200
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2024
200 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
60284 readers
3422 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Technically, if we could reach relativistic speeds close to the speed of light, the trip could be very short for the crew. Just don't expect to ever be able to see anyone you knew back home ever again. We can do just fine on sub-FTL tech if the crew accepts the consequences. We can use very high ISP continuous propulsion methods like the Orion nuclear bomblet and pusher plate concept, or beefed up ion engines, or lasers pushing a solar sail, etc.
You then just have to figure out how to stop, preferably without killing any life that may have already evolved there.
Those are the ideas I was referencing as taking decades tbh. Technically a few, especially the laser sail, can potentially get to high enough fractions of lightspeed to get that noticable time dilation effect, but given that makes something that already costs a huge amount of energy, much more expensive than it already is, I'm not sure if you'd actually want to go to those speeds very often.