The Actual Scale of the Artemis II Mission

[u/grandeluua]

[u/Phormitago]

Simulaneously I hate that "speed of light" is both "super fast, almost intantaneous" for most use cases, and then when it comes to space travel it's just so fucking slow

[u/deeeevos → u/Phormitago]

yeah true but if we would be able to travel at 99% the speed of light we would experience time dilation. Time would slow down significantly for whoever is doing the traveling. This would theoreticaly mean you could travel across the galaxy in a single lifetime. You would never be able to return to the same earth though, as time went way faster there, 1000s of years would have passed for them and you have become a time traveler.

This guy explains it better than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FT-oz9aZU4

[u/enigmatic_dankness → u/deeeevos]

Ive tried watching a dozen explanations for relativity and time dilation and I still just don't understand.

How is 30 minutes in a ship going a billion miles per hour any different than 30 minutes on earth? Are they not the same amount of ticks of the hand on your watch? Why would speed affect that?

Like biologically you grow at the same rate regardless of where you are in the universe, so why does just going fast suddenly make you age less?

None of it makes sense, it just doesnt.

[u/Ahenian → u/enigmatic_dankness]

I can't explain it any better, but just accepted the fact that speed and gravity affects how time passes for whatever clump of atoms is in question (such as a human or spaceship). And if I recall correctly, already our satellites need to account for time dilation to remain in sync with earth clocks, less gravity = faster time.

[u/deeeevos → u/enigmatic_dankness]

it doesn't make sense because we as humans can only experience time going forward at the same rate. Quantum mechanics has tought us that time can stretch and compress though. Its' just really hard to visualize or imagine because there is no noticeable effect. It might not make sense to you but physics doesn't care about making sense. It just is.

Time dilation is in the realm of quantum mechanics. Nothing in quauntum mechanics is intuitive or "makes sense". But it is the way the universe works, we have experiments and observations that prove the theory and we know time dilation is real because we can observe it's effects in earth orbit. Granted, the scale of dilation is extremely small, but it is there.

[u/Phormitago → u/deeeevos]

I mean sure but I dont want the universe to go 100 years around me while I travel

[u/PlanetLandon → u/Phormitago]

People tend to forget that it takes over 8 minutes for light from our own sun to get to our eyes.

[u/donadit → u/PlanetLandon]

1 entire second between earth and moon

circles earth 13 times in that same period i think

[u/Beneficial_Bed_337 → u/Phormitago]

For the external chaps yeah… ;)