Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

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.

It's always a bit revealing, with these kids of interstellar missions, how people reveal their own unseen biases.

Clearly such a mission is beyond the capabilities of our world currently. Like, obviously such a mission is something that capitalism cannot accomplish. That communism or anarchism or any -ism just cannot do. And I think that when people look at jaunts out to Alpha Centauri and think in terms of cost, they whole thing is hopeless from the get-go.

To make something like a trip out to Vega, even with just a probe one way at .1c, that's 500 years (right?). We can't fathom doing that right now as staying around to check out any answer. The ultimate 'plant trees in whose shade you'll never sit.'

Generation ships out there, even with magic hibernation tech, I just don't think we have the mental capabilities as great apes to think about this properly. The time scales, the advances in tech, the costs, just even thinking about things in this way shows to me that we're not at all ready to be serious about this.

You don't build a ship by teaching people how to hew oaks or caulk bulkheads. You build a ship by teaching people to yearn for the sea.

Space is still 'not worth it'. Until just being there in the void elicits the same feelings you get when reading about the bowsprits, white with sea-foam, before a quick and fast wind, look, we're not going to do this.

We have to love the trip itself first. The first stars until morning. The good ship to guide by them.