Time Dilation

Spore and the time space continuum!

Time Dilation is not something that actively seen in Spore, if it were in real life the UFO would be experiencing it but it incredibly impractical from a gaming stand point (you will know why later on). But I think Time Dilation is one of the most interesting astronomical topics and it is really eye opening; you definitely won’t think of space in the same light ever again.

What is Time Dilation?

Time Dilation probably is the wackiest thing I’ve learned and because of this I need to make a point very clear before I even discuss what it is. As crazy as the consequences of Time Dilation are, it is not some theoretical concept that has never been proven. In fact, it has been confirmed and it is taken into consideration whenever time sensitive equipment (such as the United State’s reference clocks, those that all clocks refer to to figure out the exact time of day) are transported at high speeds by airplanes. It also has been seen at the atomic level through the use of particle accelerators and it is also taken into consideration once satellites enter orbit.

Time Dilation, first revealed by Albert Einstein, is based on the fact that time is not an absolute - it’s relative to the observer. The only absolute is the speed of light (300,000km per second). The easiest way to explain time dilation is to use a real-life example of it. Lets start with two atomic clocks, these are extremely precise clocks that can calculate time to the nanosecond, and synchronize them. If these clocks were let to stand side by side, they would always show the same time as one another until their energy ran out. But for our experiment, let’s take one with us on a trip around the world. Let’s travel by airplane, we can take as many transfers and breaks as we want, but all long distance travel must be by airplane (because of their speed, not because they are flying). Eventually we would return to our point of origin and if we were to compare our two clocks we would expect them to show exactly the same time, right? But they won’t! The clock we carried with us will lag by a few nanoseconds! These clocks are so precise that they should always show EXACTLY the same time, but they don’t so what happened? Time dilation happened. The faster you go, the closer you are to the speed of light and therefore the time you experience relative to the outside world is going slower. With our experiment we only saw a few nanosecond difference, which is important for machines but useless to people, but this is only because we were going relatively slowly - planes, as fast as we think they are going, are far far away from reaching the speed of light. Lets say we could go to 99.999% of the speed light, a speed that is incredibly fast and far outside our technological reach for now and possibly forever. At these speeds, time dilation acts as a one way ticket into the future. For every day you experience, the world around you experiences almost two years. If you were to travel around the cosmos for one year (as you feel it) and returned to earth, 730 years would have gone by. And the numbers can become even larger if you can reach a higher percentage of the speed of light (ie. 99.9999999999999%), at this point for every day that you experience, 20,000 earth years go by.

If this interests you, I suggest you pay a visit to some of the following sites - I had to after I heard about this, as I thought my professor was high on something and just feeding us a big joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
http://www.thebigview.com/spacetime/timedilation.html

The application of time dilation in space travel may never happen though, as the closer you reach the speed of light, the greater your mass becomes and the more mass you have, the more energy you need to move. The energy requirements are astronomical and definitely is the limiting factor in how we could eventually apply time dilation for space travel.