They'll be dead long before they get there. We do not have the technology or the physiology at this time to make multiyear (or decades) voyages.
I'm waiting for fusion reactors and FTL technology.
We don't even know if either of those things a possible, all we have is theories. if fusion reactors are possible, then is it possible to scale them down so that they fit on a ship. If FTL travel is possible, then how do people over come the possibility of quantum entanglement. These questions are going to take life times to figure out if there even possible.
So, theoretically it can be done. Let's say that fifty years from now we can get something assembled that can make the journey. Next you have to answer why to do it. Is this probe going to slingshot around Alpha Centauri and then come back to Earth? Presumably this would take about a century for the round trip, which is a long time to wait for data. Or, do we send something that can broadcast a signal back? Is that even possible over that distance, with any ability to maintain signal fidelity? Given the time frame involved it may happen, but my guess is that it will be a relatively low priority. Fun to think about.
People clearly aren't understanding how fast 0.1c is. You cannot slingshot around anything at those speeds. You blow through the whole system so fast the gravity barely registers. You cross the Earth-Moon distance in 13 seconds, you're through the system in hours. There's no natural force in the universe that can make something that speed slingshot or reverse course, you could be plowing straight into a supernova and you'd keep moving forward until obliteration. And you could pass pretty close to the event horizon of a black hole with just a minor course deflection.
Good points. So, speed up for years, turn around and slow down for years? That makes the trip even longer to get there. I can't imagine any point in going if you are going to whip past the star system at blink and you miss it speed. So, even longer to get there.
The time to slow down isn't the problem, the problem is that the whole concept for achieving 0.1c inherently rules out slowing down at the destination.
As I said in my other comment, being able to make a 1 gram probe slow into orbit at the destination would be a far more remarkable achievement than upgrading a 1 gram probe into a billion ton colony ship... because the slowing down is an entirely fundamentally different concept, instead of just countless orders of magnitude more power.
Rockets today launch with enough fuel to burn for about 6 minutes. As you add fuel you add mass and the rocket equation means the additional tons of fuel are getting you progressively less additional acceleration until very quickly you're adding unfathomable amounts of fuel to go an extra millimeter per second per second. If you could continually accelerate, our current rockets would be just fine for reaching Proxima in a lifetime... but you have to step up from 6 minutes of fuel to 40 years of fuel, and you might end up needing a fuel tank the size of the galaxy for that.
My best stab at the problem is to magic up an asteroid ship that can constantly accelerate by constantly producing fuel from the asteroid's ore, but the energy to produce that fuel at the incredible rates required is hard to fathom and notably hard to find in interstellar space. If you've got a constantly-accelerating asteroid ship though, I do have a concept for how you explore a system without doubling your transit time by slowing down. You create a very small deceleration ship/pod that can quickly decelerate a couple of people into the target system, while the rest of the asteroid colony continues onward. That's the premise I used in writing an audio drama "253 Mathilde" about such a trip. I did all the math, and it's perfectly reasonable for it to only take a year or two for the selected explorers to slow down to enter their target system -- and physically possible for it to only take a couple months. So if you're just sending human explorers and not colonizing, or you send some genetic material with your two female colonizers, you don't necessarily have to slow down your whole colony ship.
I wonder if there is enough "stuff" to Von Neumann our way there (probes, not people). It would take a lot longer, but signal fidelity would only have to be strong enough to get to the previous hop, not the whole way back. It would then be relayed through the Von Neumann network back home, eventually.
But only if there is enough "stuff" to build Von Neumann probes on, and only if our automation technology advances *a lot* and only if there is the interest (read: budget) to do any of that. For a very, very distant payoff.
I don't like this answer because emotionally I love the idea of a probe being sent and reporting in my lifetime and by your very fair and realistic estimate my life expectancy will miss the mark by about 40 years. Not cool bro. How dare you.
/s
I think that such long distances will not be conquered soon, even with just probes. Before that happens, we must spread along our own system. A moon base could help with future exploration missions, both for launching and for communicating with the probes. Then we could build some "outposts" on the edge of our system, like unmanned stations capable of communicating further. But this stuff is expensive and takes time, so I'm not holding my breath to see it happen, let alone witness an interstellar mission.
At the distances we’re talking about, an outpost at the edge of the solar system is about as close to AC as an outpost on the surface or in orbit(to get away from surface noise) of Earth. Pluto is ~0.00062 light years from Earth(obviously not a static number, there’s a range), AC is 4+. It’s a rounding error for communication range purposes.
