Extraterrestrial objects and Time

[Ofaebtas]

With the risk of sounding like a total dumbfxck, I wanted to ask about this thought that popped into my head today.

Now, the Earth is making its trip around the Sun at a certain velocity and the Sun's gravity is affecting the Earth a certain way and let's say there are some other worlds - alive or not - moving at great speeds relative to the Earth's frame of reference with different gravitational effects. Wouldn't that mean there are planets/planetary systems whose birth and death can happen in a blink of an eye in Earth's frame of reference? Or vice versa, someone on one of those worlds snaps his/her/its fingers and our solar system is born and destroyed within the "time" it took it/her/him to do so?

If so, then in a science fiction type of a setting, even with wormhole/stargate technology, it would take extreme luck or extreme precision for a possible civilisation on a world like that to "jump" to this solar system when AND where it still exists/existed/will exist.

 

[mike]

The earth in fact never occupies the same point in space twice, nor does any other celestial body including the moon.
Most people picture the sun as fixed with the earth going around it, ending up in a year back in the same spot it was last year.
But actually it looks more like this

And of course the galaxy itself is moving out away from the big bang, so the earth and moon never occupy the same place twice.
Despite this weve been to the moon and back, Interstellar travel is just a scaled up version of this but not imo impossible

 

[stonehart]

The earth in fact never occupies the same point in space twice, nor does any other celestial body including the moon.
Most people picture the sun as fixed with the earth going around it, ending up in a year back in the same spot it was last year.
But actually it looks more like this

And of course the galaxy itself is moving out away from the big bang, so the earth and moon never occupy the same place twice.
Despite this weve been to the moon and back, Interstellar travel is just a scaled up version of this but not imo impossible

beat me to it damn!

 

[Ofaebtas]

Yeah, I was thinking more along the lines of time dilation, but the differences in relative speeds of different systems and gravity would have to be extreme for it to make such a dramatic difference in experienced time. I guess. I don't understand this stuff.


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EDIT
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Like, here reality check - Do different star systems experience time differently? - Worldbuilding Stack Exchange someone named GrandMasterB explains a little bit of it. (The first answer to the question. ) I guess theoretically two systems could have great differences in velocity, but these types of situations would be rare?

 

[mike]

It happens even here at home

Researchers in the United States have for the first time shown that time passes faster the higher up you are.
In a curious aspect of Albert Einsten's theory of relativity, they show that someone living or working long hours in a top floor apartment or office will age more quickly than someone on the ground floor.

Time passes faster the higher you are - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Its known that Airline pilots age faster too

Do pilots age differently when flying? | Yahoo Answers

They actually age slightly faster. The reason is that they are further away from the center of the Earth's gravitational field, and the weaker the gravity, the faster time passes. It is also true that moving at high speed slows time down, but airplanes don't move fast enough to overcome the opposite effect of diminishing gravity.
Of course, the effects are generally too small to measure.
If all this sounds like nonsense, it's not. GPS satellites have very precise atomic clocks aboard them that have to have their frequencies shifted by a very tiny amount because they run faster in orbit than they do on the ground, thanks to the lower gravity in orbit. However, from a human standpoint, the difference is too small to perceive

Time is indeed a variable not a fixed value, The earths gravity well being our major influence, but so to does the suns gravitational field and indeed the entire galaxys gravitational field affect the speed of time from our perspective.

But even this is not a big deal if we are talking warp drive as a means of travel, the scientists working on it say time will stay relative

He says that, if everything is confirmed in these practical experiments, we would be able to create an engine that will get us to Alpha Centauri "in two weeks as measured by clocks here on Earth." The time will be the same in the spaceship and on Earth, he claims

NASA Starts Work on Real Life Star Trek Warp Drive

Given the mass of the galaxy itself sets the baseline, with changes occurring as you get closer to gravity wells like suns and planets, i think the real issue for us will be intergalactic travel.

Travelling through the great void to a galaxy with twice the mass of the milky way, even then you still have the universal baseline, and perhaps warp bubbles will be able to deal with this too.

Its a fascinating subject to be sure

 

[Ofaebtas]

Its a fascinating subject to be sure

True! Seems that Interstellar (2014 movie) style extreme time dilation isn't that common whether due to gravity or speed.

That's an interesting point about pilots aging faster due to gravitational time dilation. I could have guessed they would age slower, only taking into account time dilation due to fast movement, but these two (gravitational and speed) work against each other and gravitational wins by a little bit it seems. (The less gravity works on you, the faster time moves vs. the faster you travel, the slower time moves).

