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"The star is 2500 light years away from Earth." Found that on google. Doesn't seem so far away :P
by toblender 13y ago
"The star is 2500 light years away from Earth."
Found that on google. Doesn't seem so far away :P
- devx 13y agoYeah, unreachable without FTL travel.
- deletes 13y agoIt would take about 15.6 years [0] to reach the star on a ship capable of a constant 1G acceleration. Here is the explanation and equations: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.h... [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6637131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6637131
- evoloution 13y agoDoes this take the needed deceleration in account? If we are to land there anyway :P
- deletes 13y agoYes, but the real problem is fuel( even with antimatter ). And radiation.
- pdonis 13y agoI agree that the real problem is fuel, but 10 years isn't quite long enough if you are going to accelerate halfway and decelerate halfway to arrive at low speed. For a 2,500 light year trip composed of two 1,250 light year legs, the time experienced by the ship will be (in units where c and a are both approximately 1): 2 * T(1250 lyr) = 2 * (c/a) arccosh (ad/c^2 + 1) = 2 * arccosh(1250 + 1) = 2 * 7.8 = 15.6 yr.
- gnaritas 13y ago15.6 years for the passenger, thousands of years from our perspective.
- Groxx 13y agoMeh. People were willing to go half-way across the world to try living somewhere new, probably never to return. Announce the trip, and you'll have to weed out volunteers pretty viciously.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alex-g 13y agoSo after a few subjective years, you will be overtaken by newer and faster ships, and when you arrive, there will be a flourishing civilization already there to greet you.
- fernly 13y agoAnd the people in the faster ships will be your grandchildren, yup. Plot of Heinlein's "Time for the Stars", pretty much.
- ck2 13y agoIt is dubious we will ever travel faster than 10% the speed of light. But a probe might be able to.
- wikiburner 13y agoNot dubious - speculative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238297 Although, I certainly wouldn't bet against it long term.
- maaku 13y agoIf you did, you'd really be betting on your ability to collect / pay up the debt.
- vectorjohn 13y agoWhat does that even mean? Of course it is reachable without FTL travel. Besides time dilation which could make it a subjectively short trip, there is also cryogenics and other life extension techniques that could get us there. If you accept any ship could get there, you might as well consider that space travel isn't the only technology that will advance.
- ars 13y ago> there is also cryogenics and other life extension techniques that could get us there. You are aware those don't actually exist? People assume they will exist, but we have nothing to base that assumption on except "it would be cool".
- vectorjohn 13y agoBesides the fact I think it's clear they will exist (assuming we don't destroy ourselves somehow), I already addressed that. We're already talking about things that don't currently exist. I can talk about a ship to Mars which doesn't currently exist. But both a Mars trip and cryogenics seem pretty reasonable to me.
- ars 13y ago> it's clear they will exist ???? Based on what exactly? > But both a Mars trip and cryogenics seem pretty reasonable to me. You think those are similar? We could do a Mars trip today with enough money. Every bit of money in the entire world would still not get you cryogenics - it requires a new idea that doesn't exist right now.
- robryan 13y agoThat is arguable, we have the freezing people but going. Sure it is being done in a very destructive way to the human body, it is a bet though that at some point in the distant future technology will get good enough that the current freezing method could be reversed.
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- maga 13y agojust three years at warp 9 =)
- grecy 13y agoIt's strange to realize that even at Warp 9, it still take a very long time to get anywhere much. In the TV shows and movies, they never seem to spend more than a few days at a time going anywhere at warp speed.
- ceejayoz 13y agoHell, in the new movies, you can transport from Earth to the Klingon homeworld instantly, and fly there in like 20 minutes.
- Groxx 13y agoHell, in TOS they went to the edge of the galaxy (or back) in practically no time, under their own power.
- itafroma 13y ago> In the TV shows and movies, they never seem to spend more than a few days at a time going anywhere at warp speed. There are a few canon reasons for this: 1) Ignoring special episodes (and all of Star Trek Voyager) where they use a contrivance to hurl the ship tens of thousands of light-years, the working range of a starship on Star Trek is relatively small: * The distance to the Romulan Neutral Zone, on the outer fringes of Federation Space, is only 28 light years away from Earth. * Deep Space 9 (so named because it's on the outer frontiers of known space) is 70 light years away from Earth. * Oo'nos, the Klingon homeworld, is ~100 light years away from Earth. 2) Ship speed exponentially increases as warp factor increases, and by the time the USS Enterprise-D is in service, warp 9 is fast, but not "I need to get there immediately because every plot shown on TV is an emergency" fast. The maximum sustainable speed for the Enteprise-D is warp 9.6, which is 1,909 times the speed of light. This would allow Picard to reach even Qo'nos from Earth in under 3 weeks. 3) With the exception of the JJ Abrams franchise (where they seem to keep going back to Earth after every mission), the ships featured in Star Trek are generally exploratory: between each episode, they'd roam their mission areas performing routine work. The episode plots would generally revolve around them dealing with an issue that happened to be close to wherever they happened to be at the time. Of course, being a set of TV series and movies, liberties with distances were routinely taken. For example, in the first episode of Enterprise, they say Qo'nos is 4 days away from Earth at warp 4.5, which would place it less than half the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri, the closest star system.