Is it worth colonizing a planet that travels near the speed of light?
There is a planet that is orbiting around not a single star, but the core of a galaxy. It is independent of the other solar systems in the galaxy, but is affected by the center of mass of the core. It is orbiting very near the speed of light. It does have a clean orbit, meaning, it does not collide with any other planets or stars in the galaxy while it's orbiting around the core.
It is very difficult to land a spacecraft on this planet as only a few civilizations in the galaxy can approach a significant fraction of the speed of light, therefore only the most advanced ones can come close to the planet and land on it.
The question is: would it be worth it to colonize this planet for any reason? Politically, economically or from a military standpoint? Or use it as a treasury, or anything? Would we have any use for it? Would it be worth any investment?
(The technology to live in very cold places, far from stars is already developed and established, so even if this planet does not have an atmosphere and very cold, cities could be build on it which can support life with existing technology)
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/45019. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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As a few of the others have said, due to time dilation, this planet wouldn't be very useful as a colony. Between the speed and the proximity to the SMBH, it would probably be one of those situations where every hour that you spend on the planet, a hundred years go by in the rest of the galaxy*.
But there is one thing that it could be used for, and that's long term storage, especially of data.
Scientists have looked into all kinds of long term data storage methods, trying to find something that could last 1000 years or longer.
But by using the time dilation you no longer have to worry about that at all. Send a library probe to the planet, and 20,000 years is only a few days on the planet.
Updating and retrieving information would be slow, but possible. You simply fly your ship near by and use a laser to make your data request. The library receives the request, the super computers do the lookup and 3 ms later it uses its own communication laser to send the information back.
Back on the ship it's been 3 months, and the reply comes back with the recipe for how to make yum yum sauce that had been lost in the last galactic collapse.
* This is only an example.
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