This post is going to be about time and some concepts that we come across in life and space travel. Today over lunch, we watched a show on Amazon prime called "Faster Than Light: the Dream of Interstellar Flight." It was 45 minutes long and while dated a few years (it was made in 2017) reasonably well done. As a bonus, it appears to be available on YouTube and watchable there. While it didn't really cover any things that were new to me, it was a pretty decent look at the problems and the concepts. That's what led to this.
The nearest star is Proxima centauri - Centaurus is a constellation in the
southern hemisphere and the name Proxima literally means "close". It's a way
to name it, "the closest start in Centaurus".
An easy web search
says that star is 4.2465 light years from us. How far is that? In statute
miles, which (I think) most readers will reflexively think of, that's
24,963,000,000,000 or 24.963 trillion miles. 40.175 trillion km.
Voyagers 1 and 2 are the farthest man made objects from us, and have been traveling for 47 years. As I've said before:
Voyager 1 is currently 22 hours, 37 minutes and change away at light speed. I'll call it 22-1/2 light hours away. The nearest stars are just over four light years away. Assuming it's even going in the right direction, it'll take Voyager 1 almost 77,000 years to get to the Alpha/Proxima Centauri star system.
It's safe to say that there's no way we could mount a mission to the nearest star with any technology we know of. What moving machines do you know of that could work for 77,000 years? If we could go 10x faster than Voyager, it's still 7700 years. We'd have to go a significant portion of the speed of light to even get there in an adult's lifetime. The problems are mind boggling - and this is for the nearest star. Our galaxy is thousands of times bigger than the distance to Proxima centauri; around 88,000 light years in diameter. It's practically impossible to go those distances. Even going 100 times the speed of light it takes far too long to get there.
Meanwhile, the stars are moving. Proxima isn't sitting still How fast is it moving away from earf? Add that to your calcs.
ReplyDeleteAnyway.
Thinking is the best way to travel.
As for what machine? A lever.
Which is why we need to expand and explore this star system. We could be mining and living in the Oort Cloud way before we need to even think about fiddle-farting around with slower-than-light travel.
ReplyDeleteAnd to add with what Rick said, parallax and figuring out the lead-on to make it to just Oort cloud objects is somewhat tricky. Going after Proxima for 7,700 years requires really knowing exactly where Proxima will be in said 7,700 years and know all the gravitational issues between here and there.
Again, best to stay here in our system and practice all that fiddlefarting and long-guessing and long-range travel and work out things like navigation, setting up communication relay systems and all of that jazz.
We have far more materials available to us just in this system than people can imagine.
Mars is reachable in about two days with a steady 1g acceleration. I hear that commercially-viable fusion is only 20 years away...again. If someone could come up with that one simple trick, the whole galaxy is in reach in a single lifetime, with bonus wacky time-dilation stuff thrown in.
ReplyDeleteThere are still people working on the Alcubi..Albu...that Mexican guy's space folding math. I'm expecting us to start deploying our galaxy-wide network of stargates any day now. Holding my breath in three...two...one...go.
After Pournelle died, I lost track on the quantum drive he was following (physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/2014/01/mihsc-101.html). I've heard of two other 'quantum drive' concepts being developed, but I don't have the education for anything but pop-science-magazine style write-ups of the results.
But nothing compares to antigravity: goede-stiftung.org/en/goede-award
But even Jackie Gleason could get his stage wife "to the moon" very rapidly back in the 50s!
ReplyDelete186,282 miles per hour. It's not just a good idea, it's The Law!
ReplyDeleteIt's one of those weird, "I swear I'm not making this up" stories, but when I was interviewing technicians to hire, one of the deciding questions was to ask them the speed of light. 186,000 miles miles/second is an acceptable answer. Thanks for coming in for the interview.
DeleteIn radio work, a lot of things have to be based on wavelength and that depends on the speed of light in whatever material you're working with. That's done by starting with speed of light in a vacuum and multiplying by a velocity factor that varies with the material.
SiG, when I was in High School I attempted to actually measure the speed of light. I measured the distance between two mirrors I had mounted on the gym walls, then used a CW He-Ne laser (VERY new at the time) to do multiple bounces between the mirrors and then to a photocell at the edge of hte mirror to time the bounces. I used a 'scope to measure the time between start of the beam and when it struck the photocell. It was crude as hell, but I got about 170,000 as the figure after repeated measurements. I was doing it simply out of curiosity and didn't realize after many years that it would have made a helluva good Science Fair project!
DeleteAw, geeze - it's miles/second.
DeleteBRAIN FART!!
"BRAIN FART!!" and I typed 186,000 miles miles/second. Didn't notice the extra word until much too late.
Delete