Science Forums 2

[alxian]

thanks to eintein and his time warping model of gravity time is reckoned locally and cannot be expressed as a metric even a theoretical one on a universal scale.

time is defined as a local constant (or pseudo constant) by which local events can be measured with reasonable accuracy.

once a constant is defined and tested its 'good enough' to judge local events with great accuracy, getting further away from that point of reference (light years) where synchronizing those local constants becomes difficult is a problem we'll have to resolve once we start travelling beyond our solar system.

a good question would be how much gravity distorts local time and can civilizations prosper in very high gravity fields that are 'accelerating' much like a ship would travelling through space. one way to find out is by visiting the moons of jupiter. the loss of synchronicity may be noticable, and means found to synchronize chronological constants between bases in orbit around jupiter and ones around earth.

another question is relative to observers would that civilization in a gravity field several tie stranger than earths, say on a planet several times as massive as earth, age noticeably faster than we do?

and would peeps on a generation ship (ship carrying peeps from on star to another) with very little gravity (1/6 enough to get by on, or peeps living on lunr bases) age slower than terrestrial humans since they'd have less local acceleration being applied to them?

since we are being affected ourselves by several local gravity fields, earth, the moon, jupiter and the sun, it is possible we are losing time relative to a beacon with a chronometer floating in interstaller microgravity (where the micro in that sense is much nearer to nothing than satelites in orbit around earth). another question is how far does a galaxies gravity field extend? are there regions of space that have no more local gravity than the static energy of motes attracting or repeeling each other? if you set off a repulser type energy pusle and voided nearby space of such particle could you achieve zero gravity?

that beacon, if it were not accelerating and if it could compensate for the pull of local galaxies (should their magnetic influence overlap to neighboring galaxies) and anomalies would represent as close to perfect "time" keeping we could hope for. if we had ansibles (FTL communications) to communicate with it, and a need to keep perfect universal time, then several such clocks could keep several local systems synchronized.