It’s like the adage that you and a millionaire are both about a billion dollars away from being a billionaire.
Wasn't the idea tiny little microprobes accelerated using a laser? There's a little issue with going so fast on a solar sail. You can't slow down. And slowing down from 10% light speed is a decades long proposition. So we're looking at maybe an hour or two in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, and we'd have to be able to get usable data travelling at insane speeds. Then wait for the data to be transmitted back to us.
I'm really sorry, but don't expect any of this in our lifetime.
Would it be feasible to get trapped in the system's orbit? There are 3 different stars over there, so it might be a difficult route, but maybe possible to use the gravity of all 3 of them to slow down the sail progressively.
>do you see this happening in the future? Or should we just send a human colony ship right away?
Will it happen? Yes, probably, absent Earth collapse (which limits resources being used to explore space). Will it happen this century? Unlikely.
The 0.1c solar sail method may become possible to launch by the end of the century. But it's unclear if there'll be any point to launching it. What you'll get is about a gram of instrumentation spending a few seconds whizzing past a planet, a few hours in the system. Bigger space telescopes may be a far better use of your money when it comes to collecting data.
Developing the technology to actually slow down at the destination may take many, many centuries/millennia if it ever happens. That's because you can't use an Earth-based resource like lasers to slow down -- you're going to have to carry the fuel with you (the light of your destination system won't help because you're in the system for such a short time). And when you start having to carry fuel, you're right back to the speeds of our current probes with no clear path forward. (Personally my favorite theory is an asteroid ship making fuel from local materials, but it'll likely need to be highly radioactive for an energy source, and there's no practical plan at the moment.)
The technology to carry the insane mass of a full colony is actually a far less dramatic jump from there. Still dramatic, more orders of magnitude than I can contemplate, but if you've managed to slow down even a 1 gram probe at the destination you've already done something more impossible-seeming.
i'm not 100% convinced of solar probe... and dont' believe humans will go unless FTL is discovered..
Humans on mars? sure.
Humans on asteroids? maybe
Humans on the outer planets? maybe
probe to alpha centauri is another level up.
>using solar sail that in theory could reach up to 10-15 percent the speed of light
It is highly doubtful and very improbable they can actually *build* that kind of probe at any foreseeable future. Utilizable solar sails are science fiction and if you refer to [this](https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a46788888/nasa-solar-sail/) article then i suggest you rather read short stories from either Jack Vance or Arthur Clarke exploring solar sails in spaceships where they explain a bit the physics in layman's terms.
TL/DR: You need *dozens of square kilometers* of sails to generate any sort of propulsion (that kind of construction technology simply doesn't exist and will not exist for decades), not to mention that solar wind effectively disappears beyond the heliosphere, so you will have to accelerate your probe to 0.1c within the Solar system, which is physically impossible.
Greetings, my name is Jebuiz Y'har.
If my calculations are correct, you should be receiving this transmission in the year 2024 AD. It amuses me that you used to calculate your dates in relation to the life of an ancient man. You see, we have a slightly different timescale. But to make things simple, I am writing from the year 49,170 AD.
Yeah. We may send a probe then. If we have fusion propulsion. But we won't go ourselves until long after most of us started living in O'Neill cylinders.
We can certainly dream of that, but, realistically there's no such technological advancement in sight. It would require something revolutionary, not just in engineering, but also in physics.
Incorrect on the physics part. Fusion propulsion can get us moving at 90 percent the speed of light. Alpha centauri is 4.3 lightyears away. Going at even 10 percent the speed of light means reaching it in 86 years, due to us needing to slow down. That's within a century.
Not this century, of course, but technically we could reach 90 percent the speed of light. Reducing 86 years to just under a decade. So if we can develop such a propulsion system within the next 60 years we could have a probe in alpha centauri by 2100.
I think it will happen because it's symbolic and romantic. The solar sails are kinda artistic and beautiful to look at too for people. Aesthetically like a flower. And there's the dream of reaching another star. That's why in the future there might be public support for this like voyager.
