Re: 1g trip to Toliman
- From: macfraggin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:40:04 -0800 (PST)
If you sustain 1 g acceleration for 2 years locally, 3,75 years passes
on Earth and 2,9 ly is covered.
I'm not so sure about this -- 2 years of constant acceleration would,
going by Newtonian mechanics, give you a delta-V of about 600.000km/s
- roughly twice the speed of light. What should happen here is that
the ship's velocity converges against c, and the time frames for ship
and observer (earth) are dissociated:
t' = t / (1 - v^2 / c^2)
So at 99%c - which the ship might reach after one year of travel - the
time dilation is about 50:1. If the ship just kept coasting for two
years, a hundred years would pass on earth. This is all vastly
simplified, but the long and short of it is that, upon our valiant
jetmen's happy return to The Green Hills Of Earth, they'll hardly know
the place because many centuries, if not millenia, will have come and
gone down here.
Note: if you want to avoid serious time dilation troubles, scale down
the trip to a top speed of maybe 50%c - that will give you just 25%
time dilation, but of course the ship will be on its way quite a while
longer -- roughly 16 years shipboard time, and 20 years on earth
(round trip).
For the crews of the ship, they are leaving home for 8 years.
See above. Just pay them in a fixed-rate saving certificate over 1
dollar each if you want to go with the near-c travel. Returning after
several centuries, the crewmen will either find themselves filthy
rich, or the whole system (maybe all of mankind) will have gone to
shambles and money wouldn't be worth lick anyway.
How much would a ticket to Toliman and back cost, in 2008 prices,
assuming that propulsion is a minor part of the costs?
For a trip of several years, it doesn't make much sense to pack
everything as single-use consumable. Even if everyone just lived of
MREs (which will come out your ears after a couple of weeks), that
would be 9 tons of food per person. Water, if everyone just washed
catlick-style, about 18 tons per person. Oxygen, a similar amount. All
in all we're talking about 36 tons of provisions per person - if
everything is single-use.
In that light, it should make sense to set up a self-contained cycle
based on algae and plants. You recycle the food, oxygen and water; at
least in large parts, so you only have to take a relatively small
reserve to replenish losses due to system inefficiencies.
.
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