Fun With Time Warping....

[Spacescifi]

The scenario:

We get a time warp field device which can surround a spaceship with it.

Inside the time warp field time passes normally.

Outside the time warp field time can be warped to go faster.

Hours can pass in minutes, or hours can pass in seconds.

 

Implications: For relatively short interplanary distances artficial gravity for flight is no longer needed because crew travel time will be much faster due to time warping. For example if hours are warped to seconds a hohman transfer will take a coasting spaceship from LEO to the moon in only a few minutes at most!

I am sure some planets are far enough away to stlill merit artificial or spin gravity, but many no longer are with time warp.

Even Mars is OK to coast to I reckon using time warp... although I am unsure how much faster the trip would seem to the crew.

 

 

 

Edited April 4, 2022 by Spacescifi

[magnemoe]

It would make an trip to mars much more like an trip to the moon, say one day last 10 seconds, an year will take one day, now you would still need an lander and time to do science on mars but something like an Apollo style mission would work well enough. 
Manned missions out to the asteroid belt would also work well. 

[kerbiloid]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c

[Gargamel]

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

[snip]

 

So, the question boils down to "What's the longest duration 0-g flight can a human take without seeing any ill effects from that lack of gravity?"?

[magnemoe]

2 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

So, the question boils down to "What's the longest duration 0-g flight can a human take without seeing any ill effects from that lack of gravity?"?

As time passes much slower inside the field you will not get problems with lack of gravity until you do hundreds of year long voyages. 
It also saves you from one issue with freezing someone for an very long time, radiation will still damage you and its nothing to repair the damage. 
For 0x10c anything slightly radioactive will have broken down. 

[monophonic]

3 hours ago, magnemoe said:

radiation will still damage you

And you will experience days/months worth of radiation in minutes/days. In other words, a trip that in real time might've upped your life long cancer risk by a percent or two could become fatal. Maybe not instantaneously, but being dead in 30 days still sucks. Instant death is also an option if you turn the time warp up to 11.

[razark]

Space travel?  Why?

I'm thinking the ultimate fridge!  I put my cold ice cream and hot coffee in the box, and come back a week later, and the ice cream is still cold, the coffe is still hot, and they're both fresh, because they've only been in the box a few seconds.

[mikegarrison]

3 hours ago, razark said:

Space travel?  Why?

I'm thinking the ultimate fridge!  I put my cold ice cream and hot coffee in the box, and come back a week later, and the ice cream is still cold, the coffe is still hot, and they're both fresh, because they've only been in the box a few seconds.

It's a Larry Niven stasis box.

[wumpus]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c

Inspired by Red Dwarf, perhaps?  Red Dwarf was a British TV sci-fi comedy that starts with the crew entirely dead and the only survivor released from stasis 3 million years later (once the radiation had all decayed).

Somehow I think cryogenic freezing is much more likely.  From what I understand, it is already standard practice in heart-bypass surgery (granted, that type of thing allows even greater risk than space flight).  While doing that, it is impossible to tell if the patient survived the surgery (and cooling) until they warm the patient up and see if they are still alive.  Note that I don't think this involves any crystallization, just temperature near or slightly below 0C.

[magnemoe]

10 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

It's a Larry Niven stasis box.

Thought the same but here the effect was much higher, billion of years passed without you noticing. 
This also gave you some interesting properties like letting you aerobrake down from high relativistic velocity in the atmosphere of an star. 

Another fun option was litobraking from high interplanetary velocity, the drop pods created an huge exploding then impacting.

7 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Inspired by Red Dwarf, perhaps?  Red Dwarf was a British TV sci-fi comedy that starts with the crew entirely dead and the only survivor released from stasis 3 million years later (once the radiation had all decayed).

Somehow I think cryogenic freezing is much more likely.  From what I understand, it is already standard practice in heart-bypass surgery (granted, that type of thing allows even greater risk than space flight).  While doing that, it is impossible to tell if the patient survived the surgery (and cooling) until they warm the patient up and see if they are still alive.  Note that I don't think this involves any crystallization, just temperature near or slightly below 0C.

Cryogenic in surgery is to lower the temperature of an organ down to say 10 centigrade, now it uses much less oxygen. Think its mostly done on hearts while the body is on respiration, but the world record for being drowned is 40 minutes in ice cold water who cooled the body so it require little oxygen. 

Some mammals like hedgehogs goes into hibernation lowering their body temperature, its something who would be nice to be able to replicate for spaceflight but more important to save lives. 

[caecilliusinhorto]

Unless the ship also warped the planets, wouldn't you miss Mars completely because it's been moving at normal speed while your ship is sped up?

[Ultimate Steve]

For the radiation problem, getting tons of radiation in a short amount of time - That could be somewhat counteracted by only building extravagant vehicles at your destinations. All the volume/mass on your interplanetary transport ship that would normally be used for long term life support, living space, etc. would be able to be put towards a small, extremely shielded crew compartment where you'd sit, sardines in a can, for a few hours/days/whatever over the real time several month travel time. It wouldn't block everything but it would definitely be a massive decrease in total dose compared to a normal Mars mission.

Kinda like why Soyuz is so small. Modern Soyuzes can get away with it as they take only a few hours to get to the station - if this is consistent, the orbital module's living space might not even be necessary any more.

The ship's computers might have to be shielded too, taking X amount of radiation over 9 months vs the same amount over a few hours isn't trivial. Clock speeds would also slow to a crawl with respect to reality, so the ship might be slow to react to things in the real world?

[kerbiloid]

The body contains the radioactives itself.

Also, why fly when we can just wait first until Milkomeda appears, then until Sgr A* disappears.

If keep sitting on your planet long enough, the whole Universe will pass by in its time.