3 ms·

17 km per SECOND, not hour, if any site says hour then it's wrong. Here is Voyager 1 and 2s official website, you can see the distance being updated live, you'

by dm2 13y ago

17 km per SECOND, not hour, if any site says hour then it's wrong. Here is Voyager 1 and 2s official website, you can see the distance being updated live, you'll notice that it increases very fast. http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ Make sure you are looking at distance from the sun, not Earth, the earth travels faster than Voyager 1 so sometimes it will actually be getting closer to earth. We do know how to create antimatter, just not how to create amounts large enough to be used (the LHC generates it I think). I'm not optimistic about traveling faster than light anytime soon, but it isn't 100% out of the question. And if an alien civilization captures one of our spacecraft: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec_more.html http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec_more.html

ufmace 13y ago
Ah, looks like I misread things. 17kps makes a lot more sense - 17kph is like bicycle speed. We can create anti-matter all right, but AFAIK, that isn't the exotic matter required by an Alcubierre drive. Anti-matter could in theory be used to create the most efficient rocket drive possible, but apparently even that isn't all that great. According to this http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/images/content/84509main_warp06.gif http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/images/content/84509main_w... sobering chart, even a theoretical anti-matter rocket would require 1 million kg of propellant to send a small capsule past the Centauri cluster in 900 years, without counting stopping. Going back to chemical rockets, there is apparently not enough mass in the entire universe for that rather underwhelming plan! I don't know that FTL is out of the question, but apparently it is impossible to have it without time travel. I'm not looking for any of that to happen tomorrow, and I don't think anybody alive now has a clue when anything like that might be ruled in or out for sure, but with the right theoretical breakthrough, a lot of interesting stuff could potentially happen very fast.

by dm2 13y ago

ufmace 13y ago

Ah, looks like I misread things. 17kps makes a lot more sense - 17kph is like bicycle speed. We can create anti-matter all right, but AFAIK, that isn't the exotic matter required by an Alcubierre drive. Anti-matter could in theory be used to create the most efficient rocket drive possible, but apparently even that isn't all that great. According to this http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/images/content/84509main_warp06.gif http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/images/content/84509main_w... sobering chart, even a theoretical anti-matter rocket would require 1 million kg of propellant to send a small capsule past the Centauri cluster in 900 years, without counting stopping. Going back to chemical rockets, there is apparently not enough mass in the entire universe for that rather underwhelming plan! I don't know that FTL is out of the question, but apparently it is impossible to have it without time travel. I'm not looking for any of that to happen tomorrow, and I don't think anybody alive now has a clue when anything like that might be ruled in or out for sure, but with the right theoretical breakthrough, a lot of interesting stuff could potentially happen very fast.