Comment by sheepscreek
Comment by sheepscreek 4 days ago
It’s not the destination, it’s the journey :)
Comment by sheepscreek 4 days ago
It’s not the destination, it’s the journey :)
We can instead happily drive our solar system in a different direction by nudging the sun.
At this point in humanity's history, I think that's more feasible than high speed traveling.
Not with light speed travel. At even 1% the speed of light, the travel time diminishes significantly:
- Titan, Io and Ganymede are only 2.5 days away - Pluto is about 23 days
Edit: Even at such speeds, we still can’t visit a nearby star system in a reasonable time-frame. Oh well.
As time passes, the universe is expanding infinitely in every direction from every point.
Even if we could travel at 1 percent the speed of light, the "destination" would be inflating away from us at much greater relatavistic speed.
To your point, this is less an issue with solar or extra solar objects.
Doesn't this depend on the initial distance to the destination? I'm thinking you have to be going ~140M light-years for cosmic expansion to exceed 1%c, and Proxima Centauri is only ~4 light-years away
There's nothing about 0.1c or even 0.999c travel that's detrimental to meatbags. They would both feel exactly the same to the traveler. If your (for now) imaginary rocket could accelerate at a constant, gentle 1G, you could reach 0.1c in about a month (traveler's time), and you could reach 0.999c in about 44 months. Building and fueling such a rocket is the hard part.
Speaking of which, Peter Watts' Sunflower Series has a great and short enough hard-ish scifi story about just such a ship.
10,000 years of empty space to get to the next solar system. Exciting.