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Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

(www.centauri-dreams.org)
92 points JPLeRouzic | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.41s | source
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imoreno ◴[26 Jun 25 06:28 UTC] No.44384709[source]▶
With Alpha Centauri being only 4 light years away, interstellar travel seems almost feasible. But then you consider all the inconvenient details, and realize such a journey would have to take hundreds, maybe thousands or even more years on top of some incredible advances in rocket tech.

If you go to something like Trappist (40 ly) at 0.01c (very optimistic), it's not just that everyone you know will be dead when you arrive. Your entire nation will have disappeared to the sands of time. The landfall announcement you send back will be incomprehensible because of language shifts, and you won't live to see the reply. Meanwhile, such a trip would be an enormous investment, requiring multiple nations to bankrupt themselves, with no hope of even surviving to see the outcome.

With that, it's very hard to imagine interstellar travel being feasible with our current understanding. There would have to be something like FTL travel or wormhole. The only "realistic" development, (much) better engines that can do 0.1c, would not actually change much.

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1. echelon ◴[26 Jun 25 08:30 UTC] No.44385384[source]▶
> it's not just that everyone you know will be dead when you arrive. Your entire nation will have disappeared to the sands of time.

Humans are just a stepping stone. Earth intelligence will transcend our 77 year lifespans and primate brains.

Our lungs are adapted to gas exchange on this particular gravity well and its unique biogeochemistry. There's no reason redox reactions need to happen like this, or indeed even be the primary propulsion mechanism.

This is our frail biases speaking. We are limited by our biology, but we won't be forever.

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2. K0balt ◴[26 Jun 25 14:06 UTC] No.44387570[source]▶
This exactly. Evolution is a stepping stone to engineering., which then will also be subject to evolution. (Is there a word for engineered evolution?)

The trick will be to remain -human- perhaps. Or we just accept the fate of the loser of natural selection, and are replaced by our children of an obsolete god.

I have posited an idea on how this could work and done a bit of world building in that space, perhaps I will overcome my reticence toward writing fiction and publish one day.