Chapter 168: Time Dilation

The situation was complex. The ambient temperature inside the ship’s outer sectors was slowly dropping, but it would inevitably plateau. The massive magma pool trapped in the high-gravity ventral zone acted as a colossal, persistent heat source!

Worse, as the engineering teams successfully sealed the breached exterior bulkheads to prevent atmospheric venting, the trapped heat caused the internal temperatures to slowly climb once more.

Fortunately, the Noah’s purple alloy hull possessed miraculous thermal insulation properties. It prevented the ambient heat from passing through the secondary radiation walls, ensuring the civilian populace wasn’t slowly roasted in their sleep.

The ship’s interior was a disaster zone in desperate need of repair, but it was a manageable problem.

The external environment, however, was a completely different story… Bursts of high-energy gamma radiation from the supernova still occasionally slammed into the ship, violently imparting even more kinetic energy into the hull.

The astrophysics team had finally managed to estimate the Noah’s current velocity.

They were moving fast. Impossibly fast.

In fact, they were traveling at relativistic speeds!

“According to our latest calculations, we’ve broken 0.98c! We are traveling at 98 percent the speed of light!”

When that number was announced, the science teams forgot all their immediate troubles. Their faces lit up with pure, unadulterated awe.

Riding the apocalyptic shockwave of a supernova, humanity was plunging into the unknown depths of deep space at an unprecedented velocity!

A stellar detonation provided an unfathomably powerful propulsive force, infinitely more potent than any localized nuclear strike…

At 0.98c, relativistic effects became severe. According to the laws of relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, its dynamic mass increases. Under these conditions, the Noah’s operational mass had spiked from roughly 1,038,600 tons to a staggering 5,219,100 tons approximately five times its resting mass!

In standard terms, the Noah had absorbed the equivalent of over four million tons of mass from the supernova blast wave, instantly converting it into raw kinetic energy.

It sounded impossible, but the physics checked out. The Noah was absolutely colossal in volume but possessed a near-zero resting density (approximately 0.000073 kg/m^3). This meant it acted like the ultimate solar sail, effortlessly carried away by infinite light pressure.

Four million tons was actually a minuscule amount of mass; the sun naturally burned through that much matter every single second during its normal main-sequence phase. By going supernova, the sun had violently expelled ten billion years’ worth of energy in an instant. The Noah had only absorbed an infinitesimal fraction of that wave roughly one part in 300 trillion.

But for humanity, that kinetic energy was astronomical. Slowing the spaceship down using conventional retro-thrusters was physically impossible!

A standard rocket burn? Not a chance.

Fortunately, the Noah’s unique, impossibly low density offered a workaround. The engineering teams had devised a “rapid mass-ejection protocol.” Essentially, by violently venting physical matter from the ship’s forward sections, they could bleed off momentum and decelerate rapidly.

Therefore, they weren’t worried about how to stop. The primary concern was finding a resource-rich, terrestrial exoplanet to stop at. Once anchored, they would strip-mine the planet down to the mantle.

The scientists eagerly debated the logistics.

“Finding a terrestrial planet? That’s a needle in a cosmic haystack… Space is vast and mostly empty. The odds of a random intercept are incredibly low!”

“True, but our velocity is only going to increase, not decrease. Because we can’t deploy our external sensor arrays right now, 0.98c is just our most conservative baseline estimate.”

“…We could be moving even faster!”

“And because of relativistic time dilation, our effective search range expands exponentially…”

Jason sighed and nodded in agreement.

The universe was governed by infinite mysteries, and the “relativistic effect” of high-speed travel was one of the most profound.

The speed of light (c) is an absolute constant. Whether you are stationary or traveling in a sub-light ship, if you measure a beam of light passing you, its relative speed will always be exactly c. This is the core postulate of Einstein’s theory of relativity: the constancy of the speed of light.

These relativistic effects manifest in three primary ways: time dilation, length contraction, and relativistic mass increase. If a stationary observer watches an object moving at relativistic speeds, they will see the object’s time slow down, its physical length compress, and its mass increase!

However, the occupants inside the fast-moving object experience absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

“Time dilation is the ultimate hack for interstellar travel,” one physicist explained. “At 0.98c, the flow of time we experience aboard the Noah drops to roughly one-fifth of the time passing in the outside universe. It’s the only way a mortal species can survive interstellar distances.”

“The three months we just experienced? To the rest of the universe, fifteen months have passed. Which means it’s been over a year since the sun exploded, and we are already 1.3 light-years away from where Mars used to be!”

For the scientists, the realization was intoxicating. Humanity was physically experiencing one of the universe’s greatest phenomena. And this effect was working entirely in their favor! Within a single human lifespan, they could traverse distances that should have taken centuries!

The farther they traveled, the higher the probability of intercepting a viable star system!

“If we just detect a random asteroid field, we ignore it… We don’t drop anchor until we find a terrestrial planet rich in heavy metals,” Jason stated firmly.

The crew nodded in agreement. They wouldn’t settle for a handful of barren space rocks unless they were on the absolute brink of starvation.

This velocity was a once-in-a-civilization gift. Once they decelerated, humanity possessed no technology capable of accelerating a ship this massive back to near-light speed.

They couldn’t just go out and detonate another star whenever they felt like moving.

They had to find a permanent home. They couldn’t settle for scraps.

Jason had already made up his mind. Wherever they finally stopped, humanity would build a true interstellar empire.

For the civilian population, the psychological impact of time dilation was profound. While daily life aboard the Noah felt perfectly normal, physics behaved exactly as it always did, the knowledge that a day inside the ship equaled roughly five days outside was staggering.

It brought to mind the famous “twin paradox” thought experiment: If one twin boards a near-light-speed ship and the other remains on Earth, the traveling twin will return to find their sibling is an elderly man, while they have only aged a single year.

This paradox was the literal embodiment of relativistic time dilation.

The realization sparked a massive resurgence of interest in theoretical physics among the civilian populace.

However, the Federation Command had more pressing concerns. They desperately needed to know what lay ahead on their flight path and precisely where they were in the galaxy. But achieving that was currently impossible.

At 0.98c, the Noah wasn’t just outrunning the supernova; it was plowing through the interstellar medium.

While space is a near-vacuum, it isn’t completely empty. Interstellar space contains roughly one stray particle per cubic centimeter. In the vast voids between galactic arms, that density drops to about one particle per cubic meter.

But when a ship is moving at near-light speed, those stationary, microscopic particles become a nightmare. Impacting a stray hydrogen atom at 0.98c triggers a violent kinetic detonation!

While a single atomic collision is microscopic, millions of them striking the hull every second creates a constant, ablative bombardment, like being pelted with endless sticks of TNT.

As a result, microscopic explosions were constantly rippling across the Noah’s forward deflector shields, slowly bleeding off the ship’s momentum. This deceleration was countered by the occasional surge of high-energy radiation from the expanding supernova behind them, which pushed them forward again.

Because of this intense kinetic friction, deploying external sensor arrays was suicide. Any probe pushed outside the hull would be instantly shredded by the interstellar medium or melted by the residual solar radiation!

Even the Gravitational Wave Telescope couldn’t function while stowed safely inside the hull; it required unobstructed exposure to the void.

The engineering teams were scrambling for a workaround.

The most viable theory was to mount the primary sensor arrays on the rear section of the Noah, pointing away from the direction of travel. That way, the sensors would be shielded from the forward kinetic bombardment.

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