Baby Astronaut

Thank you, and bear with me please. Maybe I'm using the wrong terminology, as swansont revealed, it's power not work. So to rephrase, there seems toi be less power being depleted by using the lever. It might be a machine, but it doesn't need batteries. Let's use a robot instead of a human. If robot A were using its humanoid body to lift 100 kilogram crates all day, and an identically constructed robot B were lifting the same but using a lever with a 10:1 mechanical advantage, it seems like robot A would be recharging its batteries more often. Here's my confusion about it. More energy/power seems to have been depleted/expended in one case more than another. How was the extra/less energy or power conserved? It seems as if the non-renewable energy going into robot B's system isn't matched by the output of potential or kinetic energy created if it were to suddenly drop its crate onto something else.

I'd liek to understand how conservation of energy applies when using a lever. For example, you didn't put that much work in when using a lever to hoist up something heavy. Layman's terms please

Which reference frames? And how? Are you saying that for us to move the super fast craft, but doing so from our own frame, we'd need the tremendous energy, but, for the people in their own frame to move that very same craft, they need only the typical amount? Meaning, someone never gets a head-start towards going light-speed by starting off in a faster frame than us? But they do when explaining the Large Hadron Collider. "Capable of sending a single proton through the 27KM loop at 99.99% the speed of light, or within 90 milliseconds." Which definitions?

A couple of things still nagging at me. 1. If a spaceship were cruising at near light speed, it would take a vast amount of energy to make it go faster. So logically, you'd need vast amounts of energy to accelerate just the people within the spacecraft as well. Yet I can't imagine them needing a vast reservoir of energy to run from the back of the ship towards its front, which in essence accelerates them. Or better yet, let's say there's a planetary system cruising at near light speed for some unknown reason. If one of its planets were inhabited, its people shouldn't have trouble racing cars or launching a ship in front of the planet, towards the same direction it's cruising in (their star is also cruising along with its planets, so life is about the same as here on Earth). Now, if they went by spaceship and were calculating how much energy they'd need to reach light speed, they'd arrive at a conclusion that the energy needed to get there would increase every step of the way. But since they're already going 99.999% of light speed, they would be going much faster than any Earth ship can. Ironically, that'd be the case even if they took off in the opposite direction. But relatively, they'd be going as fast as us, at least in their own frame of reference. My point is, all that energy required to reach light speed, 99.999% of it has been given to them as a shortcut, and with that in mind, can they achieve light speed by eventually developing superior technology? Let's say we on Earth in a few hundred years develop a ship that goes 99.999% the speed of light. Now, let's say that other planet develops an identical ship, but they're entire planet is already going that speed, so it'd be 99.999% + 99.999% meaning they'd get a lot closer than us. But can they pass the speed of light? 2. The new particle accelarator has particles cruising at near light speed. If their mass increases substantially from going that fast, shouldn't they weigh more than our planet? If not, how much do they weigh (in anyone's opinion/calculation)?

This visual display is the kind of thing I'm referring to. (it's pretty insane, eleven miles of webpage to show the distance between a proton and its electron -- although my visual needs are a bit more practical)

I think it'd be the other way around: akin to asking whether you can isolate reflectivity out of a mirror's surface, and just have the mirror by itself. Which of the following two questions does paul's best match? 1. If you remove a single proton's sole electron, do you still have an atom? 2. If you remove the skin from an apple, is it still an apple? You see, the atom would cease being an atom, where the apple would still be an apple. So, maybe this would help answer paul's question.

Then send the entire population away for a while and the smart people stay here and they do a 100 years work in one year of the population's time

The frame of reference bit makes it all clear. Also, it shows what I mean by virtual. Because an object will have a minimum amount of mass in any frame of reference, that minimum amount is basically its true mass. Anything more than its rest mass would be virtual, because the object itself can't measure those increases within its own frame of reference. At least I don't believe it can.

Is there a size comparison of a photon, an atom, and a virus in a book or somewhere online?

So what you are saying is that relativistic mass, i.e. it's total energy including momentum, will not have the same properties as its equivalent in rest mass? For example, say an object (A) at "rest" has x units of mass, which is enough to trigger star formation due to its mass quantity alone. Then let's say an object (B) with 10 times less the units of mass were accelerated up to the point that it would now have x units of mass due to its rest mass + its velocity. Conclusion: object B won't collapse into a star because of its mass, even though its units of mass are identical to that of object A. Is that correct?

