alt Hacker NewsSo 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.
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Project star shot is still very much s research project at this point, but it seems serious.
The idea is to not use self powered rockets, but launch a thousand small solar sail based probes. These would launched into orbit traditionally, then accelerated individually from a massive earth based laser array, solving the rocket equation problem while introducing a host of its own.
Many probes will not make the trip, but the hope is enough would survive to do a fly by.
Optimistic reality means spreading cellular life, not the great ape in particular. People by and large are uninterested in this, they feel it is pointless if not somehow immoral. Our "weakness" is not in the flesh but our attachment to it, specifically, these would-be galaxy childs' personal flesh. The 20-50 year mission duration is not a cure for the nihilism but another expression of it.
A more realistic goal: make an imaging probe that hits 1% SOL and gets just close enough to produce images better than we can generate from our solar system.
Even that is a real stretch.
Worse yet (for an equivalent vehicle mass), that's 22,500x (150^2) the energy needed.
Its not unrealistic sci-fi. We have particle accelerators that operate at much, much higher energies. The kind of energy that would succesfully leave earth and our sun behind if these particles were shot out of the LHC. That is to say, you'd be right that any vessel carrying fuel wouldn't reach such speeds. And while its true that even the smallest sattelites today are still at least 1000grams. Getting that up to relativistic speeds would require on the order of 2 billion MJ of energy. Or the equivalent of a large power plant runnning for 20 days to supply all the energy.
But that's only the start, any advancements in making sattelites on a chip could massively reduce the weight and therefore power requirements. Even with all losses accounted for. I believe this could be doable in the next 50 years. You just need to build the most powerful laser anyone has every built and power it for as long as you can.