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Comment by hotpotamus | Hacker News Reader

> I don't get the problem with traveling to stars though. If I could move at the speed of light through space

Well, to be a stickler for the laws of physics, you can't move through space at the speed of light. In principal, you can get moving pretty quick though, but what if there's a space pebble between you and those stars? If you're going at half the speed of light, the collision force would be in the atomic bomb range. So that's a potential problem.

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If a large pebble (or a large piece of space junk) collides with ISS at 16 km/s ISS will be destroyed. That doesn't prevent ISS for being where it is though.

The ISS routinely eats micrometeorites or other tiny debris and also maneuvers to avoid larger trackable junk on occasion. If it was travelling at half the speed of light, it would be a bit more problematic.

We don't know how much of this stuff exists in the interstellar space. It's possible that a probability to hit something there is much less than ISS hitting something big enough to destroy it, even with all radars and maneuvers. So I wouldn't consider it as an argument against interstellar travel, not yet.

I'd say it's one of many potential problems. We've already observed a couple interstellar comets, right? So we actually already know that there are objects out there. Certainly it wouldn't hurt to send some laser accelerated probes out there and see what we find, but human travel seems like pure sci fi.

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