“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

This is happening 124 light years away from earth.

That means if we develop a way to make a space ship accelerate at 1g for a long period of time, you could go there in just 10 relativistic years.

Unfortunately, whilst science allows such a rocket, our engineering skills are far from being able to build one.

It would still be >124 years from the perspective of people on Earth, though.

If you find that sort of thing interesting... I don't always know how seriously to take the things on this channel, but I discovered Fraser Cain not so long ago and find the ideas mentioned in the interviews to be fascinating, for example "Interstellar Travel Without Breaking Physics with Andrew Higgins" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkGRVvA23qI (warning: it's over an hour)

Calling it simply an engineering issue is not properly conveying the ridiculousness of such a journey. For a small space ship of 1000 tons, this would take ten thousand times the current yearly energy consumption of mankind. So we'd need to figure out how to generate the energy and then store it on a space ship before even thinking about the engineering.

And that's ignoring the mass of the fuel. The classical rocket equation has the mass going exponentially with the velocity, which makes this endeavor even more mind bogglingly ridiculous. We'd actually need 2 million years worth of our current yearly energy consumption.

It's fun to think about, but being clear about the challenges puts quite the damper on it.

> The classical rocket equation has the mass going exponentially with the velocity

This made me think that F = G((m1m2)/rr) is good enough to go to the Moon, but not good enough to give us GPS.

Maybe some discovery could help us build antimatter drives one day.

It does not have to be a chemical rocket. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

I wasn't talking about chemicals.

My computation assumed an antimatter engine. Any drive is bound by conservation of energy and momentum.

I guess you wanted to object to an propulsion drive. Sure, you can do some fly by maneuvers or use earth bound laser propulsion, but I'm not convinced that it will put a dent in it for a regular space ship.

Also, the starshot concept won't help you with slowing down. I was assuming you actually wanted to exit the spaceship upon arrival.

While still ludicrously optimistic, there's a vast gulf between "20% the speed of light" and "constant 1g acceleration for 10 years", energy-wise.

Seriously, most if not all of humanity's issue is our current energy wall. I truly wish we can invest more in energy as compared to AI because I truly believe that most AI agents are roughly the same and now are benchmark maxxing and even google's gemini is really really cool. Maybe now training it even further has less reward for the cost?

I truly wish energy could be a solved issue. I think clean energy can be great of two types, solar and nuclear, though nuclear can require a lot of expertise to build it once and operation costs, (I am not talking about the risk of nuclear reactor exploding since its just a fraction of current risks)

I personally prefer solar as its way more flexible though I am okay with nuclear as well

Mainly the issue in solar is of battery, if I understand it correctly. So We just need to really focus as a civilization to the humble battery.

Our energy production grows exponentially. For a type I civilisation, producing that kind of energy would be possible. For a type II it would be trivial. In any case the timescales involved are measured in centuries.

That's mainly because our population roughly grew exponentially lately. That won't continue.

Energy production is not something self-amplifying like a population of rabbits, so there is no fundamental reason why energy production per capita should grow indefinitely.

But sure, how you would turn sunshine into antimatter at astronomical rates might be an interesting problem to think about. But my original point that basically dismissing this as an engineering issue is a bit dishonest still stands.

I don't think there will ever be a time when energy is a 'solved' problem.

The more energy you have access to, the more uses you'll find for energy, and therefore the more energy you'll want to have access to.

If you can somehow make a ship capable of constant acceleration at 1G, and had enough shielding on it to protect it against the radiation, you can travel to any point in the observable universe, in a human lifetime.

If you just keep accelerating and left as a 20 year old, you'd be in your 50s when you saw the final stars born and die in 100 trillion (earth) years time.

That's how crazy relativity and torchships are

That is the most believable but bizarre thing I've read today. Maybe this week. It's probably tied for the month.