/sci/ - Science & Math

The speed of light may have set the ultimate limit on interstellar travel, but we can't get anywhere even close to that, due to the energy requirements. And you have to remember that however fast you get, to cross interstellar space in years to decades, you have to find a means of slowing down when you arrive. That's an enormous problem.

Humanity would probably break itself economically in making a single starship that goes 10% of LS, and somehow slows down when it gets to Alpha Centauri, and somehow remains functional and life-supporting for the entire the 43-yr trip, and then remains functioning while habitats are built by the voyagers in the AC system. Such a vessel would cost trillions of dollars. $10 trillion is the absolute minimum... and I still have no clear idea how it would attain 10% of LS for that price, not to mention how it would then slow down 43 years later, and how it could do all of that with the necessary mass to keep the voyagers alive and sane for that period of time.

World GDP at this time is $70 trillion. I can see that it's physically possible to allocate 10% of that each year, for 5 years, to reach a $35 trillion mission cost for ONE massive vessel outfitted for a 43-yr trip to Alpha Centauri. So what will it take to con everyone into giving up 10% of their production for each year of a 5-yr period in order to make this silly gesture towards the stars?

One Japanese physicist talks about doing it through bending space. compressing it ahead and expanding it behind. There would be no travel time though through this method. It would be near instantaneous.

>>5188073

We will have colonized our solar system FAR before we ever send human trips out to explore other systems. We need to focus on that first, since exploring/colonizing other systems is so far removed. We likely won't even be biologically human by then, though. Or at least we'll have solved the aging problem by then. So the 50 year trip won't be that big of a deal.

Remember, by the time you get the vessel up to 10% of LS, the impacts of interstellar dust upon the vessel's prow become a huge threat. You'd have to basically launch a specially-formed asteroid, with an equally massive prow of volatiles that can absorb impacts (ablation method) as well as be storage for the colony's volatiles. We'd have to carefully understand the ablation rate, since the colony can run out of the ablation shield halfway there or something like that.

It would be the biggest engineering feat Humanity had ever done. Nothing else could compare. And you'd still take the significant risk that the massive vessel would impact some piece of gravel at 10% of LS that would pierce the shield and pretty much vaporize the interior of the ship.

>>5188124
> One Japanese physicist talks about doing it through bending space.

Please. We're having a serious discussion. "Bending space" is science fiction. Nobody's demonstrated that they can 'bend space' at all.

>>5188138

Pretty much. And we're making precisely ZERO serious attempts to colonize the solar system. We remain on Earth and pretend on message boards that we're going to be the space-faring species that we read about all the time in our scifi books.

>>5188150
shut the fuck up meatbag

>>5188124
That would actually be a Mexican scientist. It cracks me up because this literally is Warp Drive that relies on a theoretical Warp Bubble to travel faster than light. It's like the universe just made a TNG reference.

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

This sort of technology is being developed now, and if it works we could quite suddenly have access to multiple star systems. Now of course this is all theoretical, and there are many hurdles ahead, but the idea itself is quite astounding IMHO.

>>5188124

Michio Kakku?

>>5188178
Bah, the interior will be bathed in burning death if it went FTL

>>5188156

Politics really. Just stands in the way of anything that would have been awesome. I remember someone here linking a picture depicting every Earth-to-Mars mission/plan NASA made that got struck down by the feds since 1970 or so.

>>5188178
> This sort of technology is being developed now,

LOL! It is? Give me any link to anyone who as actually "bent space".

OH WAIT YOU CAN'T. Stop pretending scifi is scifa.

>>5188178

Did you or other retards actually bother READING your link?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Difficulties

Yeah, 'difficulties', like it's fucking impossible. READ IT. The phrase "violate various energy conditions" doesn't mean you're going to accomplish it, retard.

>>5188520
>Give me any link to anyone who as actually "bent space".
http://www.yourmom.com/

See, it's because in GR massive objects bend space.

And dot com implies that she's a commercial entity.