11 ms·
It's 111 light years away. For all intents and purposes, that's a one way trip right there; irregardless of the rocket equation. Even at relativistic speeds, yo
by archgoon 7y ago
It's 111 light years away. For all intents and purposes, that's a one way trip right there; irregardless of the rocket equation. Even at relativistic speeds, you can't come home anymore.
- ajconway 7y agoTheoretically, you can. At 0.99c 111 light years take about 15 years of ship time to travel.
- archgoon 7y agoYou can make the trip arbitrarily small from your perspective (in theory at least :) ). The issue is that by the time you've made it back home, it's 222 years later. Hence "you can't go home anymore". :)
- stickfigure 7y agoIf you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back.
- repiret 7y agoYou know where I can find one of these interest-bearing accounts that can outpace housing cost inflation?
- fujiters 7y agoWhile not an interest bearing account, investing in an index fund of global stocks should outpace housing. Investing in a REIT should roughly keep pace with housing costs.
- RandomBacon 7y agoBetter do it in different countries and in different currencies and hope none of them get confiscated or have hyperinflation.
- pcrh 7y agoOr maybe a meal at a nice restaurant?
- dragonwriter 7y ago> If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back. If you do it in a country that doesn't allow you to be declared legally dead when you are out of contact for a couple centuries, and if the institutions involved don't collapse, and if the interest on the account outpaces inflation, sure. What percentage of the banks that were around 222 years ago have not failed?
- saganus 7y agoFrom [0] we can see that there are 10 banks founded before 1700 and 24 from 1700 to 1800. So it might not be that far fetched, assuming that the banks keep your accounts open after more than 100 years without use. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_continuous_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_contin...
- swarnie_ 7y agoProbably tiny? Lloyds bank founded 1765 Barclays founded 1736 I doubt any banks in the new world are as old.
- po1nter 7y agoBerenberg Bank founded 1590 (429 years ago)
- 7y ago
- chriswwweb 7y agoNot if you have negative interest rates. I heard on the radio that some European banks want to introduce this.
- Swizec 7y agoSo you can survive the trip but even if you come back home, it’s not home anymore? Imagine leaving 222 years ago and coming back now ...
- atoav 7y agoMany european cities would still exist and the mountains I grew up in front of too. But granted, all people I know would be dead and some I could find in the history books maybe..
- yawz 7y ago> and some I could find in the history books maybe.. Where you would also be, at that stage.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoWhen the French invade Fishguard, Wales in 1797 our hero Gruffyd Rhys Llewellyn goes to get help in the only place where help may be forthcoming. The Heavens! I should make a kickstarter, but I am already in my jammies.
- t3f 7y agoI would recommend reading Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter if you'd like to scratch that theoretical itch playing out one specific way.
- peteretep 7y agoI mean that sounds pretty awesome if you invested your funds well. I'd definitely be willing to be the first person who did that.
- Swizec 7y agoWhere can you invest that would still recognize those funds as yours after 222 years?
- 7y ago
- DidISayTooMuch 7y agoWait, is this correct? Doesn't 111 light-years mean even light takes 111 years to travel through? And light travels at 1c.
- cthalupa 7y agoIt takes 111 light years from our reference point to travel that distance. If photons could perceive things, it would not take them 111 years by their perception.
- jjtheblunt 7y agoi'm pretty sure the assertions means that the 111 years needed would only age the traveler by 15 years
- dkural 7y agoLight does not experience time at light speed - it is stuck in a static moment. So from our stationary perspective, light takes 111 years to come from a 111 light year distance, but from light's perspective it takes an instant.
- gdubs 7y agoEvery time I think I’m closer to understanding matters of time and space...
- cthalupa 7y agoGo watch a Carlo Rovelli lecture on time and loop quantum gravity. Time might not even exist in and of itself.
- PorterDuff 7y agoJust view light as like being in line at the DMV.
- methodover 7y agoSo, actually, like, it's actually really intuitive I feel like: From the perspective of an object accelerating, newtonian physics works totally intuitively. If you had a rocket that could accelerate at 1g indefinitely, you just go faster and faster and faster and you get to any destination you want (even far away!) pretty quickly. And it would be a rather comfortable trip! You'd have Earth-like gravity the whole way. It's really only the observer's perspective that things get confusing. When an observer watches something accelerate, they see it never going faster than the speed of light, no matter how fast it "actually" goes. The trick is time. Time for slow things passes faster than time for fast things. A clock on a very fast rocket ticks much more slowly than clocks on (relatively) stationary things. That's how the paradox is solved. Let's say you wanted to visit the Andromeda galaxy, which is around 2,500,000 light years away. If you had a rocket that could travel at 1g indefinitely, you'd get there in a comfortable 29 years! However, observers on Earth would see the trip taking around 2,500,000 years. If you'd like to play with these numbers yourself, feel free to check out this neat calculator (not made by me) http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel.php http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel...
