New Horizons Pluto Flyby

At more than 3,000,000,000 (3 billion) miles, flying between 30,000 and 50,000 MPH, it has taken our New Horizons spacecraft nine years to reach Pluto. How long would that same trip take using the ship in my short story "Son of Thunder?" At one-tenth the speed of light, my fictional series III nuclear propelled space shuttle could make the trip in 5 days. To read more about light speed space travel and my proposed methods, see my blog post titled, "Light Speed Travel, Part I." Read the story "Son of Thunder" in "Orion’s Arm; Tales from the Milky Way" here https://www.createspace.com/3836037 .
‪#‎NASA‬ ‪#‎NewHorizons‬ ‪#‎PlutoFlyby‬

Light Speed Travel, Part III; Time Travel

As promised, here is the discussion of light speed travel and time disruption. In my story “Son of Thunder," an experimental propulsion system pushes a ship towards Mars at a percentage of light speed, creating a time anomaly for its crew. First of all, Einstein came up with this convoluted theory of time dilation where the closer you approach to light speed, the slower time moves. So, using Einstein’s “twin paradox,” if a twin traveled at 99.99% of light speed for six months, when he returned his twin would be fifty years older than him. Really? Prove it Einstein. As mentioned in previous discussions, without referring to wormholes or time wrinkles, limitations of light speed travel are based on increasing mass and the need for an infinite energy source. So how can we test it? Well, the first experiment was conducted in 1971 with atomic clocks and an airplane traveling around the world at 600 miles-per-hour. After the trip, the moving clock was a few billionths of a second behind the stationary clock on the ground. A few billionths? Really? Whoop-dee-do-dah. In more recent years, the same experiment with atomic clocks was conducted using the International space station. This time, after six months orbiting the Earth at around five-miles-per-second, the difference was about seven one-thousandths of a second. WOW? (sarcasm). Maybe Einstein was right. Well, these types of miniscule time differences don’t make for good science fiction. And no matter how much we slow time we can never make it go backwards. The time dilation theory is much different then a theory I used in my story “Kronos Methodios” where a machine freezes its occupant in time or perhaps propels them through a wrinkle and deposits them at a point in the future. So, for my story, my time incursions caused a possible leap between alternate time lines or maybe just delusions to the travelers themselves. Anyway, the time anomalies in “Son of Thunder” wreak havoc with the timeline, threatening the safety of the courageous astronauts conducting the experiment. Can they straighten out their problems or will it cost them their lives. What are your theories on time travel or light speed travel? Anything I failed to mention?
Jim

See also:
Light Speed Travel, Part I
and
Light Speed Travel, Part II; Nuclear Propulsion

Light Speed Travel, Part II; Nuclear Propulsion

Tell me what you think about this. Firstly, what do you know about the nuclear prohibition in space. Obviously, with the laws of inertia, you don’t want radioactive material flying about the universe. But what do you think would happen with a nuclear explosion in outer space. Secondly, in my story “Son of Thunder,” I proposed a nuclear propulsion device that would harness the expanding energy of an atomic explosion against a blast-plate attached to a ship. Since a nuclear blast’s initial detonation expands at high percentage of the speed of light, I used ten decreasing proximity explosions to propel my ship faster and faster as the reactions get closer to the ship’s blast plate. In the story, my ship achieves a velocity of four percent of the speed of light, exceeding twenty-five million miles per hour. At that speed a ship could travel to mars, depending on orbital conditions, in less than a day.

In researching the story, I discovered that there have been studies on nuclear pulse propulsion, not the least of which was “Project Orion.” Also, there are numerous science fiction forays using such a device. And of course, when you talk about light speed travel, you also have to think about time anomalies. And that’s where the true focus of “Son of Thunder” resides. But that sounds like the subject for another future post. I can sense a “Light Speed Travel, Part III; Time Travel” in the offing.

I wanted to bring this up because I think about it often and would love to hear your opinion.

Jim

See also:
Light Speed Travel, Part I
and
Light Speed Travel, Part III; Time Travel

Light Speed Travel, Part I

While making calculations for my short story “Son of Thunder,” a story about a round trip voyage to Mars at a percentage of light speed, I came up with some interesting data to share with you.

We know light travels 186,282.397 MPS (miles-per-second), which translates to more than 670 million MPH. Current theory does not allow an “object” to move at the speed of light because of the restraint that increased acceleration as it approaches light speed would require an infinite amount of energy.

However, here are some examples of how long it would take to travel to specified locations in a ship capable of traveling at the speed of light. Our light speed ship could travel the roughly 250,000 miles (varies depending on its orbital distance) from Earth to the moon in 1.3 seconds. The 93 million miles from Earth to the sun would take 8.3 minutes. (However, if you’re traveling to the sun you’d better go at night so don’t you burn up ;) ) The time to traverse the 25 billion miles to Alpha Centauri would be 4.4 years. And a trip in our speed-of-light-ship to the edge of the Milky Way galaxy would take a mere 100,000 years.

Seem like a long time? How about this? Using current technology, most of a vehicle’s fuel is used reaching Low Earth Orbit with little fuel left for an interplanetary or interstellar mission. But presuming we could fuel a ship beyond orbit, its speed is around 17,000 miles per hour (408,000 miles per day, 148,920,000 miles per year). Therefore, our space ship travels at 0.0025 percent of the speed of light. Considering our light speed ship took roughly 4 and a half years to reach the nearest star Alpha Centauri (4.3 light years at 5,865,696,000,000 miles per light year equaling more than 25 trillion miles), it would take our ship 170,000 years to travel that distance. Now here’s the real kicker: The center of the Milky Way galaxy--our galaxy--is approximately 30,000 light years. To reach it using our current technology spacecraft would take approximately 1,186,046,511 years, that’s more than a billion years; almost unfathomable, not to mention what it would take to reach another galaxy.

In “Son of Thunder” I proposed a controversial propulsion system that I discuss in Light Speed Travel, Part II; Nuclear Propulsion. Check it out here. But these are plenty of numbers to wrap your brain around for now. Have you ever contemplated space travel and the speed necessary to achieve a deep space program? What are your thoughts? You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.

Jim

See also:
Light Speed Travel, Part II; Nuclear Propulsion
and
Light Speed Travel, Part III; Time Travel