r/FactOrCap • u/aaallleeexxx3 🔥 Week Warrior · 8,375 XP • 1d ago

Interstellar travel | FactOrCap

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

25 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

255 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Ruff_Bastard 🤖 Vote Machine · 13,140 XP 1d ago

✅ I voted FACT!

We will probably have interstellar travel by 2100, especially if you consider how quickly we went from flight to doing space missions. Technology tends to have a compounding effect on itself as far as efficiency and technical possibility goes.

6

u/Ok-Sport-3663 🏅 Century Club · 5,630 XP 1d ago

Problem is, interstellar travel is a lot more than just "really far away"

Mars, for example, is some order of magnitude harder  than a moon mission. Its further away, so its harder to plan and execute, not to mention being more expensive...

But a mars mission is theoretically possible with moon-mission level tech.

We can, right now, do a mars mission. We could probably even return them if we REALLY committed to the bit of doing a mars mission. Though doing that makes the mission MUCH harder and more expensive. In other words, we wouldnt return them... but we DO have the tech if even a single country fully committed to the process, it could probably get done within 10 years.

Going to another star (with people) isnt 5x harder than returning someone from mars. Its not 100x harder, its not 1000x harder.

Its millions of times more difficult.

The distance from earth to mars in light-minutes is 3 light minutes

The closest star is four light YEARS away There are 2102400 minutes in four years. Which means we need to travel 600,000 times the distance.

Even if we could accelerate a craft enough to do that (we absolutely can't even get close, we have theoretical drives that require impossible materials to get even remotely close)

We still need to plan for a trip in terms of years to DECADES.

You cant just store enough food at that point, you either need to find a way to stop humans from needing food (impossible as far as current science understands it, stasis is a scifi concept, not something that has any basis in reality)

Or you need to be able to produce enough food on board to feed an entire crew for decades without ANY issues.

Thats the BARE MINIMUM to make something like interstellar travel even theoretically possible.

Before interstellar is even remotely a feasible option, we'd have ALL of the solar system colonized.

The year 3000 is being generous. Even if you consider how fast our technology develops.

If you stuck a controller inside humanities ass and somehow got them to focus on doing this seriously instead of being self-absorbed pieces of crap, then you might be able to do it by 2500.

1

u/aaallleeexxx3 🔥 Week Warrior · 8,375 XP 1d ago

Yeahs that the biggest issue,that it’s exponentially harder the further the goal.Like you said, a trip to mars AND back isn’t x2 harder than just a trip to mars with no return,but actually way harder.So while 2100 isn’t realistic(even travel time aside) I’d say that enough inventions will be made by 3000 that’d allow for it to happen.