Essentially the closer you move at the speed of light, time flows slower for you. So, if you are in a rocket which is moving at close to c, for you the journey to Alpha Centauri which is 4 light years away may be like just an year. But for us outside of your rocket, it would likely be more than 4 years.
If you were to goto Alpha Centauri and then back to Earth, you may have spent just 2 years in your rocket. But when you get out of your rocket, you will find that 8 years have gone by on Earth.
Taking a lot of liberties with my explanation, but hope this ELI5 works.
A lot of people seem outraged about the speed of light limitation and demand to know when we're going to get around it... as if our current speed limit weren't <.0001% of the speed of light.
You don't need to go faster than light to get anywhere you want, in any time period you like. The speed of light is not the limiting factor.
The amount of energy available to you, and the tyranny of the Rocket Equation, those are the constraining factors. Those are perfectly ordinary engineering issues, rather than magically hoping to circumvent the laws of physics.
If you were hoping to come back and explain it to your spouse/sibling/Nobel Prize Committee, then yes, you'd need new physics. But if you just wanted to go, that's a problem that you could actually make progress on by studying actual science, rather than sci-fi.
The planet is therefor closer to its star but apparently it may not be tidally locked:
> The four innermost planets are probably tidally locked, but Kepler-186f is in a higher orbit, where the star's tidal effects are much weaker, so the time could have been insufficient for its spin to slow down significantly.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 38.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.emc2-explained.info/Dilation-Calc/
I hope it would look more like the first picture instead of like the second.
Of course, we could probably do that much sooner at 5G or so if in cryogenic stasis tank.
For everyone else it would take longer than 558 years of course.
If you were to goto Alpha Centauri and then back to Earth, you may have spent just 2 years in your rocket. But when you get out of your rocket, you will find that 8 years have gone by on Earth.
Taking a lot of liberties with my explanation, but hope this ELI5 works.
You don't need to go faster than light to get anywhere you want, in any time period you like. The speed of light is not the limiting factor.
The amount of energy available to you, and the tyranny of the Rocket Equation, those are the constraining factors. Those are perfectly ordinary engineering issues, rather than magically hoping to circumvent the laws of physics.
If you were hoping to come back and explain it to your spouse/sibling/Nobel Prize Committee, then yes, you'd need new physics. But if you just wanted to go, that's a problem that you could actually make progress on by studying actual science, rather than sci-fi.
The planet is therefor closer to its star but apparently it may not be tidally locked:
> The four innermost planets are probably tidally locked, but Kepler-186f is in a higher orbit, where the star's tidal effects are much weaker, so the time could have been insufficient for its spin to slow down significantly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-186f