back
Earth might not even be still there
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John say: And if you can get the point, with the other answers in mind - our two year old coffee pot has a funky switch lately. And it's a nice pot, too.
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billrussell42 say: It wouldn't. It would take millions of years.
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Frank say: Ludicrous speed, duh.
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rennhackrobert say: Even if you could travel at light speed .you would have to fold space or time travel to travel to distant stars.
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Adullah M say: Provided that when we return to earth bound our world still remain as it is waiting for us.
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john say: It's not what you think. All physics says is you can't annilate enough mass to reach the the speed of light. It does not say you can't go faster than light speed.
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David say: Take a short cut.
Read the book A Wrinkle in Time.
Of course, it's fiction. So yeah, no intergalactic travel for you.
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Helmuth say: i has gay
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Chris Ancor say: You would be long dead.
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say: Bingo, give the man a prize of his choice.
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Bill-M say: Intergalactic travel is for Science Fiction books. Not real life.
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quantumclaustrophobe say: Well... right now, the issue is just getting to the other planets in our solar system a bit faster - it took New Horizons about 10 years just to reach Pluto - and, it wasn't slowing down to orbit, it was simply a fly-by...
I don't think we've even begun to worry about speeds approaching the speed of light yet.
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Josh say: Time is relative to motion. If you had a twin brother and he travelled 5 light years away and 5 light years back (without factoring in the time it takes to speed up and slow down.. I'm no physicist), when he returned, you'd have aged 10 years. He wouldn't have aged at all. When travelling at the speed of light, the trip is instantaneous from the perspective of those travelling. Doesn't matter if you travel one light year or 1 billion light years. So you'd need to take with you everyone you ever wanted to see again on a vacation that's several light years away.
This is something we'll never have to worry about anyways. E=Mc2 (energy = mass × the speed of light squared) explains to us how much energy would be needed for anything we know the mass for. It would be impossible to send a cockroach at light speed.
This is why aliens haven't (and will not) visit us. They face the same problems with distance as we face. Even if life exists on proxima b, It's much too far away.
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don say: Uber
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drake say: I’ve said this on here before but from lights point of view, it gets to anywhere almost instantaneously.
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CarolOklaNola say: There's no physics law that says you cannot travel FASTER than the speed of light IN A VACUUM. The laws of physics CAN be bent. That we currently do NOT have that technology does NOT mean we will NEVER have that technology.
GOOD science fiction HSS funny way of becoming science FACT in less than 25 years. 3 inch and 5 and half inch floppy drives are now outdated technology by more than 30 years.
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Who say: Traveling faster than light to get from A to B is not the same as getting from A to B faster than light can
If you could warp space so that A and B were close together in 4D space AND you could jump across from A to B then you could get from A to B faster than light could, cos light would have to travel the full distance from A to B in 3D space
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Totally Dianne. say: If we could travel at 99.9 light speed we could travel to the far reaches of the Milky Way, and return to a Earth millions of years older due to time delation.
There is no way around it unless we could invent a form of warp drive that would bend space towards the ship so that a few hours travel would take us a hundred light years.
That is firmly in the realm of scifi of course.
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Acetek say: Einstein Rosen Bridge (Worm Hole)
In 1935, Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen used the theory of general relativity to elaborate on the idea, proposing the existence of "bridges" through space-time. These bridges connect two different points in space-time, theoretically creating a shortcut that could reduce travel time and distance
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