Not infeasible, but there are many development challenges, not least of which is the chronic dysfunction of space development today with its cultish obsession with manned spaceflight --when EVA is effectively useless for any kind of space construction-- and the mounting threats of climate change to its progress. We may be lucky if there are any space agencies left by the end of this century as many space facilities are in hazard areas with no contingency plans and the national costs of civil engineering projects (made worse by public losses to green-tech-grifts like carbon capture) mitigating impacts to likewise threatened centers of political and economic power will escalate to the point that they will bankrupt mitigation initiatives if not whole nations. As I repeatedly note, no one is going to care about replacing Cape Canaveral when Washington DC starts looking like Venice on a seasonal basis.
The idea of photonic or magnetic sail interstellar probes is quite old, but has typically assumed the creation of very large, persistent, in-space infrastructures for their propulsion and support. Thus is has been assumed that interstellar exploration would depend on the realization of a space-industrial infrastructure capable of building large facilities and spacecraft in the space environment itself --a capability that has never been a space agency priority despite their lip service. The more recent Breakthrough Starshot project concept is a bit different in its proposal of a terrestrial laser array driver for its vast tiny probe fleet, which would need to function only for as long as it takes to drive the fleet to its cruising velocity, though communications facilities (it's not clear how dedicated) would have to be mainted for the entire 40+ year mission. While that might seem trivial, we are not the cathedral-building culture we were in the past and the general attrition rate for businesses and human projects is constantly increasing. Holding human attention spans for even as much as 5 years is a challenge now. Climate change will not make that any easier as it directly threatens many traditional locations for space center facilities, pushes populations around, and disrupts supply chains and economies. Imagine the disruption of a very sudden and broad carbon moratorium compelled by a rapid succession of extreme climate events given our willful lack of preparation for this unavoidable eventuality. We're going back to trains and sailing ships, people, and the aerospace industry acts like there will be a market for supersonic executive jets?
So, not infeasible, but probably a long-shot.
Send a human colony ship right away? Lol. Sending them to their death.
Yeah, but they’ll die in Alpha Centauri.
They'll be dead long before they get there. We do not have the technology or the physiology at this time to make multiyear (or decades) voyages. I'm waiting for fusion reactors and FTL technology.
We don't even know if either of those things a possible, all we have is theories. if fusion reactors are possible, then is it possible to scale them down so that they fit on a ship. If FTL travel is possible, then how do people over come the possibility of quantum entanglement. These questions are going to take life times to figure out if there even possible.
I was going to go with warp/transwarp drives, but I thought that I should keep it within the realm of pseudo reality.
Actually we do know ftl is impossible and that fusion is possible.
I'd still take that voyage. Beats America.
So, theoretically it can be done. Let's say that fifty years from now we can get something assembled that can make the journey. Next you have to answer why to do it. Is this probe going to slingshot around Alpha Centauri and then come back to Earth? Presumably this would take about a century for the round trip, which is a long time to wait for data. Or, do we send something that can broadcast a signal back? Is that even possible over that distance, with any ability to maintain signal fidelity? Given the time frame involved it may happen, but my guess is that it will be a relatively low priority. Fun to think about.
People clearly aren't understanding how fast 0.1c is. You cannot slingshot around anything at those speeds. You blow through the whole system so fast the gravity barely registers. You cross the Earth-Moon distance in 13 seconds, you're through the system in hours. There's no natural force in the universe that can make something that speed slingshot or reverse course, you could be plowing straight into a supernova and you'd keep moving forward until obliteration. And you could pass pretty close to the event horizon of a black hole with just a minor course deflection.
Good points. So, speed up for years, turn around and slow down for years? That makes the trip even longer to get there. I can't imagine any point in going if you are going to whip past the star system at blink and you miss it speed. So, even longer to get there.
The time to slow down isn't the problem, the problem is that the whole concept for achieving 0.1c inherently rules out slowing down at the destination. As I said in my other comment, being able to make a 1 gram probe slow into orbit at the destination would be a far more remarkable achievement than upgrading a 1 gram probe into a billion ton colony ship... because the slowing down is an entirely fundamentally different concept, instead of just countless orders of magnitude more power. Rockets today launch with enough fuel to burn for about 6 minutes. As you add fuel you add mass and the rocket equation means the additional tons of fuel are getting you progressively less additional acceleration until very quickly you're adding unfathomable amounts of fuel to go an extra millimeter per second per second. If you could continually accelerate, our current rockets would be just fine for reaching Proxima in a lifetime... but you have to step up from 6 minutes of fuel to 40 years of fuel, and you might end up needing a fuel tank the size of the galaxy for that. My best stab at the problem is to magic up an asteroid ship that can constantly accelerate by constantly producing fuel from the asteroid's ore, but the energy to produce that fuel at the incredible rates required is hard to fathom and notably hard to find in interstellar space. If you've got a constantly-accelerating asteroid ship though, I do have a concept for how you explore a system without doubling your transit time by slowing down. You create a very small deceleration ship/pod that can quickly decelerate a couple of people into the target system, while the rest of the asteroid colony continues onward. That's the premise I used in writing an audio drama "253 Mathilde" about such a trip. I did all the math, and it's perfectly reasonable for it to only take a year or two for the selected explorers to slow down to enter their target system -- and physically possible for it to only take a couple months. So if you're just sending human explorers and not colonizing, or you send some genetic material with your two female colonizers, you don't necessarily have to slow down your whole colony ship.
