3 ms·

Large interstellar objects are, well, large, so you can see them well in advance and just steer around them. changing courses would be plain impossible You ca

Large interstellar objects are, well, large, so you can see them well in advance and just steer around them. changing courses would be plain impossible You can steer by vectoring your acceleration. It would take about 3 days for a 1G ship to travel from the Earth to the Sun, so it wouldn't add much time to the journey to steer around an object the size of the sun. Ideally you'd identify those objects so far in advance that it would take little course correction to go around them. Smaller objects like asteroids that are too small to see in time to avoid would need to be absorbed by the shielding or destroyed or pushed away by some other method. At near relativistic speeds, this would obviously be a non-trivial problem to solve, but hey, you have unlimited energy to solve it.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
But the faster you go, the more the galaxy is Lorentz contracted from your frame of reference, and therefore the denser the stars are, so dodging gets harder. Also, they're coming at you faster, so you have less time to dodge.
- WJW 5y ago
  > and therefore the denser the stars are, so dodging gets harder. Not sure this is true, since the stars also get "smaller" and therefore harder to hit. Also, while you have less time to dodge you also don't have to dodge "as much" since your vast speed means you move through any zone quite quickly and therefore don't have much time to heat up/get irradiated. You can probably pass by a star relatively closely as long as you are moving fast enough. (From a heat/radiation perspective, solar wind particles might still mess you up good)
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    The stars only get smaller in the direction you're traveling. Perpendicular to that (that is, in the direction you have to dodge), they don't change no matter what your velocity is.
    - mike_hock 5y ago
      But is hitting a star (or a planet) head on a realistic risk?
      - numpad0 5y ago
        Here are my preemptive prayers to lost billion colonists aboard the ships that hit stray planetary bodies between 3450 - 4550 A.D. Your genes and spirits will be carried on by the quadrillions that made it, but for now, may you rest in peace.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

But the faster you go, the more the galaxy is Lorentz contracted from your frame of reference, and therefore the denser the stars are, so dodging gets harder. Also, they're coming at you faster, so you have less time to dodge.

WJW 5y ago
> and therefore the denser the stars are, so dodging gets harder. Not sure this is true, since the stars also get "smaller" and therefore harder to hit. Also, while you have less time to dodge you also don't have to dodge "as much" since your vast speed means you move through any zone quite quickly and therefore don't have much time to heat up/get irradiated. You can probably pass by a star relatively closely as long as you are moving fast enough. (From a heat/radiation perspective, solar wind particles might still mess you up good)
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  The stars only get smaller in the direction you're traveling. Perpendicular to that (that is, in the direction you have to dodge), they don't change no matter what your velocity is.
  - mike_hock 5y ago
    But is hitting a star (or a planet) head on a realistic risk?
    - numpad0 5y ago
      Here are my preemptive prayers to lost billion colonists aboard the ships that hit stray planetary bodies between 3450 - 4550 A.D. Your genes and spirits will be carried on by the quadrillions that made it, but for now, may you rest in peace.