Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

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You’ve shifted and redefined the goalposts and even then requires orders of magnitude advancement in multiple areas (power generation, lasers, satellite shrinkage etc) and doing it all in space. Thinking any of this happens in a lifetime of anyone alive today seems unrealistically optimistic. And all of this ignores something critical OP said:

> we'll expect people to live hundreds of years by the time we can send a ship to alpha centauri.

Even hundreds of years is not a realistic life expectancy to reach the nearest star and requires not just an enormous overabundance of energy, the fuel source has to be available at the midway point so that you can decelerate. Humans at another star without discovery of faster than light travel mechanisms (mainly wormholes) seems purely in the realm of science fiction.

Your post is exactly the nihilism that can't be proven false until someone succeeds. Voyager reached the termination shock of our sun's heliosphere. It succeeded. The next voyager could only target another star.

Voyager was a once in a lifetime coincidence of taking advantage of a line up of celestial objects to achieve a distance of 0.06% to that of the nearest star. No one thought it would be impossible to achieve. Indeed, the remarkable possibility is what spurred the funding.

For comparison, Voyager would need to travel 1666x further in the same time frame. It’s not nihilistic to suggest that 3 orders of magnitude improvement in our lifetime isn’t likely. Oh and Voyager is basically on life support having shut down most systems.

I didn’t say it’s outright impossible or not worth pursuing. Just that believing it’ll happen in our lifetime is unrealistic precisely because of the currently known laws of physics and the orders of magnitude of technological achievement necessary to attain more than 10% the speed of light for anything that has any mass (and again assuming all you want to accomplish is a flyby at relativistic speeds).

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