Not so much going into it and hoping for a wormhole, but my understanding is that the closer you get to the event horizon the more time slows down. So could a ship somehow get extremely close to a black hole, and as a result maybe 1000 years would pass but it would only feel like 1 year to the crew?
In the future if a spaceship wanted to travel to the future could they get close to a black hole, let time pass rapidly around them and then escape the black hole to enter normal time again?
I have no idea how close you can get to an event horizon before you lose all ability to escape, how much time speeds up the closer you get, etc.
Could black holes eventually be used by a hyper-advanced civilization to do interesting things? Yes. Flying near it to slow down time isn’t feasible with any conceivable method, of course, because no rocket engine using a known method (even antimatter) would have enough performance to escape, and there are tidal forces near black holes that would rip a ship apart.
Will humans crewing a ship do this kind of thing? Absolutely not. In no possible future are humans still flesh and blood and still mortal and also capable of such feats. First of all, the gamma rays would fry you. Second, you’re talking about a centuries long journey. (without Star Trek grade engines just getting to a large black hole takes centuries). And third…again, it’s fucking stupid to have people just aging and dying. Fruit flies can’t use tools, and humans that live just a few decades and then turn into a corpse can’t build starships.
Why use black holes when you can do that now with near light speeds? You don’t need Star Trek engines (they break a lot and you need a Scottish engineer to fix them), but you need something better than we have now, and maybe not as good as something that will allow you escape from near the event horizon of a black hole.
In addition, travel to the future is a risky proposition, what if you get there and find everyone is gone? You may be some kind of primitive being to the people of the future who don’t want you around. And don’t count on interest accruing in that savings account for a thousand years, there are plenty more financial crises waiting to happen in the future.
In principle, you could, even with fragile cargo like humans. In practice, though, if you have the tech to do that, then you probably also have the tech to get the same effect in multiple much easier ways.
It seems to me that a spacecraft could approach a black hole and just slingshot around it, just as it would any other massive body. With sufficient speed it should be able to make a close approach to the event horizon without crossing it (assume radiation is a solved problem here).
While in the stronger gravitational field, relative time would slow down, and the craft would emerge in the future. Well, farther in the future than it normally would anyway.
Umm, maybe I missed the article in scientific America where scientists found a way to shield against gravity and gamma rays. As far as I know, this is not in any way possible, even “in principle”.
You don’t have to get super close to the horizon to achieve something. The closer you get the more the difference will be, so you just get close enough that our meat sack bodies stay intact while achieving some time differential. Also if the black hole is sufficiently large, the tidal forces become less important.
Perhaps a question Chronos could answer is, how close to the horizon do you need to get to slow time to 1/1000 speed, and how big would the BH need to be for it to be survivable? Bonus points for how fast do we need to be able to travel to escape the black hole afterwards.
Gamma ray shielding has been a reality for almost a century now. Solving it for spaceflight is just a weight management problem. As far as gravity, not sure about your concerns here. At least in my scenario they would be on a slingshot trajectory around the event horizon, never near enough to experience significant tidal forces.
Yeah, the only potential problem would be tidal forces, and you can take care of those by just using a sufficiently-large black hole (the one in the center of our Galaxy would work just fine).
The real question is, how are you getting there (or, for that matter, to any other black hole)? For any answer to that question, there are easier answers to the OP’s question, in addition to solutions from other fields, like suspended animation, which are probably easier than interstellar flight.