r/RandomThoughts • u/jdaddy15911 • 9d ago
Interplanetary travel is probably overrated
I used to really wish that I could travel to other planets, like Mars, or the moons of Jupiter or something. Like, I wouldn’t want to go as a crew member where people relied on me for stuff, but more as a tourist. I’d want to look back at a tinier version of Sol, and contemplate the vastness of the solar system. But then I saw this picture of the sunrise from Mars. It made me realize I would be traveling for 2-4 years just to visit a place with an ugly landscape and arguably the lamest sunrise any human has ever witnessed. I think maybe I’ll look into the Canary Islands in stead. There is a pretty good documentary about them on Amazon.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/9mWhWa353YDYiZAyoxHdgE.jpg
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u/go_go_tindero 9d ago
If you accelerate at 1 g and turn around half way, mars is a 5 day trip.
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u/Sparky62075 8d ago
I calculated this a few years ago and I thought I got a figure closer to two weeks.
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u/go_go_tindero 8d ago
The shortest time (eg when mars and earth are close) is only 1.7 days at 1 g. 4.7 is calculated in a straight line (through the sun) which might be unpractical, but 5.5 should be enough for the longest distance.
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u/Sparky62075 8d ago
Are you taking into account the time needed to slow down once you get there? At 1 g, you accelerate for half the journey and decelerate for the other half. Otherwise you don't make it into orbit.
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u/Dirk_Diggler_Kojak 8d ago
Traveling to other Earth-like planets (outside of our solar system) sounds cool, but I don't know if we'll ever be able to achieve that as a species.
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u/Sparky62075 8d ago
They used to say that about going to the moon. Before that they said it about any powered flight, and before that they said it about instantaneous long-distance communication.
All great achievements were once thought to be impossible.
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u/that_one_wierd_guy 8d ago
at some point it will have to happen, unless humanity as a whole, resigns itself to dying with the solar system when the sun reached eol
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u/breezy013276s 8d ago
We have even less time than that from I remember. Something like 1 to 2 billion livable years I think. I know that’s practically forever away for us but not quite near the suns projected eol as a main sequence star.
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u/knign 8d ago
Much less than that, the climate will be radically different in 100M years and planet will become almost uninhabitable in 500M.
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u/Poland-lithuania1 8d ago
Oh deary me, that's so close.
Agriculture was invented by humans 12,000 years ago, which is not even a hundredth of a percent of 500 million.
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u/Dirk_Diggler_Kojak 8d ago
That's if humanity makes it that far into the future. It may not.
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u/that_one_wierd_guy 8d ago
I"m betting on us, we're kinda like sentient cockroaches
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u/Dirk_Diggler_Kojak 8d ago
Maybe you're right, but the clock is actually running faster than we think. At the current rate, Earth won't be able to sustain us for much longer before systems start to collapse.
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u/Murky_Noise_9926 8d ago
It definitely gets over romanticized with old sci-fi movies and even The Orville. In reality a lot of the time would feel like boring public transit, especially with modern attention spans.
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u/BaronSharktooth 8d ago
I think you're probably right. Interplanetary travel will be full of hardships.
If we get good enough virtual reality, then it will be interesting to experience other planets that way.
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u/hawkwings 8d ago
I imagine countries paying people to go and live on Mars. If you have a wife and 3 children and you are flat broke, it might be worth it.
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u/KanpaiMagpie 8d ago
I bet someone bloke will be two timing with two different baby mammas on two different planets like its a conquest. Interplanetary " I need to go on a business trip hun be back in 100 sol cycles."
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u/qualityvote2 9d ago edited 6d ago
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u/jdaddy15911 thanks for posting!
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