Idle musings with the sprogs last night around travel at light speed (and beyond) in sci-fi. I should clarify at this point that I do understand that the “fi” in this genre is a truncation of “fiction”...
We managed to imagine that we had a power supply capable of pushing some kind of ship to light speed – but there was then no real surprise to find that us squishy humans are the limiting factor. But how much?
Accelerating to the speed of light at 1G would take 341 days.
If folks could withstand something a bit stronger – lets say a constant 1.25G (which doesn’t sound much, but your 14stone/89kg blerk would feel 17.5stone/111kg throughout) – this comes down to 273 days.
In addition to this, lets strap them in properly 4x every day and increase the acceleration to 3G (about the force that astronauts encounter during earth launches into space) for 20 minutes each time. This reduces the time to reach light speed to 253 days.
And of course you need the same to decelerate from light speed if you wish to stop at your intended destination.
Not sure where I am going with this, but we collectively felt “oh – a bit disappoint” after this discussion, so hey – I thought I’d share.
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