 

[Zebra or the Logos]

Great thread! I'm surprised this isn't getting more attention..

 

[Zebra or the Logos]

How common is it for people to report instances of time dilation in reports of sightings/contact?

 

[Zebra or the Logos]

In your opinion, how can one get a real grasp of time dilation outside of simply comprehending the concept?

 

[Burnt State]

That's an interesting point about pilots aging faster due to gravitational time dilation. I could have guessed they would age slower..

Ok, so you're saying that the original Planet of the Apes scenario is never going to happen. I'm disappointed. Will justice never be served?

 

[Burnt State]

How common is it for people to report instances of time dilation in reports of sightings/contact?

There is some discussion around how under duress our experience of time may dilate, and the nature of the experience may cause an alteration of one's sense of time. In cases of high strangeness we see reports of the flow of time and even normal processes of traffic, noise etc. to suddenly switch off or transform. It seems that proximity often creates more of an impact on the experiencer's perception and even ability to comprehend all the specifics of certain events.

The subjective experience of time can also be manipulated experimentally. Visual stimuli which appear to be approaching are perceived to be longer in duration than when viewed as static or moving away. Similarly, participants presented with a stream of otherwise identical stimuli, but including one oddball, or “deviant”, stimulus, tend to perceive the deviant stimulus as lasting longer than the others. The underlying neural mechanisms of this are unknown, but now the first neuroimaging study of this phenomenon implicates the involvement of brain structures which are thought to be required for cognitive control and subjective awareness.

The apparent prolonged duration of a looming or deviant stimulus is referred to as the time dilation illusion, and three possible, but not mutually exclusive, explanations for why it might occur have been put forward. First, the stimulus might be perceived as lasting longer because it has unusual properties which require an increased amount of attention to be devoted to it. Alternatively, the perceived duration of the stimulus might reflect the amount of energy expended in generating its neural representation (that is, duration is a function of coding efficiency). Finally, the effect might be due to the intrinsic dynamic properties of the stimulus, such that the brain estimates time based on the number of changes in an event.

Does time dilate during a threatening situation? – Neurophilosophy

I can remember hearing a podcast that identified some very interesting examples of dilation in very extreme situations including a pilot in a crash who executed a series of complex procedures in an unprecented short period of time to save himself, and also one of a person with a brain tumour who was experiencing time and perception in very odd ways - while showering each drop of water was visible as if in a slow stop motion effect.

 

[Wade]

David Eagleman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Possibilian - The New Yorker

 

[Last Laugh]

Here's a segment from Radiolab featuring David Eagleman

Why A Brush With Death Triggers The Slow-Mo Effect : NPR



Interesting stuff.

 

[boomerang]

The opening subject of this thread is thought provoking indeed. The topic has branched slightly--a good thing on this forum IMO-- in discussing time dilation related to gravity and alteration of perceived time passed seemingly due to neurological factors. Although this in itself raises a plethora of philosophical questions. And many of them have been discussed on other threads related to the nature of consciousness, in depth and to great effect.

Since physics supposedly indicates that time is indeed not a fixed constant in the universe and is influenced by gravitational fields, I have always had a difficult time wrapping my head around descriptions of the Big Bang as occurring along a calculated timeline. The gap in communication here is probably to be found in incredibly complex math. But when I read that-so-and-so occurred at "X" number of seconds or earth years after the the original event in formation of the universe, the first question that pops into my head is: seconds or years in what frame of space and time reference? We are told that time slows drastically in intense gravitational fields, relative to time outside of that field. But that passage of time for an observer within the field would seem normal. And now we are back to the issue of what constitutes an 'observer' in physics. Are we not ?

An aspect of the UFO phenomenon that continues to interest me are the number of historically reported effects that seem ( stress seem) to be related to time and gravity. Close in witnesses report missing time. Shapes of UFOs vary almost endlessly in a way that could suggest light being warped by intense gravitational fields. UFOs are observed to behave in ways that defy known laws of inertia. I have long suspected this phenomenon has such complete control of space-time that it may even travel backward in time to alter after effects of future encounters for its own purposes. Around that, my head will certainly not wrap.

On subjectivity and the mind, David Eagleman is indeed a very interesting guy.

'Incognito': What's Hiding In The Unconscious Mind : NPR