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ExoticPearTreetoday at 8:44 AM5 repliesview on HN

> If you accelerate at 1g constantly for 1y you travel 0.5 light years

Can't we accelerate past 1G constantly? Or do we expend so much energy doing it that we can't realistically do it with today's technology?


Replies

myrmidontoday at 9:24 AM

Sadly there is no realistic approach to get there (even assuming fantasy-levels of technology).

Chemical rockets are currently the only thing that allow sustaining such accelerations briefly for human-size payloads, but the low exhaust velocity and exponential reaction mass requirement make sustaining it for days/months/years completely impossible.

You'd have to supply the energy externally (i.e. some sort of beam propulsion), but getting any significant fraction of g out of such a system (with human-sized payloads) seems unlikely within the next centuries, especially as the distance increases.

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TheOtherHobbestoday at 9:20 AM

We can't do it with any rocket-like propulsive technology. By the time you get anywhere close to c the front of your spacecraft is being abraded into nothing by interstellar gas, larger particles of dust will kill you, and colliding with anything bigger creates an explosion that can be seen for light years. You need to be flying a large asteroid to even think about surviving it - you still won't for long, but you will have time to think about it - and the energy requirements are wildly impractical.

Magic warp bubble tech is the bare minimum, and we're nowhere close to inventing that.

jdjfbfbdbfnftoday at 9:07 AM

We need a massive rocket to escape the earths gravity (1g). That takes us minutes and a crap ton of fuel. The issue is to keep doing that with fuel and oxidiser constantly for 1, 2 or 10 or 25 years is a monumental amount of energy, which is a monumental amount of weight, which is a monumental amount of volume... Also you also need the exact same amount of fuel to stop again.... So yeah ... We don't got it yet

wallst07today at 8:54 AM

We can easily accelerate past 1g... 1g is just chosen for human comfort, but running any rocket engine continuously for a year requires an impossible amount of fuel.

mjmastoday at 8:54 AM

We can't necessarily survive that well when under acceleration greater than 9.81 metres per second per second for extended periods of time.

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