6 ms·

While the statement is obviously true, relatively speaking 700 light years is pretty close when it comes to star systems. It's only ~20 times further away than

• GordonS 4y ago
  Yes, it's "close" in galactic terms, but in human terms it might as well be 7 million light years away.
  • bratbag 4y ago
    Depends on how our propulsion tech advances. From the local timeframe of people on the ship, a constant 1g of acceleration and then deceleration would get people there in a little under 13 years.
    • shiftingleft 4y ago
      How much faster than the speed of light are we going here
      • DesiLurker 4y ago
        coolworlds did a video on constant 1G acceleration travel : https://youtu.be/b_TkFhj9mgk https://youtu.be/b_TkFhj9mgk bottomline, you get progressively closer to speed of light and time slows for you so you can cover larger and larger distance in local frame. problem is finding this 1G drive.
      • tsimionescu 4y ago
        Not at all. But those 13 years are from the perspective of the people on the ship (also, from. Their perspective, the distance they travel is much much smaller). From the perspective of people on Earth, the ship arrives on that planet many thousands of years later. Edit: actually, from the perspective of people on Earth, it will roughly arrive 700+1 years later.
    • ben_w 4y ago
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that have a peak speed of 0.9999961908c, thus a gamma factor of 362.3, and therefore the CMB ahead of you would be blue-shifted from 2.7 K to 989.1 K?
    • hermitcrab 4y ago
      But how do you keep up 1g of acceleration as your ship becomes more and more massive, the faster it goes?
  • hansvm 4y ago
    It's close enough to be useful for generational ventures, and in terms of one-way travel time, it takes much less than 700 years from the perspective of the ship to traverse that distance.
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      > in terms of one-way travel time, it takes much less than 700 years from the perspective of the ship to traverse that distance. Only if either cruising at a large percent of the speed of light, or with constant acceleration. Neither of these is achievable with any technology we know exists, but neither is ruled out by current physics either.
    • simonh 4y ago
      Only if the ship is travelling at close to the speed of light, and we have no reasonable technology likely to be able to achieve that, especially for large vehicles.
  • hwillis 4y ago
    If we can go 1% the speed of light, a 70,000 year journey is roughly the length of time humans have been living in shelters. It's an extremely long time, but it's firmly a social and technical problem. The people who step off that spaceship will have nothing in common with Earth, and even if they spend 95% of their time in suspended animation not aging, they may very well not even speak the same language that their ancestors did when they left here. A 7 million year period is very different. Humans split off from chimpanzees 7 million years ago. The people that step off that ship will probably not be human. Even with radiation shielding, even with genetic engineering, keeping genes stable enough to stay compatible with current humans is... unlikely. It's easy to say they could just have DNA on file, but the actual reality of that challenge is mind-boggling. How do you handle a space ship where you have to account for wind erosion in the hallways?
    • daniel-cussen 4y ago
      People think about space travel exactly in the same terms as the History of European Colonialism. Like exactly. Every first contact movie "take me to your leader" is right out of the letters to the king written by Hernán Cortez and Francisco Pizarro, looting the Aztec and by far the most gigantic, the Kechwa fortune after taking the Inca hostage. That's like 200 years of Chile's current gold production, and this is a mining country with modern technology to the point it exports eg explosives for mining. Just an insane amount of gold whose accounting was not possible to do correctly. Like doing the accounting of a casino from the movie Casino. Gold like it was iron ingots. Fucking stupid stupid amounts of wealth, all for going overseas. So people think, OK, who plays the Europeans? Some movies say Earthlings do, other movies say aliens do. Either way, plunder and pillage. Like one movie, very enlightened, said the aliens just wanted our gold. That's wantable. But like think of it in terms of apes, like a primatologist. Aliens would be going somewhere with shit technology right? Well the real reason would be to get our nice biosphere, before we wreck it long-term ourselves. That they could want. So, for a rough handle for alien's interest in humans, look at primatology or study of cetaceans. Yeah we spend trillions on space travels, rockets, telescopes. I doubt we've even spent a billion on primatology. Cetaceans I think has cost more than a billion. There's just way more money and brains in whales than apes. I think space colonization will be similar to European Colonialism but only for the Solar System. After that, it sucks. And it doesn't stop sucking for at least 700 light-years.
• Aperocky 4y ago
  Correction, about 175 times further away.