3 ms·
We can visit up to a few tens of solar systems in a few hundred years, if we could develop a space-ship powered by a black hole, antimatter, or some advanced or
by devx 13y ago
We can visit up to a few tens of solar systems in a few hundred years, if we could develop a space-ship powered by a black hole, antimatter, or some advanced or innovative hybrid fusion engine (there were talks about one from the 60's around here).
Colonizing a few solar systems out of the 100 or so we can visit with such a ship that reaches a large fraction of the speed of light, should be "enough" for the next 1,000 years or so.
By year 3,000, we'll probably figure out something faster than that, to really begin exploring the whole galaxy.
- gliese1337 13y agoBlack holes naively look like a great way to get 100% mass-to-energy conversion, but when you really look into it, things aren't that great. To get more energy output, you want the black hole to be small (to have a high curvature in the event horizon); but, black holes that are small enough to give reasonable output are also too small (smaller than an atom) to reasonably feed new matter into. Meanwhile, black holes big enough to feed fuel into have an incredibly terrible power-to-weight ratio. And that's assuming that black holes even work the same way when they get that small. Quantum gravity could easily screw things up even more (or make them more convenient; who knows?)