At 4Xs the speed of light it will still take 15k years to get from one side of the galaxy to the other.
“4 orders of magnitude” <> 4x, but
(4(10)^4)C
Heh, what if we are just so ignorant today that all of this becomes a joke many years from now? Maybe all of this our math is just not wrong but way wrong. What if our ideas about space travel are so backward that it becomes just another wives tale (in the future of course). Maybe our whole perception of space and distances is just wrong!
Just a bit of food for thought...heh. The future holds many strange and wonderful things...
Four orders of magnitude is not 4X.
1 -> 10 is 1 order of magnitude.
1 -> 100 is two orders.
1 -> 1,000 is three.
1 -> 10,000 is four.
So that's ten thousand times the speed of light... (1 year) / 10,000 = 52.5948766 minutes, or about an hour.
The 25 nearest stars to our solar system lie in a range of 4.2 to 11.7 light years; so if we could travel that speed, we could get there in less than 12 hours.
An order of magnitude is 10 and a fourth order of magnitude is 10,000
“At 4Xs the speed of light it will still take 15k years to get from one side of the galaxy to the other. “
The kids are going to nag you the whole way and you’ll have to stop at Betelgeuse to ask for directions.
Voyager 1 is 35 years old. Imagine if we launched a proper robotic probe with a proper engine on it. We would be able to find out which of these "earthlike" planets in our own interstellar neighborhood are truly suitable for colonization.
I'd sign up to found New America - no commies allowed.
Not "4X the speed of light".....four ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE (10,000X) the speed of light. Makes those pesky photons look like aged and decrepit snails.
It may just be that the author of the headline is math-challenged, but 4 orders of magnitude would mean 1000x the speed of light. It's still gonna take a while to get from one side of the galaxy to another. Hell, it still would take a long time to travel between stars, but it is more or less doable at that speed, at least for nearby stars, i.e., those within 50 or so light years.