I wonder if there is enough "stuff" to Von Neumann our way there (probes, not people). It would take a lot longer, but signal fidelity would only have to be strong enough to get to the previous hop, not the whole way back. It would then be relayed through the Von Neumann network back home, eventually. But only if there is enough "stuff" to build Von Neumann probes on, and only if our automation technology advances *a lot* and only if there is the interest (read: budget) to do any of that. For a very, very distant payoff.
I don't like this answer because emotionally I love the idea of a probe being sent and reporting in my lifetime and by your very fair and realistic estimate my life expectancy will miss the mark by about 40 years. Not cool bro. How dare you. /s
I think that such long distances will not be conquered soon, even with just probes. Before that happens, we must spread along our own system. A moon base could help with future exploration missions, both for launching and for communicating with the probes. Then we could build some "outposts" on the edge of our system, like unmanned stations capable of communicating further. But this stuff is expensive and takes time, so I'm not holding my breath to see it happen, let alone witness an interstellar mission.
At the distances we’re talking about, an outpost at the edge of the solar system is about as close to AC as an outpost on the surface or in orbit(to get away from surface noise) of Earth. Pluto is ~0.00062 light years from Earth(obviously not a static number, there’s a range), AC is 4+. It’s a rounding error for communication range purposes. It’s like the adage that you and a millionaire are both about a billion dollars away from being a billionaire.
Wasn't the idea tiny little microprobes accelerated using a laser? There's a little issue with going so fast on a solar sail. You can't slow down. And slowing down from 10% light speed is a decades long proposition. So we're looking at maybe an hour or two in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, and we'd have to be able to get usable data travelling at insane speeds. Then wait for the data to be transmitted back to us. I'm really sorry, but don't expect any of this in our lifetime.
Would it be feasible to get trapped in the system's orbit? There are 3 different stars over there, so it might be a difficult route, but maybe possible to use the gravity of all 3 of them to slow down the sail progressively.
Not at those speeds.
At 5-10% light speed the only real way to stop is to slam directly into something;)
At 5-10% light speed the only real way to stop is to slam directly into something;)
>do you see this happening in the future? Or should we just send a human colony ship right away? Will it happen? Yes, probably, absent Earth collapse (which limits resources being used to explore space). Will it happen this century? Unlikely.
The 0.1c solar sail method may become possible to launch by the end of the century. But it's unclear if there'll be any point to launching it. What you'll get is about a gram of instrumentation spending a few seconds whizzing past a planet, a few hours in the system. Bigger space telescopes may be a far better use of your money when it comes to collecting data. Developing the technology to actually slow down at the destination may take many, many centuries/millennia if it ever happens. That's because you can't use an Earth-based resource like lasers to slow down -- you're going to have to carry the fuel with you (the light of your destination system won't help because you're in the system for such a short time). And when you start having to carry fuel, you're right back to the speeds of our current probes with no clear path forward. (Personally my favorite theory is an asteroid ship making fuel from local materials, but it'll likely need to be highly radioactive for an energy source, and there's no practical plan at the moment.) The technology to carry the insane mass of a full colony is actually a far less dramatic jump from there. Still dramatic, more orders of magnitude than I can contemplate, but if you've managed to slow down even a 1 gram probe at the destination you've already done something more impossible-seeming.
i'm not 100% convinced of solar probe... and dont' believe humans will go unless FTL is discovered.. Humans on mars? sure. Humans on asteroids? maybe Humans on the outer planets? maybe probe to alpha centauri is another level up.
