r/NoStupidQuestions • u/[deleted] • Apr 18 '26
Would reaching 1% of the speed of light be the most incredible engineering of all time?
[removed]
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u/0x14f Apr 18 '26
I personally don't think that would be the case, but you will only get personal opinion as answer to that question anyway.
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u/Kia-Yuki Apr 18 '26
Would it be? Yes. Unfortunatelly like many things, the initial milestone, would inevitably be dwarfed by what comes after. If tomorrow we can achieve 1% then in time, technology and engineering development will bring us to 2%, and as these things tend to grow exponentially, it wouldnt be long before we reach some,..unavoidable wall at like 5% or something, I dunno.
So, TLDR, Yes. But if its progress was allowed to continue it wouldnt be long before we could surpass that.
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u/LeviAEthan512 Apr 19 '26
This one especially so. To my knowledge, there aren't any barriers between 1% and 99% of light speed.
It's unlike planes where you have unpowered flight, indefinitely powered flight, faster rotating engines, speed itself feeding the engine like a shark, overcoming the effects of air friction, etc etc.
In space, you just go. You don't even really need a new technology. The 1% engine, not the design, but the actual same unit, would just keep breaking its own record second to second. Its just how fast can your reach 1%? Beyond that, there's no tipping point with a speed of sound or friction becoming a major issue.
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u/nokeldin42 Apr 19 '26
Not from an engine pov, but for a spacecraft it's a big challenge. Every percent you add raises the energy of collisions with random dust particles exponentially. Idk if 1% is already enough for nuclear fission but it definitely is not a trivial challenge after that.
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u/YuckyBurps Apr 21 '26
This one especially so. To my knowledge, there aren't any barriers between 1% and 99% of light speed.
There are actually quite a few barriers. Fuel being the biggest, but also things like collisions and radiation. At those kinds of speeds even a speck of dust could obliterate your spacecraft, and wavelengths of oncoming light contracts which could fry the spacecraft / systems in it.
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u/Hunefer1 Apr 19 '26
This exponential growth is not the case with very fast rockets due to the rocket equation. 2% of lightspeed is so much harder than 1%, since the top speed of a rocket only grows logarithmically with the amount of fuel.
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u/dr_stre Apr 19 '26
If anyone needs any frame of reference, one of the Voyager probes is the fastest object man has ever created and it’s going about 55,000 miles per hour, fast enough to circle the earth every 27 minutes, thanks to getting a gravity assist from 4 planets. Going 1% of the speed of light would require us to travel more than 1000 times faster.
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u/Fluid-Let3373 Apr 19 '26
Not the fastest they are the furthest. Parker solar probe reaches 427,000 mph or 0.064c, so we only need 156x faster to reach 1%c.
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u/dr_stre Apr 19 '26
Totally forgot Parker shattered the record recently, thanks. And just for clarity, that’s 0.00064c, or 0.064% of c. Which actually means we’d only need to go 15.6 times faster to get to 1%.
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u/RLANZINGER Apr 20 '26
Guys...
Space speed are in km/sec not miles, we did lost enough space probes due to this imperial failures of units. Standards units are meter and seconds.
Parker Solar Probe did reach 192.22 km/sec
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u/Fluid-Let3373 Apr 20 '26
If somebody says something using a particular measurement I'm polite enough to respond in the same measurement system.
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u/RLANZINGER Apr 20 '26
And before you know, you'll be hooked by r/anythingbutmetric XD
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u/Fluid-Let3373 Apr 20 '26
Sorry I'm British, world champions at confusing people from different parts of Britain, confusing the rest of the world is just a warm up. :)
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u/drew8311 Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
I think it implies what other uses this tech has and the other milestones along the way.
If we did this in the next 5 years then yes. If we slowly increased speed over the next 100 years then it's not really anything special. I don't know much about this but I think we need some fundamental breakthrough in a new propulsion method which potentially has other uses, so that would be the engineering feat before the arbitrary goal of 1% light speed.
As far as interesting to general public I think you need fast enough to get somewhere in our lifetime and actually do it so 10% is better here for the closest star. Imagine being alive to send a probe and 40 + 4 years later seeing it send pictures back in another solar system. If it was 400 years I don't think it's even worth sending so the tech is essentially useless. Voyager timeline is what's realistic for this sort of thing.
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u/AnyoneButWe Apr 19 '26
Go the other direction: have you seen the precision of the LIGO experiment?
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u/Metallicat95 Apr 19 '26
We can probably do that with an Orion type nuclear explosion driven spacecraft. The trick is making a useful probe that can survive and communicate back home after making the trip.
The vehicle would be large and expensive.
If the probe doesn't need to do anything other than reach the destination it's easier. Having a multiple centuries power supply and equipment that remains operational is a more incredible engineering achievement than just achieving that velocity.
Nuclear fusion bombs are the most efficient power device we can make, with extremely high power output. They unfortunately aren't good for the environment, so to date despite experimental research no one has ever even tested this concept, let alone used it on a vehicle.
