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Interstellar Hydrogen Prevents Light-Speed Travel?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the einstein-brought-in-backup dept.

garg0yle writes "As if relativity wasn't enough to prevent us traveling at light speed, Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is now claiming that the interstellar hydrogen, compressed in front of the ship, would bring the journey to a shocking end. 'As the spaceship reached 99.999998 per cent of the speed of light, "hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts," which for the crew "would be like standing in front of the Large Hadron Collider beam."'"

3 of 546 comments (clear)

  1. Considering the energy required. . . by Salgak1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    . . .to GET to .99999998 c, this is unlikely to be a concern. And if you have the effectively-infinite energy to move a ship at this speed, providing sufficient shielding should be a trivial exercise in additional hand-wavium. . . .

  2. True, But Irrelevant... by wintermute3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't think anyone seriously contemplating relativistic or FTL travel expects to be physically accelerated to such speeds. After all, if stationary interstellar hydrogen is effectively hitting you at teravolt levels, it means that every particle in your body (and the ship) has actually been accelerated to velocities equivalent to the particles in the LHC beam. Not bloody likely. We need warp drive, subspace, wormholes, or something else to solve the problem, not ridiculous conventional acceleration.

    - Michael

  3. Re:Damn it, now they tell me by Fnkmaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, the only material difference is the time dilation factor for the person in the spaceship. At 99.9% the speed of light, that factor is about 22 - i.e. the 4.4 years seems to take only about 0.2 years, or 10 weeks. At 99.999998% of the speed of light, it is almost exactly 5000 - which means the trip would seem to pass in about 7 hours. This is ignoring the general relativistic effects of acceleration and deceleration.

    So, it's a material difference to the person traveling, but not so material to the observer stationary relative to Alpha Centauri.