The same way you can determine that a mountain has greater mass than an apple. Refer to the parts in bold from my opening question, quoted below. What I mean by virtual, is not a real mass gain per se, such as how we understand objects with greater and greater mass have more of a gravity pull, weight and size, eventually becoming a star and then a black hole. So by virtual, I mean an object is treated as having the extra mass, but it doesn't have the associated gravity pull, size, or collapsing into nuclear fusion problems. Maybe it does have the weight though.

But is it a virtual mass gain? In other words, is it a mass gain only in the sense that it gains weight (and/or it's needed to make related physics calculations valid), but visually you wouldn't see the gain?

*bump*

That's pretty good Martin. Since they said it'd be about two soccer fields away to the nearest star. More importantly though, if a person in the galaxy-scale U.S were to observe the microscopic spaceship journeying towards the nearest "quarter" (star) 3/25 of a mile away, how fast would it be traveling (km per hour) relative to the observer if it took 70,000 years to get there? If the micro-spaceship couldn't take advantage of wind, the observer might think it stuck in mid-air without moving. At that rate at least (70,000 years to travel across a city block). You're correct! It's the solar system that would be the size of a quarter. But Martin seemed to catch the error.

Would a moderator please start a new thread with post #18, move it from here? Thanks.

From that link I found another link and now have a question. In the previous segment on that website, it says that it would take 70,000 years in our fastest spaceship to get to the nearest star. In the next page, it represents the Milky Way as a coin, with our solar system being microscopic specs, and the galaxy being the size of the United States. My question is: using those scales, if a microscopic spaceship (our fastest one), were to travel from Earth to the nearest star, what distance in km or miles would it travel across the galaxy-scaled U.S. and at what speed (km or mph)?

Are you agreeing with me then? I see it this way. You know how it stings when sand is being whipped at your face by high winds? I propose that a similar thing is happening at the atomic level when a person feels something hot. If the heated item's atomic particles are really moving fast, then it's reasonable to suppose those particles will slam into into other atoms (of a hand in this case), by the thousands or even millions depending on its temperature. The hotter, the faster the particle's speeds relative to yours. Maybe.

Ahh. So the reason a hot object is painful, is that an angry stream of its atoms collide into your skin atoms, which in turn slam into other cells' atoms. It's not really "heat" as we sense it but actually tiny little crashes, and if you get a moderate amount of those, like in a system of air molecules knocking into you at 85 Fahrenheit, you experience a warm and fuzzy sensation. But maybe not. Strong winds hit you fast but don't warm you up. Or perhaps the internal kinetic motion of warmed air molecules/atoms is vastly faster than wind can ever be?

That balloon looks like it's gonna pop. Hope nobody puts a space needle to it.

So are you saying that if a cloud of atoms were to zip 'round at near light speed relative to one another in the Large Hadron Collider, their kinetic energy would measure as temperature?

Is there a micro and macro version of kinetics? Such as, "micro" would be atoms moving crazily away from each other and bouncing all over, and macro would be anything moving at same velocity if no forces would act upon it. Otherwise, a lonely pebble cruising through space at 100,000 km per second would have high kinetic energy, and thus should measure blazing hot but in fact be stone cold.* *(pun absolutely intended)

Whoops, I thought you meant the light would hit the walls of a closed room (forward and rearward). Disregard my previous statements/questions. I understand now. A stationary clock holder would perceive a difference in the clock of a moving clock holder. But wouldn't the moving clock holder also perceive a difference, since in relativity the stationary clock would shrink?

Here's a newer document with the original info.

Interesting. I guess the final distance to it will be immediately outside the lone super cluster that we'll belong to in 100 billion years, as predicted.

Well, I've based my assumptions off posts in this thread. And no one disputed posts #8, 9, 11, and 13, which are full of talk about wormholes. It's more correct to say "it's likely we'll never reach beyond that horizon, unless we discover a way unknown to scientists yet". No evidence is needed to support a "might" scenario, if it's clearly written as such, although this thread's title doesn't say "might", I admit. Perhaps I should restate: other ways might pop up. But I did use "if" and "unless I'm wrong". I just believe it goes both ways: saying "it'll never be possible" requires as much proof as saying "it will occur".