Incentive Trap 2: Minimizing the Wait Time by Paul Gilster on May 9, 2017 When to launch a starship, given that improvements in technology could lead to a much faster ship passing yours enroute? As we saw yesterday, the problem has been attacked anew by René Heller (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research), who re-examined a 2006 paper from Andrew Kennedy on the matter. Heller defines what he calls ‘the incentive trap’ this way: The time to reach interstellar targets is potentially larger than a human lifetime, and so the question arises of whether it is currently reasonable to...