After just two minutes of being driven by the laser, the spacecraft will be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light—a thousand times faster than any macroscopic object has ever achieved.
Just plug in the numbers for those understand weight, velocity and energy.
This is total crap science not worthy of discussion.
Darth Vader: I find your lack of faith disturbing, Commander.
You are right my friend. To travel to the nearest star in any real sense you would have to accelerate continuously until the halfway point, then decel at exactly the same rate in order to avoid speeding past your intended target. Can a human handle 8g continuous acceleration and deceleration? It’s a joke to think that any carbon-based being will someday be born on a sol-system planet and then take a trip to a star. People simply don’t comprehend the distance or physics involved. I blame Star Wars.
And by the way. If we are ever visited by aliens, they will be robots.
They’ll have to accelerate the craft at somewhere around 50,000g for 2 minutes which sounds like a lot, but if you rewrite it as 50kg that’s only about 110 lbs and that’s certainly doable. I always wanted to be a rocket scientist!
And to think I used to be impressed with my friends 1969 Camaro Z28 acceleration. That beast could pin you back in your seat. It only felt like we were doing 0.2C.
0.2C in 120 seconds. Sure. “Earth, can I borrow all of your power generation capacity for the next two minutes. Please?”
Uh...yeah, two minutes from rest to 37,000 mph. Let’s just say that’s a lot of acceleration and leave it at that. May have to be a few advances in materials technology before that’s going to happen.
“Just plug in the numbers for those understand weight, velocity and energy. This is total crap science not worthy of discussion.”
I don’t think it even rises to that level. It’s not even good science fiction. At least science fiction comes up with novel ideas that allow the conventional rules to be broken or bent.
The g-forces alone would disintegrate any physical object accelerated at such a rate. At one g, it would take several weeks to reach one fifth of the speed of light. Doing so in a few seconds simply can not be done with any technology known today. The object being accelerated would be destroyed down to the cellular level.
Even if this could be achieved by a less rapid acceleration over a few months, there will be no way to slow the object down. How does photography work at 0.2 c?
Forgot to add this, no macroscopic object launched from earth has ever achieved even a fraction of this speed.
I hate Crap Science. Some fools read this crap science and believe it.
The energy required to accelerate just a few grams to these velocities is beyond our ability. We are talking megatons of energy over a few seconds. That is one hell of laser and I do not want to be 1000 miles from it when they pull the trigger. The sail would need to 100 percent reflective as just a minuscule percentage of the energy not reflected would instantaneously render it plasma and perhaps atomic particles.
I hate Crap Science being published as science. Those that do are not persons of science.
Absolutely!
It's 5:35 AM -- and, Im stilll up, so the old mental cruncher's not working at top efficiency -- but...
Just consider what acceleration from ~zero to .25C in 2 seconds would do to human passengers! (Can you say, "red goo smeared all over the aft bulkheads"?)
I think you mean mass, but, you know, crap science and all...
You are correct.
Show your work.