Great article. Thanks.
Speed shmeed. Space is malleable. Eventually we’ll figure out a way to bend it or fold it.
Also going to read that story.
How do you plot a course for something that isn’t there? Plotting a course to a star that we’re seeing a thousand years after it’s moved would be pretty chancey.
You would need radar to avoid collisions with space objects and that would require inventing something tbat travels faster than you.
Not gonna happen...
Interstellar travel = fantasy.
L8r
The time to reach interstellar targets is potentially larger than a human lifetime the duration of written history. There fixed it.
I disagree totally.
What will happen is that we will enter a new ‘age” of technological advancement, that will increase our ability to travel beyond our wildest dreams.
For over a hundred thousand years the maximum speed a human could go was 40 mph, on a horse....then in a span of 200 years we went from 40 mph to over 24,000 mph (Apollo)and 157,000 mph (Helios). almost 4000 times faster!
If in another 200 years, the next jump is the same we could be going 600 million mph.(speedoflight is 671 million/hour)...it could be even greater....just as the men riding horses never thought they could travel as fast as today, we may not even imagine how fast or far a new technological age will let us travel.
And in 200 MORE years....400 years from today..ANOTHER 4000 FOLD INCREASE..we could be going
4000 light years in one year.
400 in 36 days.....
40 light years in 3 days.....
12 light years a day..
HALF A LIGHT YEAR AND HOUR.......NOT BAD.
VIVA TRUMP
A factor that’s missing from the incentive equation is human life span. If we developed a starship capable of reaching Barnard’s star in 700 years, we likely would be able to figure out “suspended animation” i.e. a Sleeper ship so the passengers could complete the whole trip. At my age, if such a ship were to become reality in the next ten years, I’d volunteer to be a passenger even if it were likely that later ships might get there first because I’d still get there eventually.
Reading science fiction kind of lost its appeal after my third year of college physics. The laws of physics are a bytch. Interstellar travel is not possible. Should be called science fantasy.
I am thinking large rubber band plus warp drive.
It is the combination that makes it work.
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