4 ms·

At Voyager-I speed (17km/s) we need just 688k years to get there. Not bad considering the humble satelite doesn't accelerate anymore.

• mtgx 10y ago
  I doubt we'll attempt serious inter-stellar travel before we figure out antimatter or black hole-powered engines. So we may have to wait a century or two. This century we should be more worried about making fusion-powered intra-solar system travel a common thing, and about establishing large colonies on Mars and several moons.
  • kakarot 10y ago
    I don't know about all of that speculation, but you did give me a nice mental image of a barren, battle-scarred solar system littered with battleships containing black holes, ready to cause catastrophe at any moment, much like the nuclear wastelands of the Arctic.
    • SapphireSun 10y ago
      The black hole engines he's referring to glow very hot because they're very small, meaning that the surface of the hole is large compared with its volume. This allows for very bright hawking radiation if I understand correctly. If you stop feeding them they disappear within hours, years, or decades depending on how big they are.
    • mtgx 10y ago
      Yeah, black holes scare me, too. But to me it looks like the most "realistic" solution for travelling 10+ light-years. If we learn how to create cheap antimatter, we may be able to use that, too, but I'm not so sure if we could store that much on the ship for the roundtrip. A blackhole could last us a lot longer (I think around 100 light years, last I read about it - I don't remember the space ship's speed, but probably like 30% of light speed).
  • hcarvalhoalves 10y ago
    > So we may have to wait a century or two. It took some thousands of years to be able to circumnavigate the planet, and some centuries after that to do it quickly and safely. It feels IST in a matter of centuries from now is extremely optimistic.
    • mtgx 10y ago
      100 years if probably too optimistic. 200 years probably isn't. Don't forget our technological progress has been exponential. We've had more progress in the past 100 years than in the entire human history. We're also supposed to create the "singularity" this century, which will give us orders and orders of magnitude higher intelligence than what we have today. Hopefully we can use that intelligence to create those engines.