Wouldn’t physically being on said planet be deadly? It must have an absurdly high gravity if there’s so much time dilation
That or the planet must be travelling at significant fractions of lightspeed, which makes landing there a challenge of its own
The planet’s gravity is not what is causing the time dilation, but rather the gravity of the supermassive black hole that it was orbiting. The black hole is somehow spinning extremely rapidly, causing frame dragging, which creates a particular stable orbit very close to the event horizon.
Apparently the energy requirements of the orbit would preclude ever reaching the planet except by slingshot manoeuvres around intermediate size black holes or neutron stars.
I liked the concept but man those nerds literally couldn’t think one step ahead
Turns out only sending mega nerds into a hostile environment might not be the most well thought out system.
The only qualified astronaut is that one SEAL+Doctor+Astronaut+Model.
The other problem is the ship signal they traced would have been frequency shifted by the same amount as the time dilation. They would have had to compensate for that to even detect the signal.
It was 1 hour : 7 years I think. So about a factor of 60,000. So if a ping was once a second it would be once every 42 days. And if it was a 1MHz transmission it would be at about 17Hz.
So they somehow realized the once a second 1MHz signal was now a every 42 day 17Hz signal at 1/60000 the power. But didn’t realize that there was time dilation involved.
But didn’t realize that there was time dilation involved.
They knew there would be time dilation. They literally discussed it just before they went down there. They just thought they could get it done in a few earth-years rather than decades.
They did know about the time dilation, though? They weren’t surprised by the fact that there was time dilation, they just didn’t fully grasp what the results would be.
Couldn’t you use that in reverse to create a planet-destroying superlaser?
I feel like those funky robots may have done some of the heavy lifting.
That implies some code monkey somewhere decided that feature didn’t need a user notification!
Unless they run on a neural net or a genetic algorithm.
Remember when they dialed down the sass? Turns out that setting also affected physics notifications. “physicsassistant” - it was a typo!
