I've discussed the difficulties of interstellar exploration before. To get a spacecraft to another star within a human lifetime requires accelerating it to an appreciable percentage of c (the speed of light), say 10-20%. In general that requires titanic amounts of energy. (Forget about the common sci-fi scenarios of going into warp drive or jumping … Continue reading The Q-Drive and the difficulty of interstellar exploration
Tag: interstellar exploration
The difficulty of interstellar travel for humans
Futurism.com has an article reviewing the results of a survey they conducted with their readers asking when the first human might leave the solar system. The leading answer was after the year 2100, which make sense given our current level of progress just getting humans back out of low Earth orbit. But I think the … Continue reading The difficulty of interstellar travel for humans
Greg Egan’s Amalgam is close to the most likely interstellar civilization
The other day, I did a post engaging in speculation on, assuming we don't discover a completely new physics, what I thought an interstellar civilization might look like. In summary: Given special relativity, travel faster than the speed of light is impossible. This has been verified by innumerable experiments, and nothing in nature has been observed to … Continue reading Greg Egan’s Amalgam is close to the most likely interstellar civilization
A close pass by a red dwarf star, and a note on interplanetary and interstellar distances
First, in case you haven't heard: 70,000 Years Ago, Another Star Flew by the Edge of the Solar System | RealClearScience. According to an international team of astronomers, about 70,000 years ago a red dwarf star -- nicknamed "Scholz’s star" for the astronomer who discovered it -- passed by our solar system just 0.8 light years … Continue reading A close pass by a red dwarf star, and a note on interplanetary and interstellar distances
Eavesdropping on E.T. and the possibility of interstellar travel
Gabriel Popkin as an article at Inside Science about a study that looks at the possibility of intercepting communications between other alien civilizations. The idea is that communicating across interstellar distances is best done with lasers. So far, the optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence has focused mainly on the hope of receiving—and recognizing—an intentional, laser-encoded … Continue reading Eavesdropping on E.T. and the possibility of interstellar travel
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