J
Jetfire
Guest
What needs to happen is FTL technology...Are we anywhere near this yet???
No.
No.
"watery world" discovered
- Thread starter watermelony2k
- Start date
^Hardly necessary. Alpha Centauri is only 4.3 light-years away. At even 10% of c, it would be reachable within a human lifetime. Go up to 30, 50, or 60% and you've got a scenario like Avatar where regular travel is feasible.
Ditto, FTL is improbable and what's more we don't even really need it. With something that could get us to a decent percentage of the speed of light we could have an interstellar empire around the nearest stars.
With the effects of time dilation we could send pilots to the far side of the Milky Way (albeit from our perspective it would take hundreds of thousands of years and we would all be long dead).
With the effects of time dilation we could send pilots to the far side of the Milky Way (albeit from our perspective it would take hundreds of thousands of years and we would all be long dead).
That's almost as impractical as FTL. The energy required to get up to a suitably high fraction of lightspeed would be prohibitive, and at such velocities, even the tiniest speck of dust would hit with the energy of a nuclear warhead, not to mention that even low-level cosmic radiation would be blueshifted into deadly ionizing radiation.
Better to send robotic microprobes. A lightsail a few centimeters across could be accelerated to near the speed of light in seconds by a drive laser, and could be imprinted with an advanced computer -- or a whole network of such probes could collectively form a powerful AI. As for humans, it would probably be best to limit our physical travels to more local space, or build generation ships.
If that planet is 2.7 times the size of Earth, it will probably have a very strong gravitational field...
Except its density is much lower than Earth's, since it's made mostly of water and/or ice. Its mass is 6.6 times Earth's, but its radius is 2.7 times, and gravity goes as the inverse square of the distance. So the surface gravity is 6.6/(2.7^2) = 0.9 g, about the same as Venus.
A drive like VASIMR would be highly effective for getting a more traditional probe out of the solar system, too. The ones we have out there right now took so long because, slingshot boosts aside, they're basically ballistic. A probe which could be constantly accelerating, even at a very slow rate, would get out there much faster.
Similar threads
