Travel to the stars requires hundreds or thousands of years, even at the speed o

Question

Travel to the stars requires hundreds or thousands of years, even at the speed of light. Some people have suggested that we can get around this difficulty by accelerating the rocket (and its astronauts) to very high speeds so that they will age less due to time dilation. The fly in this ointment is that it takes a great deal of energy to do this. Suppose you want to go to the immense red giant Betelgeuse, which is about 500light years away. (A light year is the distance that light travels in one year.) You plan to travel at constant speed in a 850kg rocket ship (a little over a ton), which, in reality, is far too small for this purpose.

A.If the rocket ship's speed is 0.505 c, calculate the time for the trip, as measured by astronauts in the rocket ship.

Explanation / Answer

$cience is based on observations? Anything that has not been observed is not science. We do use a lot of rules of thumb which are useful even though we can't explain why they work. Just because they work does not mean they prove anything. For example, GPS does not prove Einstein's conjectures just because it uses some of the same math. The fact is we don't know anything about masses traveling at near light speeds ?

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