A Nonlethal Time Dilation Field

I want a way to enclose an area (building-sized and on Earth, let's say) in a field that warps spacetime so that time appears to pass 100x slower within it. You don't need to explain how the field got there or what effect could produce it, only lay out a consistent framework that it operates under. (i.e. I don't need explanations for what kinds of relativistic effects would result in a field like that - just assume it works by magic). It doesn't need to conserve energy or momentum (I suspect it'll be nearly guaranteed NOT to conserve them, since the barrier breaks Lorentz invariance). It just has to have 3 features:

1. Within the barrier, it feels just like being in normal space, except that if you emerge from the field after (what feels like) an hour, it will have been more than 4 days.
2. People can pass through the barrier without protective gear and without being crushed by their own skeletons, burned by a shell of captured photons, ripped apart by expanding space, etc.
3. Conditions inside the field are hospitable to humans as well (i.e. I'd rather toxic levels of CO2 didn't build up inside the field). This is what dooms the naive answer of just setting time to pass 100x slower in the field with no other changes.

Anything that fulfills those conditions is fair game - I just want to know if it's possible. The edge of the field can taper gradually if you want, with the speed of time smoothly changing from 1x to 100x normal. You can make it so that space inside the region becomes physically larger, as do the people who enter it, if that helps. Not saying it will, just that enlarging things 100x might offset the pressure at the barrier, though I personally haven't been quite able to get it to work.

Issues to address:

• The field is open to the air, which means that if the rate of time is just strictly different inside, atoms outside the field will be moving 100x faster, so they enter the field 100 times more often than they leave. By this logic, the air inside the field should be at lethal pressures, regardless of whether or not the barrier is a smooth gradient.
• How does light interact with the barrier? Assume that, other than any spacetime-warping effects, it's transparent. My first instinct is that, since much more light enters the field per second than leaves it, the outside seems bright to the people inside and everything inside appears dim to those outside. Not too problematic, but I can imagine fixes to the previous bullet point causing issues here.
• We need to find the limiting factor for what about being in a time gradient would kill a person first. Certainly, blood pressure differences could cause issues, but I imagine the brain's sensitivity to timing differences would kill at much gentler gradients. Hard to put numbers to that, though.

Creative answers are welcome! Maybe the whole inside area is spinning! You know, interesting angles like that, except that they actually solve the problems instead of making things worse.

posted almost 5 years ago

Gilad M‭

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