o travel to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, which is 4 light years away, even traveling at the speed of light would take 8 years round trip (Hewitt 228). The center of our galaxy is something like 30,000 light years away and at the speed of light would take 30,000 years to get there. We could not possibly survive that long. These arguments fail to take in to account of time dilation, though. Time for a stationary observer on earth and for an astronaut on a spaceship of high velocity is different. A person’s heart beats to the rhythm of the realm it is in. One realm of time seems the same as any other to the person in the realms, but not to an observer outside that realm that can see the difference. As an example, astronauts traveling at 99% the speed of light could make a trip to the star Procyon that is 11.4 light-years away in 23 earth years round trip (Hewitt 229). Because of time dilation, it would seem that only 3 years passed for the astronauts, their clocks would be 3 years older; they would be biologically only 3 years older (Hewitt 229). It would be the mission control people that would appear to be 23 years older. The question is why does this happen. Let’s say that we are in our hometown, looking at a grandfather clock in the center of town. The clock reads 12:00 noon. Light from the sun bounces off the face of the clock and hits our eyes. We then turn our head and the light misses us and travels off into space. In space, there is a space ship that is traveling at the speed of light. An astronaut looks out his passenger-side window and sees the reflection of the clock. It reads 12:00 noon. As he continues to move at the speed of light, he keeps up with the reflected face of the clock. In the space ship time would pass as normal, but time in the universe would have seemed to stop. This might sound like cosmic bologna but the idea has been proven. In 1975 Professor Carl Tllie of the University of Maryland tested t...