- amelius 7y agoAnd how much time will it take a person to reach that speed at human-safe acceleration? And how much energy would it take?
- mongol 7y agoI calculate it to take about a year, with 1 g acceleration, but don't take my word for it, am curious to compare with a more authoritative answer.
- caseymarquis 7y agoJust under a year at 1g (according to google. I'm on mobile and would have to derive from F = ma on paper to solve). Energy is variable. I'd assume energy isn't relevant, as it's currently impossible, so we're taking that for granted. Not really that long.
- gradschool 7y agoNot a physicist, but I think it might not be that simple. From our point of view, a ship with constant 1g acceleration increases its speed by 9.8 m/s every second, but people on a ship moving at a significant fraction of c take more than one of our seconds to experience one of their seconds. During the time they experience one of their seconds, the speed increases more than 9.8 m/s, so they must experience greater than 1g acceleration. I haven't done the math but it would be interesting to work out how the acceleration in our reference frame needs to reduce to ensure constant acceleration in the ship's reference frame, and how long it would really take to reach .99c without squashing the passengers.
- nerflad 7y agoIsn't a second now officially defined as a single period of atomic decay of a certain atom (I think Cessium?)? So this theoretical near-lightspeed craft could adjust it's accelerators based on an onboard atomic clock that would not be based on seconds as we tend to perceive them, but on SI seconds. I assume these would be getting longer as velocity approached 1c. Unless radioactive decay is also affected by relativity (obviously I am not a scientist), in which case of course that wouldn't work.
- bena 7y agoWhich would put you in your 50s to 60s if all you did was go there and back.
- 0xffff2 7y agoAnd? Seems unlikely that we would send a small number of people on a 30 year trip. Given 30 years in a tin can with little to do, I'd expect the age range on departure to be ~18+ (with some people knowingly making a one way trip), and the age range on arrival back at Earth to be 0+, due to new additions to the crew mid-flight.
- PorterDuff 7y agoHeck, I managed that without interstellar travel.
- isostatic 7y agoaccelerating at 1G to the mid point, then decelerating at 1g, will mean you’ll get there in about 15.8 ship years, or 115 earth years. Spend twice as long on boats though (32 years) and you can do about 10,000 light years.
- vonmoltke 7y agoA constant acceleration of 1g would cause the ship to hit c in about one ship year.
- Thrymr 7y agoThe ship will never hit c.
- nealabq 7y agoIf the ship travels tens of billions of light years will it eventually be traveling away from it's starting point at greater than c due to the dark-energy expansion of space itself? Or will the ship just red-shift more and more but never disappear from an observer with a very good telescope who stayed home? And what if you drove your ship straight into a super-massive black hole?
- isostatic 7y agoOne theory of the far future (Big Rip) is eventually nearby galaxies will be receeding faster then light, then stars, planets, then even atoms. There's a short story about the Big Rip https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solarisbooks.com/books/newbookscifi/last-contact.asp https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solari...
- guelo 7y agoThe fastest spacecraft humans have produced is the Parker Solar Probe which when it zips around the sun will reach 430,000 mph. At that speed it would take 173,000 years to reach this planet.
- cycop 7y agoGreat! , do that gravity assist a few more hundred times around the sun and we are there in 500 years.
- jerf 7y agoYou can't do a gravity assist around the sun once you've reached solar escape velocity, because you won't be visiting the sun again. If we could pull that trick so easily, we already would have.
- sandworm101 7y agoWell... you could wrap around another star, or two, and come back to this sun for another assist a la Rendezvous with Rama.
- sandworm101 7y agoIt is also the slowest spacecraft. Speed is relative. To get it going that 'fast' when close to the sun the other half of its orbit is correspondingly slower than earth. When launched it accelerated away from earth at speed, but from the perspective of the sun is was actually decelerating, and was moving much slower that it was when attached to the earth.
- soulofmischief 7y agoWe're talking about just escaping the surface gravity, not returning to Earth.
- 0xffff2 7y agoIf you can get there from 111 light-years away, you can probably also solve the higher surface gravity. While the former problem is theoretically solvable in a straightforward way, both are impractical with our current understanding of physics and material science.
- mrmonkeyman 7y agoIrregardless?
- markdown 7y agoregardless
- partiallypro 7y agoBut that's assuming you're traveling at the speed of light, right? In reality it would take much much longer than 111 years.
- Yajirobe 7y agoThe fastest man-made object: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe Travelling at that speed (0,00064c - no relativistic effects) would take ~170,000 years.
- perseusprime11 7y agoAt 111 light-years, we need to create a vehicle that can sustain several generations.