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Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

(www.centauri-dreams.org)
101 points JPLeRouzic | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | 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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baxtr ◴[26 Jun 25 10:01 UTC] No.44385836[source]▶
Maybe not humans, what about robots though?

I recently read this in an interview with Juergen Schmidhuber:

> Of course, such life-like hardware won't be confined to our little biosphere. No, variants of it will soon exist on other planets, or between planets, e.g. in the asteroid belt. As I have said many times in recent decades, space is hostile to humans but friendly to suitably designed robots, and it offers many more resources than our thin layer of biosphere, which receives less than a billionth of the energy of the Sun. Through life-like, self-replicating, self-maintaining hardware, the economy of our solar system will become billions of times larger than the current tiny economy of our biosphere. And of course, the coming expansion of the AI sphere won’t be limited to our tiny solar system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44330850

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rakejake ◴[27 Jun 25 03:38 UTC] No.44393498[source]▶
Or humans with their consciousness uploaded to a silicon or other substrate.

Of course, this is in the realm of science fiction but so is interstellar travel.

Greg Egan's Diaspora has a fantastic treatment of interstellar travel - it involves sending copies of your consciousness to different spaceships traveling to different destinations. On arrival, a preset program will verify if the planel/galaxy is worth waking up to. If not, the clone is terminated.

If more than 1 clone wakes up in a hospitable environment, then you have a problem of two copies of yourself separated by light years.

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1. sdpy ◴[29 Jun 25 09:09 UTC] No.44411479[source]▶
A similar idea appears in a more recent short story, How It Unfolds (2023) by James S.A. Corey. The premise is using a technology called “slow light,” which can clone people and objects using “enriched light.” The National Space Agency scans a group of 200 people (not only their physical forms, but also their consciousness, memories, and feelings) and transmits several thousand copies of this data package across the galaxy. The hope is that, on arrival, each package can "unfold" into a fully reconstructed version of the original team and habitat on some distant alien world.