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Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

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96 points JPLeRouzic | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.249s | 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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dakial1 ◴[26 Jun 25 11:44 UTC] No.44386432[source]▶
I love science fiction because they usually try to play these scenarios in a somewhat feasible future. The 3 Body Problem series (more specifically the 3rd book) goes well into what it would take for humanity to be interestellar even without lightspeed or wormholee tech.

Avoiding spoilers it would basically be through hibernation and/or generational ships. Which basically implies of losing all ties to earth and anyone/anything you left there.

But, then again, why would nations invest in such expensive endeavours if there is no prospect of seeing something back out of it. I imagine only an emergency situation would cause this no?

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1. troyvit ◴[26 Jun 25 14:18 UTC] No.44387685[source]▶
I've been reading some sci-fi by Kate Elliott lately. While she gets around large distances with the usual FTL tech of sci-fi, in-system space battles hew a little more to physics, so that you get situations like, "Crap! The bad guys fired all their missiles at us! We have sixteen hours to decide what to do ...." Fun stuff.

I bet you're right about emergency situations. On top of that, people have been getting on boats and pushing off into the ocean for at least 25,000 years[1] when there was plenty of good land to keep them occupied. It's not that we're talking the same time scales, but rather the fact that they probably did it despite completely unknown time scales. It makes me wonder if the right philosophy or religion will come along that makes somebody try a generation ship for non-emergency reasons.

[1] https://teara.govt.nz/en/pacific-migrations/page-1