Hacker News Reader

Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

I never knew you could get that far in that amount of time (experienced by passengers) with just 1g of force so it’s thoroughly interesting and in some sense everything is quite close: as long as you are OK with a one way ticket.

View on HN

It's important to note though that this kind of ship is still impossible as far as I remember - even with matter/antimatter reactions (which theoretically gives you E = mc^2 energy, the maximum possible per kg), you can't get enough energy to accelerate to the mass of the fuel to 1g, nevermind the rest of the ship, for the duration required for interstellar travel.

The amount of energy required for fast interstellar travel is mind-boggling. People do not comprehend the scale. Even with ridiculous things like massless fuel it would take multiple times the entire yearly energy expenditure of the earth for an ISS sized ship to travel 10 light years before the passengers died of old age.

It’s almost like we never need to do it: just send seeds of life out into space: if we send people we can never hear from them again anyway. We can’t get the information back. So it’s mostly a hedonic exercise: a one way adventure holiday for the crew.

Also why stop at 1g? People could be trained to live in 1.2 or even 1.5g.

A one way ticket with no messages back to/from home.

For such a long trip, the only logical ship type would be a self-sustaining generational colony ship full of hundreds of people. The concept of 'home' would quickly shift from being the Earth to being your ship, so staying in contact with your origin planet would become irrelevant.

Might be why the simulator is the most important technology in star trek, to keep people sane, connect with nature etc.

The thing they never address - booking slots. That simulator would never be available!

We the viewers follow high ranking officers on a capitol starship. Surely this cushy position comes with a well equipped post on a vessel that has a good number of such units. Enough so that Voyager had the meme of holographic crewmembers. I don't know if RedDwarf (Rimmer) or some other scifi show got there first.

trust the internet to have already calculated the answer to this question (you can have 10.8 hours per month = 30 minutes a day - not bad!)

https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/3aajfy/how_much_h...

If it's anything like VR, a bunch of the people on the ship would lose interest and rarely use it, leaving lots more time for the devotees.

Presumably a bunch of people could book sessions in one simulator at the same time and simulate multiple simulators inside the simulation, massively increasing the capacity of the top-level simulator.

Haha! That's like wishing for more wishes. Definitely not allowed.

Why do you need a self-sustaining generational colony ship to go 30 years? Especially in the space future when we should be able to slow aging down at least a moderate amount.

In space, they just call the "space future" the "future". ;)

after the last year I imagine quite a few people would put their hand up for that.

but also, what about deceleration?

You gotta stop some time to smell the roses... so would you cut that acceleration time in half to decelerate?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com