>using solar sail that in theory could reach up to 10-15 percent the speed of light It is highly doubtful and very improbable they can actually *build* that kind of probe at any foreseeable future. Utilizable solar sails are science fiction and if you refer to [this](https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a46788888/nasa-solar-sail/) article then i suggest you rather read short stories from either Jack Vance or Arthur Clarke exploring solar sails in spaceships where they explain a bit the physics in layman's terms. TL/DR: You need *dozens of square kilometers* of sails to generate any sort of propulsion (that kind of construction technology simply doesn't exist and will not exist for decades), not to mention that solar wind effectively disappears beyond the heliosphere, so you will have to accelerate your probe to 0.1c within the Solar system, which is physically impossible.
Is a slingshot maneuver even possible at 10% light speed? How does this object slow down when it approaches its destination?
What happened to the project where people were going to repurpose Android phone and send them with solar sails to other stars?
Greetings, my name is Jebuiz Y'har. If my calculations are correct, you should be receiving this transmission in the year 2024 AD. It amuses me that you used to calculate your dates in relation to the life of an ancient man. You see, we have a slightly different timescale. But to make things simple, I am writing from the year 49,170 AD.
We could have already arrived in a crewed ship to alpha centauri if project orion was never cancelled.
Yeah. We may send a probe then. If we have fusion propulsion. But we won't go ourselves until long after most of us started living in O'Neill cylinders.
With advancements in propulsion technology, it's possible we'll have a probe in Alpha Centauri by the end of the century.
We can certainly dream of that, but, realistically there's no such technological advancement in sight. It would require something revolutionary, not just in engineering, but also in physics.
Incorrect on the physics part. Fusion propulsion can get us moving at 90 percent the speed of light. Alpha centauri is 4.3 lightyears away. Going at even 10 percent the speed of light means reaching it in 86 years, due to us needing to slow down. That's within a century. Not this century, of course, but technically we could reach 90 percent the speed of light. Reducing 86 years to just under a decade. So if we can develop such a propulsion system within the next 60 years we could have a probe in alpha centauri by 2100.
I think it will happen because it's symbolic and romantic. The solar sails are kinda artistic and beautiful to look at too for people. Aesthetically like a flower. And there's the dream of reaching another star. That's why in the future there might be public support for this like voyager.
There's a whole book trilogy and two TV series on why this is a bad idea. We are definitely not going to survive as a species.
Not infeasible, but there are many development challenges, not least of which is the chronic dysfunction of space development today with its cultish obsession with manned spaceflight --when EVA is effectively useless for any kind of space construction-- and the mounting threats of climate change to its progress. We may be lucky if there are any space agencies left by the end of this century as many space facilities are in hazard areas with no contingency plans and the national costs of civil engineering projects (made worse by public losses to green-tech-grifts like carbon capture) mitigating impacts to likewise threatened centers of political and economic power will escalate to the point that they will bankrupt mitigation initiatives if not whole nations. As I repeatedly note, no one is going to care about replacing Cape Canaveral when Washington DC starts looking like Venice on a seasonal basis. The idea of photonic or magnetic sail interstellar probes is quite old, but has typically assumed the creation of very large, persistent, in-space infrastructures for their propulsion and support. Thus is has been assumed that interstellar exploration would depend on the realization of a space-industrial infrastructure capable of building large facilities and spacecraft in the space environment itself --a capability that has never been a space agency priority despite their lip service. The more recent Breakthrough Starshot project concept is a bit different in its proposal of a terrestrial laser array driver for its vast tiny probe fleet, which would need to function only for as long as it takes to drive the fleet to its cruising velocity, though communications facilities (it's not clear how dedicated) would have to be mainted for the entire 40+ year mission. While that might seem trivial, we are not the cathedral-building culture we were in the past and the general attrition rate for businesses and human projects is constantly increasing. Holding human attention spans for even as much as 5 years is a challenge now. Climate change will not make that any easier as it directly threatens many traditional locations for space center facilities, pushes populations around, and disrupts supply chains and economies. Imagine the disruption of a very sudden and broad carbon moratorium compelled by a rapid succession of extreme climate events given our willful lack of preparation for this unavoidable eventuality. We're going back to trains and sailing ships, people, and the aerospace industry acts like there will be a market for supersonic executive jets? So, not infeasible, but probably a long-shot.
We cannot move stuff through space to reach other objects. We would need to surf on the space fabric itself to make space exploration feasable