From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Tue Dec 08 1998 - 21:21:36 MST
Interesting, so if you could somehow get into a tight orbit
around a black hole or something massive, and somehow power
your craft off a nearby solar source to provide the scads of
energy needed, you could get going so fast that you could
effectively warp yourself into the future?
haradon@acsu.buffalo.edu wrote:
>
> --On Wednesday, December 09, 1998, 6:26 AM +1100 "Terry Donaghe"
> <tdonaghe@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > I recently finished "The Engines of Creation" and I was thinking about
> > some of the things that Drexler said. He seemed convinced that
> > humanity won't find a way to circumvent the speed of light. One of
> > the things that always bugged me about travelling sub-light speeds was
> > the incredible time it takes to travel between stars.
> >
> > However, if we find a way to indefinitely extend our lifespans this
> > means we could live a really, really long time. Further, if we find a
> > way to make our bodies much less fragile (through uploading or just
> > reengineering our bodies with nano), then we could potentially live
> > for millions of years.
> >
> > I'm wondering if a human were to have lived a few hundred thousand
> > years, how much of a pain would it be to travel between the stars at
> > sub-light speeds. Would 5 or 10 years or even a thousand even be a
> > significant amount of time for a being who has lived many many times
> > that?
> >
> > In other words, 500,000 years from now when I decide to travel to Star
> > X which is 1500 light years away, taking me, let's say 3000 years to
> > get to (conservatively of course), will I bother getting bored? 3000
> > years is .06% of 500,000 years. I'm about 30 years old now and .06%
> > of my life span is .18 years or a little more than two months -
> > assuming my math is right - is it?
> >
> > My question is, would 3,000 years feel like just a couple of months to
> > a being more than a half-million years old? Is there any way to know?
> >
> > I get the feeling that as our lifespans begin to get longer and longer
> > we, as a species, will become more patient and less impulsive. A
> > normal human observer looking at a community of long-lived posthumans
> > might even think they were immobile statues.
> >
> > I dunno.
> >
> > Any ideas, thoughts? Is this old territory?
> >
> > Terry
> >
> >
> > ==
> > ----------------------
> > Terry Donaghe: terry@donaghe.com
> > Individual, Anarcho-Capitalist, Environmentalist, Transhumanist, Mensan
> >
> > The Millennium Bookshelf: <http://www.donaghe.com/mbookshelf.htm>
> >
> > _________________________________________________________
> > DO YOU YAHOO!?
> > Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
> >
>
> Remember that time is compressed as you approach the speed of light. If you
> are going fast enough (it would have to be really close to C), then a year
> to the outside world may pass in a day for you.
> If you are going a certain speed, X, then take 1 minus [X squared over C
> squared] (c is the speed of light: 300000000 meters per second). Take the
> square root of that. Divide "objective time passed" by that number, and you
> have the time that you subjectively observe to pass.
> It may still take something like 99.9999% of the speed of light to reach an
> acceptable trip length, and this may take a lot of energy (as you approach C
> your mass increases, approaching infinity). You could further shorten the
> "subjective" length of the trip by spending 90% of the trip or more in
> cryonic suspension. Better yet, upload yourself, have yourself "turned off"
> and set to be turned on near the trip's end to be uploaded into a body. You
> could have a few thousand people uploaded and asleep, and 5 active bodies
> that they take shifts sharing for about a year a peice.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Zeb Haradon
> my web page:
> http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~haradon
--
The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed.
-William Gibson
______________________________________________________________________
Visit Hypermart at http://www.hypermart.net for free business hosting!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:56 MST