Stephen Hawkins Universe - Time Travel

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Now, lets just ignore the really basic wording of the show and focus on one specific thing, the time travel.

I just watched it and one big thing hit me, essentially time travel would be worthless, if you could only travel forwards in time like described at the end. The big spaceship travelling at 0.99x the speed of light causes one minute on the ship to be one year on eath. That means hundreds and thousands of years will have passed before they slow down again, let alone get back to earth. Not bad on its own but getting to the edge of the galaxy this way apparently means you could do it in one lifetime (80 years). Well that's useful, because aside from those on the ship humans and potentially earth would be long gone by that point. Real life Red Dwarf apparently.

I'm sure by the time they got there there would be more "advanced" humans there, probably having set up a Butlins holiday park!

So, is time travel actually worth while?

 

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Impossible! not even men of the future could go faster than sound!

Just checking to see if people were awake...

useful for ark ships but at that speed i doubt you'd be able to avoid obsticals (or even have computers/people process their presence and react in time to even start the manoeuvre).


Also it could be useful for certain people "leapfrog though history has it where.


one thing though does this mean it would significantly reduce the wear on the ships components?

ie they only have 80 years of run time though the engines or would the engines put in X years of undiluted run time as it were.

I did wonder about the leapfrog idea, but in which case if we can build a (almost) speed of light ship I'm sure we will be able to build a stasis chamber, or work out how to revive people from freezers! interesting idea about the equipment, I'm assuming the engines would be on the "ship" time and so would only have 80 years on them, not the ~36.5 million years the rest of the universe/earth would have experienced in that time.

 

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I'm taking my maths from the TV show that was just on. If that's that wrong then I have no idea.

 

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Cryogenic sleep solves that problem.

But not the issue of Butlins Holiday park.

Nope, the OPs math is way off. If you travel for one year at the speed of light (.99) then during that lightyear, seven earth years would have passed.

Incidently if you travelled for one year at twice the speed of light only 7 months would have passed, hence travelling back in time (but only in relation to your travelling time)

Those maths would make more sense, but I'm sure that isn't anywhere near the times they mentioned... Anyone with 4OD want to clarify?

Amount of energy required to accelerate anything with mass resembeling that of spaceship up to that speed would be a problem.

*Haven't watched said programme

Apparently it would need a rather large ship, because of the amount of fuel.

 

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http://www.news.com.au/technology/t...-stephen-hawking/story-e6frfro0-1225861418565

Ahh, it's day, not minute or whatever I put. Still 30 thousand years, not really useful in any sense.

That doesn't however correlate with the 7:1 ratio some in this thread are talking about...

Having said that I think it is aimed at the lowest common denominator.

 

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As Brian Cox stated, they are talking about 99.99r the speed of light, not 99 percent the speed of light as the OP said.


You can work it out using the Lorenz Factor equation

γ = (1 − v2/c2)−1/2.

Ok now we're getting pedantic (although I admit I was going to but recurring at the end, then thought people wouldn't care, I made the assumption people had watched the show)

Either way that quote is the exact wording of the show I watched.

 

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You would age two days if you were in the ship (I was wrong in the OP, I should have said day rather than minute)>