LogFAQs > #914587935

DevsBro posted...

Nah, you can travel anywhere you want in any amount of time you want if you go fast enough. Once you get moving fast enough, you actually have less distance to go. It's an interesting consequence of special relativity. Like, if you could accelerate to relativistic speeds instantly, the trip to Andromeda could be a ten foot trip. Only thing is getting to that speed requires stupid amounts of energy.

Let me comment on that in slightly more detail.
As we are all well aware of, the second postulate of special relativity predicts that the speed of light is the same in all (inertial) frames of reference.
This has the interesting consequence that we cannot use length contraction and time dilation to just justify anything.
For those of you who don't know (I'll use a simplified version for easy understanding): Time dilation predicts that time as viewed from our moving spaceship moves differently than proper time as view from our planet. However, length contraction also predicts that a similar thing happens to space itself.
Now, length contraction behaves as our Lorentz factor (or the inverse of it, depending on which frame you view it from), which can take values from 1 to infinity. So yes, we could theoretically reach a speed in which the distance we are trying to travel becomes as small as we want it to be. This changes our time scale the other way around though, as such we still cannot violate the second postulate.
I'd be happy to discuss this in more detail, but doubt anyone will even read it lol.