Weird Trick of Relativity Could Provide An Easy Way To Get High Relativistic Speed

So I take it to assume that your so called "relativity trick" is to slingshot around Jupiter, using its enhanced gravity to boost the speed of the spacecraft? yeah, hate to burst your bubble(not really) but that wouldn't get you anywhere near .99c.

stormbringer1701
the article is from 2009. i do not know if the experiment was done. i would assume not since i have seen no follow ups but i will search for it later today.

EDIT: it may been done though because i found this article when trying to find one about a similar effect that is actually newer than this set of articles in the OP. i wanted to share that one but could not find it. but it is possible the article i was looking for was a follow up to this.

Thanks for the reply. If you happen to find the other article, please post a link to it.

stormbringer1701
at .99 C a flight to alpha proxima would take about 4.3 years. whatever time it takes to explore and survey the system(s) and 4.3 years to come back home discounting deacceleration time. ideally there would be a relativity trick with the opposite effect on speed you could use to slow down. If it was an unmanned probe with no sample return requirements the trip could be done in 4.3 years plus mission dwell time on target.

I think it would have to be an unmanned probe. The .99c journey would give humans a lethal dose of radiation according to physicist William Edelstein, but it might even be hard on an unmanned probe:

Traveling at warp speed is lethal

Physicist William Edelstein of Johns Hopkins University told the American Physical Society that stray atoms of hydrogen gas would actually go right through the ship traveling close to light speed, effectively microwaving its passengers.

I've read the topic title as far as "An Easy Way To Get High" and got too excited for there for a sec

Trippy stuff. I've read somewhere that accelerating constantly at 1g will (hypothetically) get you to light speed within a month or two. Is that correct?

If there is no possible shielding against radiation that appears at relativistic speed, perhaps the space civilisations (including ours) are doomed to slow speed and very limited manned space exploration.

wildespace
I've read the topic title as far as "An Easy Way To Get High" and got too excited for there for a sec

Trippy stuff. I've read somewhere that accelerating constantly at 1g will (hypothetically) get you to light speed within a month or two. Is that correct?

If there is no possible shielding against radiation that appears at relativistic speed, perhaps the space civilisations (including ours) are doomed to slow speed and very limited manned space exploration.

well at one G it takes about 3 months to get to .25 c therefore just under a year to get to .99 C. initially i was using the three month figure for getting all the way to C.

Arbitrageur

Traveling at warp speed is lethal

Physicist William Edelstein of Johns Hopkins University told the American Physical Society that stray atoms of hydrogen gas would actually go right through the ship traveling close to light speed, effectively microwaving its passengers.

i believe that may be a a critique of alcubbiere FTL warp mechanics. however his analysis is flawed if that is the case.

however one of the biggest problems with travelling at any appreciable speed in space is collisions with dust and bigger stuff. molecular gas is not particularly a problem though because the density of such in space is a few particles per cubic meter.

travelling at just below light speed you can expect one collision with a dust mote sized particle per day on every square meter of the front facing portion of the ship. these impacts will impart the energy of a rifle bullet upon impact. the more massive particles do geometrically more energy on release. at those speeds a gram weight particle will explode with the energy of ten hiroshima bombs.

however larger than dust mote sized impactors are very widely spaced and the odds of hitting one is far less than dust motes. the bigger the particle the rarer.

there are ways of mitigating impact risk especially for the ones you could not see coming as it were. a m2p2 shield can effectively handle anything up to course sand or mini gravel sized by forcing them to follow the magnetic and electric field lines out of the center line and around the ship. wiffle shielding will work on larger particles up to a certain size and there are various sacrificial armor schemes that can direct anything that impacts off the centerline of the ship. once you get to a certain size you can detect incoming and take pro-active measures against them.

LucidWarrior
So I take it to assume that your so called "relativity trick" is to slingshot around Jupiter, using its enhanced gravity to boost the speed of the spacecraft? yeah, hate to burst your bubble(not really) but that wouldn't get you anywhere near .99c.

you are incorrect. this is not a standard gravity assist. it only crudely resembles one. it's much deeper than that. it turns gravity against itself and creates an actual repulsive force with the energy borrowed from jupiter.

It's amazing! some dude posting anonamously on ATS knows more than a giant of relativity theory and mathematics in the person of David Hilbert and a credentialed and published physicist in the person of Dr. Felber.

stormbringer1701

LucidWarrior
So I take it to assume that your so called "relativity trick" is to slingshot around Jupiter, using its enhanced gravity to boost the speed of the spacecraft? yeah, hate to burst your bubble(not really) but that wouldn't get you anywhere near .99c.

you are incorrect. this is not a standard gravity assist. it only crudely resembles one. it's much deeper than that. it turns gravity against itself and creates an actual repulsive force with the energy borrowed from jupiter.

It's amazing! some dude posting anonamously on ATS knows more than a giant of relativity theory and mathematics in the person of David Hilbert and a credentialed and published physicist in the person of Dr. Felber.

edit on 10-3-2014 by stormbringer1701 because: (no reason given)

The do you care to share exactly what makes it more than a gravity assist?
ETA: not sure if your being sarcastic or not, but the lack of face to face proximity always does that to me.

reply to post by stormbringer1701


Here an interesting post from 2009 regarding Felbers paper: sckavassalis.blogspot.com...

Now back to Felber: Nowhere near finished with the introduction, we have come to some fairly major issues. He is using a metric (although I see no evidence of him actually ‘using’ it anywhere), taken from the Membrane paradigm (not for a Schwarzschild field), using out of date results that only apply to near the Schwarzschild radius, and a very faulty interpretation of how these results can be interpreted/observed.

that actually sounds somewhat like cryton used in the tv show farscape, he used a kind of gravity assist
i suppose the prototype could be called farscape 1