Is this true???

That if someone was to travel in outer space, say for a few yrs, would life on earth be longer??

ie- the person in space aged 2 yrs but here on earth, perhaps 20 yrs went by??

Message edited 1/11/2008 8:22:09 PM.

Re: Is this true???

this made my head hurt

Re: Is this true???

Message edited 11/15/2011 9:28:11 PM.

Re: Is this true???

I think it actually made them older. I think their bones are more fragile than if they would have stayed on earth.

Re: Is this true???

Re: Is this true???

My head is going to explode...you figure it out...

Time dilation would make it possible for passengers in a fast-moving vehicle to travel further into the future while aging very little, in that their great speed retards the rate of passage of onboard time. That is, the ship's clock (and according to relativity, any human travelling with it) shows less elapsed time than the clocks of observers on Earth. For sufficiently high speeds the effect is dramatic. For example, one year of travel might correspond to ten years at home. Indeed, a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel as far as light has been able to since the big bang (some 13.7 billion light years) in one human lifetime. The space travellers could return to Earth billions of years in the future (provided the universe had not collapsed and our solar system were still around, of course). A scenario based on this idea was presented in the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle.

A more likely use of this effect would be to enable humans to travel to nearby stars without spending their entire lives aboard the ship. However, any such application of time dilation would require the use of some new, advanced method of propulsion. A further problem with relativistic travel is that at such velocities dispersed particles in the rarefied interstellar medium would turn into a stream of high-energy cosmic rays that would destroy the ship unless extraordinary radiation protection measures were taken. Strong electromagnetic fields that could ionize and deflect any interstellar matter has been suggested as one way to avoid these potentially disastrous consequences.

Current space flight technology has fundamental theoretical limits based on the practical problem that an increasing amount of energy is required for propulsion as a craft approaches the speed of light. The likelihood of collision with small space debris and other particulate material is another practical limitation. At the velocities presently attained, however, time dilation is not a factor in space travel. Travel to regions of spacetime where gravitational time dilation is taking place, such as within the gravitational field of a black hole but outside the event horizon (perhaps on a hyperbolic trajectory exiting the field), could also yield results consistent with present theory.

Re: Is this true???

Message edited 11/15/2011 9:27:31 PM.