The relatively many times faster than the speed of light travel, however, is still a pipe dream.
Just to get to the star nearest to our Sun in a year of travel would require the equivalent of four times the speed of light. Six months, eight times. Three months, 16 times. A six weeks, 32 times. Three weeks, 64 times.
Roughly speaking, to get there in 12 days is about 120 times the speed of light. 6 days, 240 times. 3 days, 480 times.
36 hours, 960 times the speed of light. 18 hours, 1,920 times the speed of light. 9 hours, 3,840. 4 and a half hours, 7680. 2 and a quarter hours, 15,360. A little over an hour, 30,720 times the speed of light.
And to fit into an hour episode, traveling between Earth and Alpha Centauri in about half an hour, you need to go around 61,440 times the speed of light.
Just to travel four light years away.
Here is a list of the stars nearest our Sun. They average about 8 light years away.
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.html
The relatively many times faster than the speed of light travel, however, is still a pipe dream.
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Agree. Similarly string theory is either the mathematicians and physicists gone mad or leap to 23rd century technology.
We don’t know. If the former we’re on the slow boat to the nearest star. If the latter then stuff like worm hole travel becomes more possible and we’re on the fast boat to the nearest star.
I have no clue how any of this will turn out. But its fun to speculate.
Personally, I suspect that if the speed of light can be breached at all, (I think it's possible, Einstein notwithstanding), then travelling at ludicrous speed is not out of the realm of possibility.
Your point on the distances involved is well taken though. I'll take this opportunity to pimp the Coolest Program Ever. It's called Celestia and is essentially a universe simulator. It allows you to 'travel' to just about anywhere in the galaxy, and to other galaxies as well, (though other galaxies don't have the detail built in that ours does). Spend a little time flying around the solar system at just the speed of light, and you get a feel for how big the solar system really is. Yeah, it only takes about 8 minutes or so to get to Mercury, but you're looking at a lot longer travel times to Jupiter and Saturn. Once you've played with that for a while, increase speed to 30 AU/sec. At that speed, you're crossing the solar system in 1 second. It still takes days to get to alpha centuri. Want to go further? Be sure to pack a lunch.
Another really cool feature is to go to a star like Betelgeuse, That star is so freaking huge that if you dropped it in place of the Sun in our solar system, the earth would be under the star's surface.
Lots of cool stuff in Celestia, and once you've run out of the natural wonders of the universe to look through, you'll want to go to the Celestia Motherload where you can get additional data that will add more detail to planets, more stars, and other similar things. The real cool stuff is the spacecraft though. You can download models of just about every major nasa mission. I especially like the Voyager pack. Then, you can download fictional spacecraft. Want to see the USS Enterprise up close? They have it, in detail that you wouldn't believe. I think the Starbase around the earth is the most impressive craft, but you can also get stuff like the Babylon 5 space station.
Celestia is available for free download for Linux, OSX, and Windows at the first link above.
If you have kids with any interest in space at all, this is a must have program IMO.