alt Hacker NewsYour post is exactly the nihilism that can't be proven false until someone succeeds. Voyager reached the termination shock of our sun's heliosphere. It succeeded. The next voyager could only target another star.
Your post is exactly the nihilism that can't be proven false until someone succeeds. Voyager reached the termination shock of our sun's heliosphere. It succeeded. The next voyager could only target another star.
Voyager was a once in a lifetime coincidence of taking advantage of a line up of celestial objects to achieve a distance of 0.06% to that of the nearest star. No one thought it would be impossible to achieve. Indeed, the remarkable possibility is what spurred the funding.
For comparison, Voyager would need to travel 1666x further in the same time frame. It’s not nihilistic to suggest that 3 orders of magnitude improvement in our lifetime isn’t likely. Oh and Voyager is basically on life support having shut down most systems.
I didn’t say it’s outright impossible or not worth pursuing. Just that believing it’ll happen in our lifetime is unrealistic precisely because of the currently known laws of physics and the orders of magnitude of technological achievement necessary to attain more than 10% the speed of light for anything that has any mass (and again assuming all you want to accomplish is a flyby at relativistic speeds).