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Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

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93 points JPLeRouzic | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | 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. CJefferson ◴[26 Jun 25 12:35 UTC] No.44386811[source]▶
I used to often hear people joke that because of Moore's law, there was no point running any computation which would take longer than 4 years, as you'd instead be better to wait 2 years for computers to double in power, then run your problem then.

Interstellar travel probably has a similar problem, even if you have an engine that can do 0.1c, you have to be sure in 5 years you won't have one that can do 0.2c, or that ship would beat you.