> Of course that as you get closer to C, the traveling object will experience time dilation (relative to observer), so the time passed will be less. At 99.999% C, the traveler would take ~11,000 years to arrive to Andromeda.
When you say constant 1g acceleration, do you mean acceleration well past the speed of light? I thought we were talking about all speeds less than the speed of light.
You can accelerate constantly at 1g without ever reaching the speed of light. A constant acceleration takes you from non-relativistic speeds to 0.1c, then to 0.9c, then to 0.999c, then to 0.9999c, , and so on, without ever reaching 1c (impossible if you have mass) -- but it takes increasingly more energy to accelerate.
The Lorentz factor, which governs time dilation and length contraction, is calculated as (1 / sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2)), where v is the relative velocity of the object and c is the speed of light. You can replace (v^2 / c^2) with the factor beta^2, where beta is the ratio of v to c, e.g. 0.99999 in this case. Since (1 / sqrt (1 - 0.999...)) grows without bound in the limit as beta approaches (but doesn't reach) 1, if you keep accelerating, the time dilation keeps getting larger, without limits. It just takes a LOT of energy to do so.
I was still at a loss for the answer to how it could take 11k vs 28 years or so. I asked AI. lol
The thing I didn’t realize is the massive difference between 99.999% vs 99.9999% of the speed of light. I took 99.999% to mean "effectively the speed of light.” Relativity is weird.
