Posted on 03/07/2008 5:44:45 PM PST by KevinDavis
Unfortunately, the amount of fuel required to do things that way gets outrageous pretty quickly. Call the mass of the ship without fuel S, and figure that the mass of fuel required to accelerate an empty ship continuously at 0.1g for a week be the same as the mass of the ship. Then the mass of fuel required to provide one week's acceleration to the ship plus one week's fuel would be 2S. The mass of fuel required one one week's acceleration for ship plus two weeks' fuel would be 4S. The mass of fuel required for one week's accelleration for ship plus ten weeks' fuel would be about 1,000S. For twenty weeks, 1,000,000S. For 52 weeks, more than 4,000,000,000,000,000S. No even remotely-plausible improvements in efficiency are going to achieve numbers anywhere near useful.
Fusion rockets, solar sails, Bussard ramjets. All near-term technologies that could be developed to do it.
If I'm not mistaken, the Centaurus system is a system with six stars dancing nutzo orbits around each other. Two sets are inside the system and orbiting each other and the 3rd set is running outside of the system orbiting each other at the periphery.
THIS is the reason that it was always considered EXTREMELY unlikely that any of the Centauri stars could support a planet. They'd keep running over each others planets. Maybe not literally but gravitationally at least.
While not necessarily in this case, the evidence for exoplanets is quite (there's a qualification) strong, and in the Solar System, water is common, although it is usually in solid form.
And not to mention the problem of cosmic radition, too. The trip to the moon had the protection of the Van Allen belts, but outside of that...even to Mars...good luck.
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