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48 light years is in our back yard. Close enough that we could probably develop a probe to get there in the next few centuries and check it out. What are the
by jimbokun 3mo ago
48 light years is in our back yard.
Close enough that we could probably develop a probe to get there in the next few centuries and check it out. What are the current popular candidates for propulsion systems capable of accelerating to near the speed of light?
- JMKH42 3mo agolaser propelled solar sails are the only plausible solution at the moment and it is not a given that even that is possible. Lots of engineering challenges there that may not have solutions. other ideas: 1. be way more patient 2. anti matter based propulsion (more out there than solar sails) 3. nuclear bomb based propulsion One issue is as you get to these speed little bits of dust will anhillate the probe, so you need some kind of shielding, raising the mass budget, making it all the harder. A solar sail has to be able to survive holes getting poked it in it and still working, etc.
- WarmWash 3mo agoIf humans can't make the trip, what's the point besides maybe satiating curiosity in a few hundred years from now?
- sebastianconcpt 3mo agoClaude: give me all the schematics and operations manual of a production grade starship that can travel faster than light. Make no mistekaes.
- 0x59 3mo agoI wouldn't bet on and as I understand theory allows a shorter routes. Major caveat is weve never observed them and their existence doesn't guarantee they're traversible. What's exciting to me is that the existence of such a planet provides fuel for more research into the field.
- baron816 3mo agoInterstellar travel is probably not ever going to happen. Even if we have antimatter propulsion (which is still probably not practical even under ideal circumstances), we’re still talking hundreds of years of travel time to get to somewhere like this star. This also goes for aliens visiting Earth. Interstellar travel is just so impractical that I don’t think anyone has come on safari to Earth.
- jfyi 3mo agoA generation ship is probably doable with some level of conceivable technology. We just have to figure out how to be self sufficient out there then we have all the time in the world, or universe. That's a big "just", I know.
- bluGill 3mo agoWe also need to make it last. The pyramids are not very old on a cosmic scale and the things that make them last are a dead end for spacecraft.
- stevenwoo 3mo agoThe political challenge of funding a laser program just for research for centuries seems just as daunting - lacking the capability for some self repairing, self healing devices, the automated or (lobster-ai) probe going to stars is just as far away as when Charles Stross first wrote about it in Accelerando some twenty years ago. Given the collapse of political norms, looking back, the decades long research projects of the US space program appear to be soon relics of the past.
- Jeff_Brown 3mo agoOne of the Voyager probes measured the density of the interstellar vacuum at 80,000 protons (and the same number of electrons) per cubic meter. A proton going through a piece of aluminum foil delivers a roughly constant amount of energy regardless of speed; a relativistic proton will pinch through and carry most of its energy with it. (No punchline; I just think that's cool. I understand that the real problem is the rare dust grain, not the ubiquitous gas.)
- jonathaneunice 3mo agoAstrophage
- ErenayDev 3mo agoProject Hail Mary :)
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoBack yard meaning we can see it but never touch it. If the ship to get there was ready today, it would get there in the year one-million? Back yard is Mars, Venus, moon. And I'm being generous with Mars and Venus.
- detritus 3mo agoYeah, if your username is any indication of your age, you've possibly taken much the same trajectory of pessimism that I have. As a youth, I assumed we'd be hitting multiple Cs or bending space time when I was an adult; As an adult I thought we might get a percentage of C and conquer the solar system; Now I realise Just How Much Effort it would be to accomplish much of any value on our own Moon, never mind Mars. I still hold on to the idea that very long term we might make strides in our own solar system, but it is a depressingly-longer timescale than I always used to believe. Unless we have some magic-level shift in our understanding of physics, we're never getting anything beyond Von Neumann probes to other stars, and even then we're talking thousands of years.
- DaveZale 3mo agoneed to get small fusion reactors online, then many options blossom. And work out safe systems for hibernation, maybe rotate the crew in shifts Oh yeah this is the stuff of science fiction coming to life
- criddell 3mo agoIf we had a probe in orbit around this planet, do we have a way to stream data across 48 light years with any kind of reliability?
- gibybo 3mo agoSend a lot of them and have them act as relays
- DaveZale 3mo agowhy, so they can watch corporate news from earth to get depressed? /s Actually, it's a great question. Even if we have single photon sensitivity detectors, just what kind of power would a laser need? Or would it be some other area of the emf spectrum? Or some other kind of communication? Sci fi ventures into gravitational waves sometimes
- JMKH42 3mo agoSmall fusion reactors don't really solve any of the key challenges. You need reaction mass to accelerate, you run out of reaction mass way too quickly even with a magical energy source on board to throw it out the back of the ship really fast.
