Relativity and cellular biology in space

[Lasty]

Satellites have to correct for time ticking at a different rate, and they can do that instantaneously with software. The genes in any living cells probably cannot be reprogrammed this way... at all. So, you got your body putting itself back together slightly out of order over time because these structures evolved in an environment with time ticking at a relatively constant rate for billions of years. Those discrepancies add up over time as cells that were put together slightly out of order divide and embed these errors further the longer they're immersed in micro-gravity.

Microbes in a drop of water are trapped there by surface tension, they cannot escape. My hypothesis is that so too are we imprisoned by the earth's temporal meniscus...

[André Toulon]

Well if that's true, it explains why people in front of you are going the same speed 

[Lemming]

You’d only really notice a difference in the integrity of cells in the human body by traveling close or at light speed for quite a few years. If it were 24000 miles per hour for 3 months, about the time it would take to get to Mars, there would hardly be any significant difference.

[Neubauten]

Geology, genealogy, I don't know what they mean

[Lasty]

19 hours ago, Lemming said:

You’d only really notice a difference in the integrity of cells in the human body by traveling close or at light speed for quite a few years. If it were 24000 miles per hour for 3 months, about the time it would take to get to Mars, there would hardly be any significant difference.

I doubt that a lot. Our biology is fragile and dependent on earth conditions....  I don't know the math end of it super well, though. Maybe you could elaborate?

[Lasty]

18 hours ago, Neubauten said:

Geology, genealogy, I don't know what they mean

Fucking double magnets all the way, what does it work

[Lemming]

I can’t find a suitable equation because google is full of stupid questions. What I do know is that at a certain point due to the redshift of light you would have traveled farther than what it would take, assuming you are at .9999 percent the speed of light, to return to your home planet in a lifetime. If you travelled 40 years away from Earth at .9999 the speed of light in a self sustaining environment with its own gravity, which is being studied at the ISS atm, you would have travelled to another part of the galaxy for sure, but only that. There might not ever be a way to travel outside of the Milky Way and space time and cell degeneration would be obvious obstacles if we ever wanted to find an exoplanet that could be the new Earth. I suggest you buy Rimworld and skim through the readme for a fictionalized but realistic take away on what would happen to humans far from Earth. In the mean time I will also look for an equation for aging during space travel.

[Lasty]

21 hours ago, Lemming said:

I can’t find a suitable equation because google is full of stupid questions. What I do know is that at a certain point due to the redshift of light you would have traveled farther than what it would take, assuming you are at .9999 percent the speed of light, to return to your home planet in a lifetime. If you travelled 40 years away from Earth at .9999 the speed of light in a self sustaining environment with its own gravity, which is being studied at the ISS atm, you would have travelled to another part of the galaxy for sure, but only that. There might not ever be a way to travel outside of the Milky Way and space time and cell degeneration would be obvious obstacles if we ever wanted to find an exoplanet that could be the new Earth. I suggest you buy Rimworld and skim through the readme for a fictionalized but realistic take away on what would happen to humans far from Earth. In the mean time I will also look for an equation for aging during space travel.

I'm pretty sure a gravitational field generator is not going to work even if they are working on that.... So what you mean to say here is: you don't know the math as well as I do and you're going to make stuff up "too"? 

[Farg]

They are studying micro gravity at the ISS. I’m not sure what that means to be honest. Just make yourself an ice cube and cruise the wavy wastes in style.

[Top Gun]

I think you're misunderstanding some of the ideas of relativity here. There are two main types of "time dilation" (i.e. time appearing to move differently in another object compared to a local observer) that are consequences of relativity. Special relativity shows that a clock moving relative to an observer will seem like it's running slower than a clock in the observer's frame of reference. And via general relativity, a clock in a weaker gravitational field (for instance, in orbit vs. on the Earth's surface) will appear to run faster than one in a stronger gravitational field. However, in both of those cases, we're talking about the apparent elapsed time relative to another frame of reference, hence the name. When we talk about needing to make adjustments to GPS to account for relativity, it's because all of the satellites involved are moving relative to the Earth's surface and each other, and they're all in a weaker gravitational field, and GPS depends on making very precise measurements of signal times to determine your position. It doesn't make any sense to say that our body's cells would experience discrepancies when in a particular environment, because at any given moment our entire bodies are essentially all in the same frame of reference, and are thus experiencing the flow of time in the same way. I mean I guess you could say that the cells in your head are experiencing a very smaller amount of gravity than those in your feet, but that effect would be so minuscule as to not even matter.

(Fun fact: due to these effects, astronauts who have stayed on the ISS for long periods of time have technically aged slightly less than those of us on the ground, but even being in space for a solid year would cause a discrepancy of only a tiny fraction of a second. Just...do yourself a favor and don't dig into the twins paradox.)