alt Hacker NewsNo need for nihilism.
Alpha centauri is approximately 4.37 light years away. Project starshot is already aiming to get there. This can take anywhere from 20 to 50 years depending on the mission. We already have a spacecraft from 1977 that is still operating today which proves our potential to build on a 50 year timeframe. We'll likely have humans somewhere in our solar system besides earth before anyone attempts to go to alpha centauri but besides that I also think we would be able to live much longer. Life expectancy increases are around 1% or 0.8% per decade at its current pace. There's no guarantee this continues but even so, if that's the average in the coming decades then we'll expect people to live hundreds of years by the time we can send a ship to alpha centauri.
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Ah, that explains why 5,000 years ago the average life expectancy was just over 6 months.
Also in 1.3 Million years this star will pass 1/6 Light year from earth:
> Project starshot
Is it a live project? Their news section is dishearteningly quiet [1]. They still talk about 2018 in the present tense [2].
Honestly I don't think there's that big of a material difference in difficulty between being able to (consistently) live to 150 and being able to live indefinitely (barring catastrophic accidents and intractable diseases).
I feel like we're bumping up against the edges of the lifespan that we can reasonably achieve without figuring out how to actually stop or reverse aging.
Possibly there's a world where we figure out how to dramatically slow it without stopping it, because there's some entropic principle regarding our ability to reliably lengthen telomeres where we can't replace lost data but we can reduce the rate of loss, but my money's that we don't break 150 until we actually solve aging on a fundamental level.
So at 50 years, that requires traveling an average of 10% the speed of light. That’s 150x times faster than the peak speed ever built which got a significant amount of speed from gravitational assists. That’s a massive leap to assume we’ll have craft traveling that fast anytime soon considering the considerable fuel costs involved not to mention relativistic problems that going that fast requires (shielding against interplanetary dust, energy requirements growing exponentially etc).
And on top of everything, stopping is a huge question when you’re going that fast so how are you achieving that? Is that fuel you had to accelerate as well? And remember - that’s 150x average speed faster than peak so your actual peak to achieve a speed up followed by a slowdown would need to be even faster.
As for voyager, that craft is barely operational in some sense. At 10% and at significantly further distances than ever achieved it would be even harder to keep it operational I think.
Let’s be optimistic but let’s live in reality and not unrealistic sci-fi.