> Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 2 is traveling from Earth, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain times of the year.
We don't even have the technology to escape the sun's gravity without needing a gravitational slingshot from other planets, and that still leaves us with a space craft moving slower than the earth.
Regardless, using planets to help speed things is just good sense. Think of going on a long trip in a car. You don't hook a trailer full of all the fuel you'll need to get to your destination, you stop at gas stations along the way. Using planets is a lot like that.
It's going slower than Earth but that is no indication of how advanced the technology is. The whole goal was to get a close encounter with Pluto-Charon. What's the point in flying off into nothingness any faster after that?
[0] https://www.quora.com/Can-we-use-the-gravity-of-the-sun-to-s...
But we have decided for now not to build something like that.
Maybe in the next century at some point a nuclear powered spacecraft could be built in space that could start exploring other star systems.
The voyagers are nuclear powered. They have RTGs powering their electronics and heat from those devices has changed their trajectories. The concept of a nuclear reactor powering an electric thruster isn't very far fetched. If we were going to go anywhere outside the solar system, that is the sort of nuclear power we would use.
If we had mining in lower gravity well areas (such as the asteroid belt) yielding that kind of fuel it might make a lot more sense.
Indeed, only 59 years since we first put something into earth orbit.
We're just getting warmed up!
Literally, sadly.
Most theorized "warp drives" either require more energy than humanity is capable of producing or necessitate breaking a law of physics or two just to move anything organic or larger than a postage stamp.
Then again, the answer could be right under our noses. There's a Sci-fi story - I forget the name - where space travel is actually quite simple if you know the math to make it happen, and when a peaceful alien race visits Earth, the humans - with their thousands of years of armed conflict - kill the aliens and take their spaceships.
Makes me wonder that if we treat the rest of the universe the way we have treated our planet, do we truly deserve the right to roam the stars?
Maybe there's a reason Golter is where it is, and maybe it wasn't always there.
It's also my working theory of why we won in Independence Day the movie :) Aliens were never warring among themselves and/or allowing any kind of a hacking culture, so didn't think to secure their systems!
They were essentially a hive mind working with a single purpose and were therefore incapable of conceiving the notion that they would need to secure their systems against an attack that essentially used their own technology against them.
If you can create trust out of electricty (ion drives also come to mind), then if you have nuclear power or fusion, things get interesting again in terms of propulsion.
To reach orbit, there are a bunch of interesting proposals: skyhooks (i.e. space elevator light), launch loops, railguns.
As a practical engine, EM drives are worse than chemical rockets or even ion thrusters (which produce about 25-250 mN/kW, according to Wikipedia).
My point is that there are plenty of possibilities to continue to develop propulsion technology.
Obviously the first engine ever exhaustively tested is usually not the highest performance achievable. A factor of a thousand seems possible although a hundred is more likely.
So for a very large nuclear plant, if the EM drive were weightless (LOL) then maybe 1/10th G applied to that nuclear sub is some kind of theoretical limit not entirely ridiculous but possible.
Now consider that to one sig fig a G of acceleration for a year is the speed of light. And if you're careful maybe you could run the plant for three decades.
So a round trip to the speed of light and back again is more or less back of the envelope possible to visit some distant star.
Relativity rears its ugly head and ten years of ship time around the speed of light is a lot further than 10 lightyears and time passing on earth is a lot longer than ten years.
Of course at the speed of light you're going to need a rather substantial hull, an active radar that can avoid interstellar crud, etc. If you can detect "stuff" at a day out, at a tenth of a G accelerating for an entire day you can be quite far away indeed by the time you pass it.
I can't run the numbers in my head like above, but even 1/100th G slices a very substantial amount of time off a Mars mission. Some unverified google results imply 1/100th G means Mars in a month not a year and a half.
At least as a back of the envelope calculation its quite a useful vehicle.
I think you might be thinking of Harry Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken". They weren't exactly friendly, but they were quite surprised by Man's ingenuity.