That's my whole point - you might not need any interstellar travel or any
Star Trek tech to benefit from time dilation, you just need to keep accelerating. Of course I know that I know nothing about physics, which is why I'm waiting for someone here to debunk the feasibility of this idea, but it does seem possible based on the little that I know. Most if not all of the tech should be available within the 21st century.
The
ISS might cost "€100 billion over 30 years", but much of that cost is R&D that wouldn't need to be done again, unrelated science experiments, shuttling people back and forth, and inevitable government inefficiency / corruption. By the middle of the century, a private sector project with just 1/10th the funds would be able to build a luxurious space habitat with on-board food gardens, super-efficient water / soil recycling, and everything else you need for long-term survival in space. That space habitat would look somewhat like a butterfly with humongous
solar sails.
In space there's almost no friction to eat up your inertia, so "keeping the engine running" means you keep going faster and faster. The space habitat in a properly controlled orbit around the sun would be accelerated by: (1) the gravity of the sun, but unlike the planets it could position itself to gain acceleration with every loop, (2) its solar sails, and (3) external man-made "helper" solar satellites that have humongous mirrors to concentrate sunlight into laser beams directed at the habitat's sails, making it go ever-faster. The billionaires on-board will eventually find real-time audio / video communications with Earth bothersome because people on earth will sound like chipmunks, while the billionaires will sound ssssllllooowwww, although non-real-time communication should work just fine, and they would be able to use the same Internet as everybody else: download the latest movies, post on Web forums, etc. This means the billionaires will watch their stock market profits accumulate in accelerated time, and use ever-more of their profits to build ever-more "helper" satellites to push them ever-faster.
Of course there is a limit to how fast / how long they'll want to go at it, especially on this first-generation space habitat, because they will be cut off from earth for anything except communications and lasers directed at their sails - they might have programmable surgery robots and equipment to synthesize a wide array of medicine on-board, but they can't have everything. So at some point they may decide to change their orbit around the sun and use their sails to decelerate, which would take as much time if not for the advances in the "helper" satellites, in order to visit Earth and experience the advances of the elapsed time in person. Or, more likely, visiting Earth in person will seem like irrational sentimentality given that it would cost them billions of dollars in velocity, and visiting the Earth on the holodeck is almost as good. What is more likely is that they wouldn't want to decelerate, but instead hop aboard a next generation space habitat - a whole city of billionaires with all sorts of new technologies aboard, who would be able to use newer propulsion technologies to accelerate to match the first habitat's velocity in a fraction of the time, and then accelerate further to travel forward in time ever faster, until they can hop aboard a third generation habitat and beyond!
The subsequent generations of habitats will almost certainly be modular, with different modules being launched at different times, perhaps using different means of acceleration, and joining together when they reach compatible velocity to benefit from the economy of scale. Our first-generation billionaires will soon (especially in their perception of time) be joined by their children and (great*X)grandchildren from earth, and they will soon be joined by people who are mere millionaires as acceleration technology becomes cheaper. Each module would be privately owned (most likely by a family corporation), and have its own system of governance, and since presence on any particular module will be voluntary this swarm of space modules spinning around the sun will be a prime example of
Anarcho-Capitalism in action.
Some modules may decide to slingshot out of our solar system to check out the neighboring star systems, but curiosity aside there would be little benefit for doing so, because this solar system has everything that we need, and being several light-years away from the Internet connectivity with the rest of civilization would be seen as the worst form of poverty! It is more likely that neighboring solar systems will be visited by robotic probes, but discovery of earth-like planets would be yawned at (though some tree-hugging hippies will scrape up enough money to send self-replicating robots there to set up the industrial base for terraforming). The odds of us finding anything useful in the
nearby stars is quite low. Too bad we don't have any super-massive black holes in our neighborhood - now that's how you travel to the future in style!
Edited by Alex Libman, 30 May 2010 - 09:46 AM.
