The Three Possible Classes of Interstellar Travel (forbes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere dream, as our technology allowed us to neither know what worlds might lie beyond our own Solar System or to reach beyond our planet. But time and development has changed both of those things significantly. Now, when we look to the stars, we know that potentially habitable worlds lurk throughout our galaxy, and our spaceflight capabilities can bring us there. But so far, it would only be a very long, lonely, one-way trip. This isn't necessarily going to be the case forever, though, as physically feasible technology could get humans to another star within a single lifetime, and potentially groundbreaking technology might make the journey almost instantaneous.

Comments

Re:Physically feasible?

[KiloByte]

Disregarding science-fiction babble like in this article, the fastest we can get to Proxima Centauri is 80k years assuming no fundamental breakthrough, or 100 years with ultimately advanced technology that's not known to be impossible with our current knowledge of physics.

Writers of such articles tend to forget that every gram of fuel needs to be accelerated by previous stages, and even worse, all the fuel needed for deceleration must be first accelerated all the way then decelerated partway. This puts a hard cap even if you magically got 100% efficiency.

But fortunately, such writers are also forgetting that physics isn't the only technology field that advances. I'd expect that both stopping aging and sentient AI are no more than 100-200 years away. Just don't forget to take playing cards with you to spend time during than 80k years long trip.

Left out the most obvious and best specific power

[burtosis]

Before going speculative about teleportation and work holes, but past antimatter propulsion is a miniature black hole power source. A million metric ton black hole would radiate about three terawatts (with less mass dramatically raising the radiated power) and you could use magnetic fields to pump in material from in front of the ship. It would eat anything even photons and nutrinos. It should be able to power a decent sized ship and would be the most ideal power source known to modern physics.

Re:Here is a working link.

[evilviper]

There's a much simpler and more universal workaround...

No matter how much javascript crapware they inject, no matter how aggressively they interfere with ad blockers, sites still MUST be indexable by Google (whose web spiders don't even do javascript) or they might as not even have a web presence.

So any site, no matter how broken, will invariable come up fine if you search for the URL prefixed with "cache:" in a Google search. That will >get you the locally stored version they indexed in the first place. Always a 100% working version of the page, without acquiescing to the site's crazy demands for insecure browser behavior.