: Oh, and time dilation works in the opposite direction. If you're traveling
: close to the speed of light, your clock ticks slower, your delta-t is
: gonna be bigger. That is to say, time in the universe around you is what's
: traveling faster. So if you go .99c to get somewhere, what seems to you to
: be an hour may very well be 10 hours to the outside universe (if you want,
: I could get an exact number, just chug through the relation with .99c in
: place of v in the gamma term...but the point is clear enough.) So time
: dialation actually slows you down, it doesn't speed you up. In a kind of
: weird way, it's the universe's way of bringing ballance and making things
: more difficult for us poor lil' sentient primates. ^_^
Er, time dilation work exactly the same as suspended animation, as far as time-relevant effects go. If you had a magic spaceship that could instantly jump to .999_ c, but there was no time dilation, but you had perfect suspended animation (and say the whole cockpit was your stasis pod, for simplicity of illustration), you would set your ship's trajectory/coordinates/autopilot, hit "go", be suspended, and "instantly" wake up x light years away, slightly more than x years later to the outside world. On the other hand, if you had such a ship and there *was* time dilation (as there is in the real world), you wouldn't have to bother with the suspended animation, as you would set your ship's trajectory/coordinates/autopilot, hit "go", time on the ship would stop while you travelled, and so "instantly" you'd find yourself x light years away, slightly more than x years later to the outside world.
In fact, my favorite scifi stasis method just is artificially induced temporal dilation, like the Slaver stasis fields used in Larry Niven's Known Space universe. If your ship has a stasis field, if you ever take serious damage the whole ship is instantly frozen in time, and thus impervious to change and thus damage, until the danger passes. From the inside, you're cruising along and suddenly "whoa the stars changed, what hit us? Where are we?" There's a great example of this in one of the Ringworld books, can't recall which at the moment...
