RTD
Relative Time Displacement is a phenomenon observed since the advent of MEST space travel, but it is always of personal impact to the family and friends of those involved.

The members of the Alpha-Centauri expedition, for example, experienced RTD of 8.4 years upon return to Earth, and most of the personnel adjusted without any special trauma.

However, the 33.5 year displacement of Niels and Marucia is the longest RTD recorded to date, and it remains to be seen what the long-term reactions will be.

If the Jupiterian-proposed Aldebaran expedition takes place, the participants will experience RTD of 53 years each way, for 106 years in all. Volunteers may be hard to find.

Relative Time
Space is full of Relative Time. Everyone knows how any specific time-frame is determined by velocity in the natural order of the Physical Universe. People travelling through space are often living in faster or slower time than us on Earth, depending on their velocity in relation to us. The faster they go, the slower they live, until the Speed of Light=zero time.

The only constant we have had is the Speed of Light itself--that's always the same, no matter what your relative time-frame is, which seems to create a paradox, but is in fact consistant with the structure of the Universe.

However, MEST techniques "warp" that structure and now allow Time to be independant of Velocity.

This has been used to advantage in scientific experiments which would have taken many years to run, being compressed down to minutes, or even seconds of our time. The radioactive element half-life experiments done at Newer Delhi Research Laboratories are the classic example of how a million years RTD were reduced to 45 minutes of lab time.

Then there was the sad story of the older man (39) who was obsessively in love with a very young girl (14), so he volunteered for a MEST- generated RTD experiment. He was in zero- time stasis for 10 years, and when he came out he was the same age, and the young girl was then 24 years old--but she had since married another older man (40) two years before.

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