I've read through the entire thread and I just thought I'd join instead of remaining a lurker. BTW Owl, thank you for bringing the issue up. I would say that certainly philosophy is relevant (necessary in fact) to science. Despite the red demerits you seem to be receiving, I have enjoyed your posts. I can't say that you're "right" or "wrong" though as I don't possess the knowledge for that.
From what little I do know of relativity, it would appear that "time" (whatever that is) does indeed slow with speeds approaching that of light. Unfortunately, I still can't wrap my head around it; thinking of time as another dimension like space is not intuitive for me, nor many of us I'd imagine. The notion that time can be stretched and warped like space is not something that we can really perceive visually. Something about us being 3 dimensional creatures and only being able to perceive a slice of that 4th dimension at any one moment...huh? <<scratches head>>.
As far as length contraction goes, from what I understand, it's simply perception based on the observer's frame of reference. Basically, if some idiot martian decides to fly by our planet at near light speed to have a good look, he would see the earth as oblate; however if he were intelligent enough to achieve near light-speed travel, I hope he'd have sense enough to realize that his perception of the planet is skewed due to his rather extreme frame of reference. I'm sure if he wanted to really take a proper look, he'd hit the brakes. The only way that celestial bodies would look natural that way is if there were creatures that existed at or near the speed of light at all times. In that case, that would be their natural frame of reference. For the rest of us (martians included) observing anything at the speed of light would be severely skewed and not reasonable. Kinda like trying to get a good look at something while traveling down the highway at 90 mph.
Personally (and philosophically) my take away to all this is that for us as humans, this is largely academic and most of the time-dilation, length contraction issues make for great sci-fi material only. GPS and particle accelerators not withstanding of course . Traveling at or near the speed of light is unlikely to ever be a possibility for us and even if it were, what's the point? To travel to the future? To what end? Once you arrived there, then what? If you didn't like what you saw, you're stuck there and can't return to warn anyone. It's essentially a one-way trip. Pretty damn useless.
Light-speed travel to explore the cosmos? Really? We've been gazing at the stars for how long now using telescopes and we've been sending out radio signals for years and we haven't found anything. So far, there's nothing of use out there. Even if we do identify a star system of interest, how do we know that it'll still be there when we arrive? Personally, I'm a human, my ancestors evolved on this planet and I'm designed naturally to live and thrive here; it's unlikely we'd come across a planetoid with similar enough conditions to make life feasible or worth the effort. Nah, I'll stay here thanks. Honestly, NASA could offer me a free ride to Mars tomorrow and I'd turn it down. Oh wait, no more funding for manned space flights. Woohoo, no more boring space launches.
