General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'm here to bitch. re: aliens [View all]daaron
(763 posts)is the exponentially increasing energy required to go a tiny fraction of a LY per Y faster. Even if one could get a vessel to travel at 1/2 the speed of light, the astronauts would need a fictional warp field to prevent decoherence of their physical forms. For instance, if one could travel AT the speed of light, one would arrive at one's destination as a flash of incoherent light, not as a human being. Going even 1/2 the speed of light would exert such force on one's atomic structure that it's extremely doubtful any passengers in such a vessel could survive. All of Einstein's spaceships were thought experiments - not meant to be understood as plausible scenarios for people.
IOW, relativistic time dilation could only ever help a very small amount, with rapidly diminishing returns on energy invested.
ETA: Why even at 1/2 light speed? Think of a poor little electron (e) - nothing more than a trapped photons 'orbiting' a nucleus at or near light speed. When e is going the same way as the spaceship atom? Well, it can't exceed light speed so its electron cloud probability distribution gets, in a word, fucked.