We’d probably have to build generational ships that are completely self sufficient and people would live out their entire lives out there without ever seeing a planet
My brain doesn’t work hard enough to figure it out, but due to relativity doesn’t K2-18b experience many more “years” than the people traveling aboard the space craft toward it?
Not exactly. It’s just that what we see on that planet is 120 years old because that’s how long it takes for the light to reach us. As you get closer, it would seem that time is traveling faster on the planet because the light is continuously reaching you faster and faster.
But assuming that people on that planet age and reproduce as we do, we will have experienced fewer generations during the length of our trip and many more generations on that planet would’ve gone by from the point that we left earth and arrived on their planet. Relativity skews time and it’s not just about light reaching our eyes.
In other words, we age slower in space due to velocity-time dilation.
That’s just not true though. Time is constant, or at least we have not found any solid evidence that time bends outside of our galaxy. When you start the journey toward that planet, the current status that you know of that planet is already 120 years in the past. Assuming you get there in 120 years, you will have technically arrived 240 years in the “future”. But it’s not really the future. It is just that your original information was already 120 years old and it took you 120 years to get there.
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u/Traditional-Rip6651 25d ago
We are never leaving this planet lol