Could you hack it as a hacker? There’s one scene in the movie “Disclosure Day” where the paramilitary group is trying to get into a warehouse with a locked door, and I swear the “hacking device” used 2 alligator clips attached to the housing of the lock. You can correct me if I misremembered, but for some reason that image stuck with me because I cannot think of one scenario that would make this device plausible. ...
Time Dilation Time dilation stems from Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which says that moving clocks tick more slowly by a factor (called the Lorentz factor). At everyday speeds, the Lorentz factor is approximately one, so the effect is negligible. Near light speed, it becomes dramatic. Here’s the Lorentz factor formula showing how the factor increases with speed: $$ \begin{aligned} &\gamma = 1/\sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}\\ &\text{where}\\ &\hspace{1em}\gamma = \text{Lorentz factor}\\ &\hspace{1em}v = \text{relative velocity between two objects}\\ &\hspace{1em}c = \text{speed of light} \end{aligned} $$Project Hail Mary The ship in Project Hail Mary (the Book and Movie) travels at about 92% of light speed, so the Lorentz factor is approximately 2.55. In reality, the ship would most likely accelerate for half the trip and decelerate for the rest, but let’s keep it simple using constant velocity. One year on the ship corresponds to about 2.55 years outside it. That’s why a journey that feels like a few years to Grace can become more than a decade for Earth. ...
I was watching the 2018 adaptation of Aniara the other day, and it got me thinking about how close we are to space travel between other exoplanets. In the movie a ship accidentally gets blown off course on the way to Mars, and plunges into deep space. Spoiler alert, the ship doesn’t encounter another solar system for 6 million years. We don’t know exactly where the Aniara ended up, since the movie only reveals that it’s in the constellation Lyra, which contains stars of varying distances from earth. This stack overflow post explains the math to find Aniara’s speed and distance given the time it took to get there (at least, it seems correct from my minimal astronomy knowledge…). Apparently, the ship would have been going between 1 and 31 km/s (traveling between 25 and 620 light years away). ...