One part of me says that interstellar travel will never be possible. The distances are just too huge. Another part is less realistic but more optimistic. Having lived through the computer revolution and witnessed how fast a technology can advance given a profit incentive (I thought my 16 megahertz computer was state of the art until about 3 months later when it was suddenly 1/3 the speed of contemporary ones), I wonder if the same thing can happen with space travel.
I think Elon Musk is already on another planet.
A day will come when some whiz kid cracks the code that enables faster than light travel, and relegates Einstein to the dark ages of physics.
May not happen in our lifetimes, but it’s coming.
Even if you could go 1% the speed of light that is still 1,860 miles per second or 6,696,000 miles per hour. If you could bleed 25 miles per hour off of that every second it would take 3 days to come to a complete stop. If you have ever had to slam on the brakes you know that quick of a stop does not feel to good.
The answer is no. There is no physical law preventing computing power from increasing and chipsize decreasing. There are the fundamental laws of the universe that govern how fast you can go. First the universal speed limit - the speed of light. Next Newton's laws: the conservation of momentum and e = 1/2mv2. Next thermodynamics 2 laws: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and the entropy of the universe always increases.
Oddly enough this proposal doesn't violate any of these, so theoretically it might work, buy how you can get enough of a power source into a microsized chip to transmit a detectable signal 24,000,000,000,000 miles remains somewhat of a puzzle and how an ultra low mass object traveling at 1/5 light speed could possible survive its encounters with stray atoms in the interstellar medium I have no idea, and I suspect the proponents of this idea don't either.
“the computer revolution”
I was easy given the millions of engineers brought on board because of huge profits forseen.
Mostly just becoming able to make smaller and smaller circuits, which by their smallness are also faster. Lasers and fiber optic transmission are part of the picture. The ability to build cheap, beautiful, large color displays is in there.
Here’s something that’s hard: making batteries with higher energy per pound.
Not unless they can come up with some breakthrough physics.
Interstellar travel will not be a mundane solution such as an earth-based laser push. It will be something not thought possible at the present time.