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De85 on 12 February 2009
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WereKitten said:
De85 said:

The cryogenic freezing wouldn't be necessary if you could get really close to the speed of light due to time dilation.  That's one pretty big if though...

 

Might still be necessary depending on how far you want to travel, because you can't accelerate human bodies much more than 1g for long timespans without clinical consequences. Thus you can't exploit the time "dilation" arbitrarily.

The calculations are quite easy for anyone wanting to dip their toes in restricted relativity, and there are good, easy texts out there (see: Taylor-Wheeler, "Spacetime Physics" for a nice university level but enjoyable primer)

 

Even if the human body could take it, you couldn't ever get a massive object moving fast enough to truly take advantage of relativistic effects.  To my limited knowledge I don't think cryogenically freezing living people is any more plausible, but I guess these kinds of things are what this thread is about.

Also, I'm a junior in physics right now, so I've read plenty about relativity and done my fair share of calculations.