

Can Starships Survive the Journey? - rblion
http://news.discovery.com/space/can-starships-survive-the-journey.html

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maeon3
The future of space colonization is not finding other worlds, unless we get
warp drive. The future of space colonization is man made structures orbiting
our sun, gathering resources from nearby planets and shuttling them here. The
sun is our battery and leaving it for extended periods of time will take
mammoth amounts of technology and risk to leave it for thousands of years.

A civilization that travels between the stars will have one of two things,
either (1) a complete mastery over their own biological/technical processes
which enable them to live in the first place (so they can repair themselves
and make changes as needs and resources change when they pass from galaxy to
galaxy). Or (2) they will have some sufficiently advanced technology to go
many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light.

Maybe our galaxy is a spaceship, kind of like a big spinning petri dish and we
just lost contact with the head honcho deciding where we are going. The sun we
are currently feeding on was charged up at our origin, and we'll acquire more
of them at our destination.

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cma
> will take mammoth amounts of technology

With 1970's project-Orion type technology, we can get to alpha centauri within
around 5 or 10 years (from the travelers' time-perspectives, hundreds of years
from earth's perspective).

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randallsquared
Orion was great, but not quite that great. Alpha Centauri would have taken
around 45 years one-way for an advanced ablation-cooled one-megaton pulse
drive. Since it wouldn't get any faster than 10% light speed, time dilation
would be negligible (I assume you were thinking about time dilation, though
the distance to AC doesn't really permit the kind of difference you describe).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_\(nuclear_propulsion\)#Interstellar_missions)

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cma
Well, the accelerations involved here would cause the most significant time
dilation, right?

I was going off of memory of the chapter "Saturn by 1970" in Dyson's
"Disturbing the Universe".

I probably mixed this up with something else; traveling at 1G acceleration to
Orion (not _in_ orion =P), would take 30 years--3100 years would pass by on
earth.

~~~
randallsquared
The article I linked has some interesting specifics and discussion of Dyson's
two interstellar Orion designs.

In general, 1g for a year gets you fairly close to light speed, and time
dilation really starts to have a noticeable effect. If you can accelerate at
1g indefinitely, then longer journeys are proportionately more reduced.