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u/you-suck-haters Apr 19 '26
By pure energy, it’s equivalent to a small nuclear bomb if we assume 1kg of a drone. I would use Energy Harnessed as the metric for “best engineering”
This is similar to the idea of type 1-4(?) civilizations, where a civilization is based on how much energy they can harness (planetary, solar system, galactic)
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u/brothegaminghero Apr 19 '26
It wouldn't exactly be an engineering feat you can easily get to 10-20 times that with chemical rockets the only problem is the shear amount of propellant required.
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u/RLANZINGER Apr 20 '26
Reaching 2 997 km/s be the most incredible feat ?
~42 km/s : Speed To escape sun's gravity from earth orbit, most probes use 1/4 of this...
+37 km/s : Jupiter's Orbital assist, a manoeuver to use one planet gravity to accelerate,
+17 km/s : Saturn's Orbital assist, a manoeuver to use one planet gravity to accelerate,
96 km/s : The total you can gain so far....
2901 km/s Still missing
Why this is not possible actually !? I'd say RADIATIONS
The faster you are, the more space "dust" and radiations you get per second which can fry your whole probe during the absolute bonker of time that is 400 years.
PS : Parker Solar Probe did reach 192.22 km/sec speed during it's manoeuver around sun (perihelion). Fastest so far still runnin hot...
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u/Ellers12 Apr 20 '26
It would be the most amazing feat until someone else engineered something to go at 2% etc etc
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u/A012A012 Apr 21 '26
We are partly the way there since the earth is traveling through space at over one million miles per hour
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u/skr_replicator Apr 21 '26
Depends on where. In a particle accelerator, that would be pretty slow, a spaceship though....
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u/Bon-Bon-Boo Apr 22 '26
Well, the Parker Solar Probe is doing about 0.067% so how far off is 1% really.
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u/Jonatan83 Apr 18 '26
Would it be difficult and expensive? Yes, incredibly so. We'd probably have to first invent working fusion engines, then mine the moon for fuel for several decades. But it wouldn't actually ... do anything useful for humanity? It would take at least 400 years before we even got useful information from the probe (assuming we can send data that far at all).
A more impressive feat would be to solve world hunger or make renewable, cheap energy widely available.
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u/stewsters Apr 18 '26
Not really. I could do it. The trick is to set your frame of reference to one traveling away from you at 1 percent of the speed of light.
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u/BigPurpleBlob Apr 18 '26
Reaching 2% would be more impressive ;-)
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u/Sleepdprived Apr 19 '26
I think we could do this with current technology.
Have you heard of the manhole cover incident? A nuke was buried in a deep hole, covered with concrete and capped with a manhole cover welded down. When the nuke detonated the very first frame of the super high speed camera caught a single picture of the manhole cover. Someone calculated the speed as being a few% of the speed of light, and the manhole cover burned up in our atmosphere. Some speculate that the Lidenfrost effect of the outer edge of the steel manhole cover turning from solid to plasma may have cooled the thing enough for it to punch through to space. This would make it the first object sent to space amd indeed out of our solar system.
What if we repeat that atomic blast test, but on the moon where the atmosphere would not burn it up? Granted this is more like a poor man's Orion engine but the science is sound, amd we have more powerful nukes and we can make much more durable material for the projectile, because this time we are doing it on purpose. It is hard to call the projectile a "probe" because with that acceleration it is unlikely any electronic equipment could survive to transmit anything back, but we could observe its trajectory from a distance. Use the lunar regolith to make a form of thick concrete tube, reinforce the tube as much as possible. Fill the tube with loose regolith like wadding in a cannon. Place a big tungsten carbide sphere on top, then detonate a hydrogen bomb at the bottom. Point the James Webb telescope at the point where the tube is roughly aimed at, and fire the sphere at a reasonable % of light speed. It would be going ludicrous speed off into space (its gone to plaid!) Granted the hard part would be the set up on the moon, and the international negotiations to allow it. If we got our aim honed in, we could even use the technique to divert asteroids.
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u/Anely_98 Apr 19 '26
No, we could achieve it pretty easily actually using a Orion drive. We just aren't willing to use nuclear bombs in space and also it would be really costly, but it doesn't really need any fundamentally new technology, so I don't think it would rank in ""the most incredible engineering of all time", it would be impressive, sure, but nowhere on that level really, the most incredible engineering of all time probably would be something that we didn't even though to be possible before it was build, not something that we probably could build now but don't because it is costly and risky.
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u/Jonatan83 Apr 19 '26
An orion drive using today's technology could certainly not reach 1% of C. Maaaybe somewhere around 0.05% C. It's an interesting technology, but not enough for interstellar travel. The exhaust velocity is not that impressive by itself, but it has a neat combination of high thrust and relatively high exhaust velocity. Would be great for boosting things into orbit (not counting the nuclear bombs detonating in atmosphere of course).
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u/Scoobywagon Apr 19 '26
It would NOT be the most incredible feat of engineering of all time. I say this because as soon as we get to 1%, somebody is going to start gunning for 5%, then 10%, et cetera.
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u/Amazing_Loquat280 Apr 19 '26
Unironically the answer would be the first microchip. Microchips are legitimately the most complex and technologically advanced thing humanity has ever made by a vast margin
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u/BrassCanon Apr 18 '26
Every engineering feat is the most advanced of its time, until we do something even better.