- dijksterhuis 3mo ago> in the next few centuries assuming we can make it another few centuries, which seems increasingly unlikely.
- andy_ppp 3mo agoProbably more likely that we work out how to fold spacetime than we get there in anything like a high enough percentage of the speed of light - the fastest object we ever made travelled at something like ~0.064% * C so we are looking at ~750 years with current technology and presumably we'd need to switch on the probe in 3/4 of a millennium and figure out how to slow it down and get it into some sort of orbit around the planet. 750 years is hard for me to get excited about even as a vampire.
- buildbot 3mo agoHonestly a near millennia long expedition would be very cool, and doesn’t seem too long on the scale of space stuff.
- detritus 3mo agoPerhaps, but it is horrifically long in terms of human stuff.
- andrewflnr 3mo agoYep. We haven't really figured out how to do a good government that lasts more than 200 years. Maybe unless you think monarchy is good, in which case I still don't want to share a spaceship with you.
- dingaling 3mo agoTynwald, the Isle of Man's parliament, has operated continuously for over 1000 years
- cadamsdotcom 3mo agoHow's their space program coming along ;p pretty spacious place, ach!
- andrewflnr 3mo ago
- quaintdev 3mo agoIf we design a probe that travels at speed of light it would reach there in 48 years and it would send back what it's seen after another 48 years. It would take multiple generations of scientists to work on this project. The longest we have worked on, are Voyager projects. Can we expect that level of commitments from our governments or corporations? Voyager became successful because people could see distant futures. We can barely plan few years ahead.
- functionmouse 3mo agoWe cannot design a probe that travels at the speed of light.
- dhosek 3mo agoThis is where English’s defective subjunctive makes life harder: The point wasn’t about the practicality of the probe from a scientific position, but rather pointing out that even in a best-case scientific scenario, the political-economic-cultural forces are against us.
- slfnflctd 3mo ago> Can we expect that level of commitments from our governments or corporations? Clearly, right now we cannot. This is one of the worst obstacles to progress in these areas that I see, and I don't see any obvious way to fix it. The situation we're currently in would've been utterly unfathomable to me 30 years ago. I have lost a great deal of the hope and optimism I held in the past. Interstellar exploration is but one of many fields where we are suffering due to short term thinking.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoFind a way to sell ads on it.
- JMKH42 3mo agoShort term thinking isn't why we are suffering. We are suffering because there are no promising avenues to pursue. If you think of one, bring it up.
- small_model 3mo agoWe have as much chance as a human stepping inside a bacteria (i.e. physics makes it near impossible)
- creesch 3mo agoJust going to recycle this comment I made in reply to an almost identical comment as yours. I don't think you folks realize how big space actually is. The speed of light is 1079 252 848 km/h, the fastest space craft ever made was the Parker Solar probe (using a sling shot) clocking in at 692 000 km/h. So at that speed it would take, 1559 years to travel one light year. This planet sits at a distance of 48 light years, so it would 74 832 years to get there. Just for good measure, when it gets there it would also take 48 years for us to know that since radio travels at the speed of light. Note, that the speed of the spacecraft I mentioned was the peak speed. Space is big, really big.
- chrsw 3mo agoScience fiction has entertained and inspired millions of people and we should all be grateful for that but it has also distorted what people think space really is. When you consider the scale of space it becomes pretty understandable why the Milky Way isn't teeming with civilizations sending large amounts of mass all over the galaxy. A realization one comes to despite the facts that it has taken humans a blink of an eye (on a galactic timescale) to go from tools to rockets and the Milky way is billions of years older than the entire history of the Earth.
- teachrdan 3mo agoI blame Star Wars, kinda. Watching it with my kid, I can't help but notice that everywhere they travel in space -- even by accident -- they end up by a planet that can support human life in terms of temperature, atmosphere, and gravity. Mandalore (the Mandalorian home planet, natch) has a moon that doesn't only support life; it also has the exact same gravity as Mandalore! Sentient life in hospitable environments is as unavoidable in the Star Wars universe as it is absent in ours.
- globular-toast 3mo agoProject Hail Mary does a pretty good job, although probably doesn't come across in the film. SF that doesn't even bother using wormholes or some other FTL travel (e.g. warp speed) is quite annoying, though.
- SirHackalot 3mo agoThis is so exciting.
- seydor 3mo agowhy don't they check us out first?
- SirHackalot 3mo agoHave you seen our track record of violence and general ignorance? I wouldn’t poke us with a ten light year pole.