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If you travel close enough to c it wouldn't take very long to the astronaut to get to Proxima Centauri. It's very far from our capability but you're saying it w
by meric 12y ago
If you travel close enough to c it wouldn't take very long to the astronaut to get to Proxima Centauri. It's very far from our capability but you're saying it won't happen in the next thousand years? It sounds like someone in 1200 A.D saying it's impossible for humanity calculate PI to the 100,000th digit within the next 1000 years.
I'm forward time travelling, and have traveled over twenty years in my life time, at a rate of 1 second per second and that's significant enough for me. :)
- quanticle 12y agoThere's a big difference between "it's possible" and "it will happen". I mean, look at air travel for example. Supersonic air travel has been possible since the '70s. But it doesn't happen because it's not cost effective, and the benefit from it never outweighed the cost. I think it's possible that we can to send a human consciousness (physical astronaut, uploaded mind, etc.) to Proxima Centauri in a thousand years. But will we? "It would be amazing", as it turns out, isn't actually a very strong justification for doing anything.
- porsupah 12y agoDoesn't happen now, because the sole craft was eventually retired. (Rather spitefully, too, with BA refusing to cede any to Virgin) There is, nonetheless, Skylon under development, though dreadfully underfunded. If it actually works as expected, SABRE will be a quite remarkable innovation. So far, it's all looking good, including the particularly gnarly issue of cooling the incoming air in extremely little time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)
- jcoffland 12y agore: SABRE, there's no air in space.