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How Civilizations Can Spread Across a Galaxy
New submitter kanweg writes: If you look at the Milky Way at night, it appears not much is changing. But over time, stars get closer and further to each other. Coryn Bailer-Jones, an astrophysicist at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, found that of 14 stars coming within three light-years of Earth, the closest encounter is likely to be HIP 85605, which now lies some 16 light years away in the constellation of Hercules. It will get a close as the Oort cloud.
This could be a (very long-term) method for human or alien civilizations to practice star hopping. Why travel 16 light-years through space when you can just wait until a star with a suitable planet gets close enough that you only have to cover the last stretch with an artificial spaceship? Take your time for a thoughtful response; it will take another 250,000 to 470,000 year before the close encounter.
This could be a (very long-term) method for human or alien civilizations to practice star hopping. Why travel 16 light-years through space when you can just wait until a star with a suitable planet gets close enough that you only have to cover the last stretch with an artificial spaceship? Take your time for a thoughtful response; it will take another 250,000 to 470,000 year before the close encounter.
Any species that is willing to wait 250,000 years to avoid a 16 LY trip would never get to space at all. A race needs the drive to challenge obstacles and overcome them if its going to make it to space, not look for excuses to not try.
Also, wouldn't a star near the oort cloud mess up our entire solar system?
Yes, but three lightyears is not "near".
Anyway, traveling 16LY is only trivially more difficult than travelling 3LY. The hard part is getting up to speed, and slowing down at the destination. The long coast in the middle is easy, and if you are going fast, it is time dilated anyway.
I very much doubt that NASA's budgets will get any better over the next 450,000 years.
Dunno. I think a real spaceship might be more practical.
Anyway, traveling 16LY is only trivially more difficult than travelling 3LY. The hard part is getting up to speed, and slowing down at the destination. The long coast in the middle is easy, and if you are going fast, it is time dilated anyway.
Getting up to speed is really really hard. So much so that you can largely forget about taking advantage of time dilation. Unless you can salvage a Bussard Ramjet (current thinking is that it won't work) you are not going to get that fast. Traveling 3LY instead of 16LY means only having to reach 1/5 the speed to arrive in a "reasonable" time. That's a big help. It might be the difference between doable but hard and hopeless.