(September 30, 2010 at 12:02 am)theVOID Wrote: Sorry that was a brain fart.

You're correct, I think, thought I don't think stating it as "affected by the ship's relative momentum" is quite the right way of putting it, rather, while you are travelling at near c relative to everything else you are still at a stand still and everything is moving away from you at near c and from your perspective they are the ones gaining mass, from all other frames of reference you appear to be gaining mass as you approach c. correct?

Huh? I got a little twisted in your explaination.
My understanding is that when you travel near the speed of light (say 99.99%), an observer would see you mostly keeping up with a beam of light but your perspective would see the beam of light streak past you as it always has.
As you approach the speed of light, an observer would withness a self-explainatory thing happening called length contraction, which meams your space ship (or whatever) would appear to get shorter and shorter at the same ratio as the lorentz forces acting on the ship moving near the speed of light. This same force is also responsible for another interesting fact of travelling near the speed of light - which is that you experience time much more slowly than the observer.
Your perception (as the traveller) would see everything become distorted in the direction the ship is moving not entirely unlike an old windows screen saver I used to have on windows 95 that is now gone on windows XP. Your perception of yourself and everything on the ship (from my understanding, but what I've read has been somewhat less clear about this) doesn't change. You would see the other passengers move about normally.

So, a traveller moving close enough to the speed of light to experience a lorentz force of 25 (very close to c) experiences 1 second for every 25 seconds that pass for an observer and the observer sees a space ship that seems to have shrunk on the length axis to 5% of its original length.
Very handy if you're interested in travelling to the future.

(September 30, 2010 at 12:02 am)theVOID Wrote: That's why I haven't heard of it I hate that show.

I love it. The original and all four offshoot series. I can leave or take most of the movies, however.

(September 30, 2010 at 12:02 am)theVOID Wrote: That's fine. We just send them all there with all of their literature on the sky-daddy subject and pretend the whole thing never happened.

Screw that. They can keep the earth (there are more stupid people than reasonable ones anyway, so we'd save on transportation) and we can grab the new earth so they can all agee with one another that evolution and climate change are fantasies while climate change ruins the planet with a runaway greenhouse effect that they can continue to deny is happening.

We can build our utopia on Earth 2 and re-terriform when they've nuked themselves to kingdom come over whose god was more peaceful, we can reclaim the homeland.

... or they'll just fufill the unfortunate but likely prophecy of the fantastic movie Idiocracy.

(September 30, 2010 at 12:02 am)theVOID Wrote: Besides, after a few generations on that planet they would all think that they were put there by a god, and after several more generations they'd be looking out at the stars thinking "how fucking cool is it that god made this planet just for us?"

I guess we're not that special after all.
Still, I very much doubt if there is any other planet with beings as sophisticated as ourselves. Which alien would ever discover that E=mc^2?

(September 30, 2010 at 4:34 am)TheDarkestOfAngels Wrote: We can build our utopia on Earth 2 and re-terriform when they've nuked themselves to kingdom come over whose god was more peaceful, we can reclaim the homeland.

It might be a difficult thing to adapt to the new environment. So, I prefer to stay on this earth. Born here and we shall die here.

(September 30, 2010 at 1:37 pm)Rayaan Wrote:

(September 30, 2010 at 12:02 am)theVOID Wrote: Besides, after a few generations on that planet they would all think that they were put there by a god, and after several more generations they'd be looking out at the stars thinking "how fucking cool is it that god made this planet just for us?"

I guess we're not that special after all.
Still, I very much doubt if there is any other planet with beings as sophisticated as ourselves. Which alien would ever discover that E=mc^2?

Do you know how many other planets, solar systems and galaxies are in this universe!? I'd say it's a fair assumption to think that there is life out there, and possibly a lot more advanced than ours.

(September 30, 2010 at 1:37 pm)Rayaan Wrote: I guess we're not that special after all.
Still, I very much doubt if there is any other planet with beings as sophisticated as ourselves. Which alien would ever discover that E=mc^2?

I could make the same arguement just on Earth isofar as us being 'special.'
But there is no reason for there not to be an intelligent species in the universe.

(September 30, 2010 at 1:37 pm)Rayaan Wrote: It might be a difficult thing to adapt to the new environment. So, I prefer to stay on this earth. Born here and we shall die here.

Who is this 'we' you speak of? You can die on this planet. The universe is going to be around for billions of years longer than this measily little blue dot is going to be around and humanity would be stupid to remain here forever.
Such to the effect that all of the greatest hits of the Darwinian Awards can remain on this planet when it finally bites the big one because I'm sure those'll be the people who deny science its just due.