Originally Posted by Nemesiscorporation

With the technology that is coming online now, if you excluded severe cost, Proxima Centauri and Barnard's Star, would be reachable within 50 years and possibly as little as 35.

Absolute bollax. Lets remove the largest impediment to these required technologies and then honky dory. Considering the huge expense and technical difficulties of just getting to Mars, your optimism is completely unrealistic.

Further Barnards star is approximately 6 lightyears away. So to get there in under 50 years would require the development of speeds of at least 0.1ly from the start. Even if ion drives could prove their estimated top speeds, you will still have impacts from instellar and interplanetry debris.

Originally Posted by riven

Absolute bollax. Lets remove the largest impediment to these required technologies and then honky dory. Considering the huge expense and technical difficulties of just getting to Mars, your optimism is completely unrealistic.

Further Barnards star is approximately 6 lightyears away. So to get there in under 50 years would require the development of speeds of at least 0.1ly from the start. Even if ion drives could prove their estimated top speeds, you will still have impacts from instellar and interplanetry debris.

It’s all theory now but I wouldn’t have imagined a phone could be made mobile have multiple applications, instant access to music, movies and games and be accessible to almost anyone when I was a teenager. It was the stuff of sci-fi TV.
This had the effect that the technology designers copied the sci-fi ideas as they became possible. Looks at the star trek equipment that was fiction back then but now we have the communicators (mobile phones) and datapads (ipads). Maybe the star trek creators should sue Apple.
It may seem impossible now but who knows how quickly this technology will develop.

Originally Posted by Potatoeman

It’s all theory now but I wouldn’t have imagined a phone could be made mobile have multiple applications, instant access to music, movies and games and be accessible to almost anyone when I was a teenager. It was the stuff of sci-fi TV.
This had the effect that the technology designers copied the sci-fi ideas as they became possible. Looks at the star trek equipment that was fiction back then but now we have the communicators (mobile phones) and datapads (ipads). Maybe the star trek creators should sue Apple.
It may seem impossible now but who knows how quickly this technology will develop.

Many of those inventions depended on computer power and code. As we are seeing in the energy industry, those sort of gains do not compute in other industries. What is being said is that technologies in the league of space elevators would be possible in a few decades (of course ignoring costs don't you know). How far away do you think tghe space elevator is? How long will it take top send anotehr mission to Mars? Based on these questions that are grounded in reality, we can see that interstellar flight to a distance of 6ly in a few decades are most likely fantasy. They were being portrayed as more possible, maybe even likely.

Originally Posted by riven

Many of those inventions depended on computer power and code. As we are seeing in the energy industry, those sort of gains do not compute in other industries. What is being said is that technologies in the league of space elevators would be possible in a few decades (of course ignoring costs don't you know). How far away do you think tghe space elevator is? How long will it take top send anotehr mission to Mars? Based on these questions that are grounded in reality, we can see that interstellar flight to a distance of 6ly in a few decades are most likely fantasy. They were being portrayed as more possible, maybe even likely.

It may seem like pipe dreams now but technology can develop in strange, unexpected ways. We may be looking at these problems from the wrong perspective. We don’t really know if the impediments we see now will be an issue.

I'd say that if in the next 100 years unmanned mining of the Asteroid belt is happening for commercial reasons , then that will be truly awsome progress. After that it get hugely speculative, trying to find a planet that has earthlike conditions might entail a radius of 30 to 100 light years plus, so essentially there could never be any communication between those going and those sending them.

Originally Posted by riven

Absolute bollax. Lets remove the largest impediment to these required technologies and then honky dory. Considering the huge expense and technical difficulties of just getting to Mars, your optimism is completely unrealistic.

Further Barnards star is approximately 6 lightyears away. So to get there in under 50 years would require the development of speeds of at least 0.1ly from the start. Even if ion drives could prove their estimated top speeds, you will still have impacts from instellar and interplanetry debris.

It'll be tough, but the numbers aren't so crazy as to outright call bollox on them. If we could get an ion drive with an acceleration of 10% of a G, say 1ms-2, and could run it for 1 year solid, then coast at .1 of c for 60 years, decelerate for another year at the end, you'd be at Barnards star. For a little context, your average 1.5l car (Say a sporty Megane or something) is capable of doing about 35 times that acceleration. The trick is doing it for two years with a sixty year gap in the middle, and avoiding impacts or ablation with the interstellar medium in the meantime. At .1c (about 10 million kph) that debris is going to hit hard - some kind of deflection mechanism would have to be thought up. If we're lucky perhaps the interstellar medium will be mostly charged particles and we'll just push them out of the way with an EM field, but that would be quite lucky ;-).

As an aside, you mentioned that we need to reach 'speeds of at least 0.1ly from the start'. ly is the SI symbol for light year, and isn't actually a measure of time, or speed, but of distance. You used it correctly when giving the distance to Barnards star, so I assume it was just a slip or whatever.

As a more light hearted aside, if you could take that sporty Megane and straight out accelerate constantly, still capping ourselves at .1c, you'd only need to need to accelerate for 10 days instead of a year on each end.

Nah, just fold space you don't need to move anywhere.

Originally Posted by Potatoeman

Nah, just fold space you don't need to move anywhere.

People already working on that since the end of WW2. Heim theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lets say now if you could get on one of these long distance journeys (40/50 years or whatever) and you were still on the Dole could you keep claiming the Dole and would you still have to sign on every two weeks because that would be a bit inconveient for some of the others on the journey not cute enough to be on the Dole ! ! !

If Humans and History are anything to go by,this will more than likely cause a War somewhere down the line.
On the bright side,most of us wont be around,but for those that are going down the Cryonics route,then you have my condolences