> If you accelerate at 1g constantly for 1y you travel 0.5 light years
Can't we accelerate past 1G constantly? Or do we expend so much energy doing it that we can't realistically do it with today's technology?
Can't we accelerate past 1G constantly? Or do we expend so much energy doing it that we can't realistically do it with today's technology?
Magic warp bubble tech is the bare minimum, and we're nowhere close to inventing that.
Chemical rockets are currently the only thing that allow sustaining such accelerations briefly for human-size payloads, but the low exhaust velocity and exponential reaction mass requirement make sustaining it for days/months/years completely impossible.
You'd have to supply the energy externally (i.e. some sort of beam propulsion), but getting any significant fraction of g out of such a system (with human-sized payloads) seems unlikely within the next centuries, especially as the distance increases.
Or some form of ram scope, plenty of H everywhere, but those also have the issue of you collecting things while going at relativistic speeds.
It's hard to accelerate at or beyond 1G for very long with current technology. Roughly speaking, the rocket runs out of fuel soon. Packing more fuel makes the rocket heavier, meaning diminishing returns when using the fuel. The mass required grows exponentially. See "The tyranny of the rocket equation"
Increasing the acceleration a little bit more than that (eg to 1%) would make a difference.
Wouldn't that be only a few months on a decades-long journey at 1.01G vs 1G??
If the acceleration was too great but survivable, what happens? I can’t imagine my back, knees or ankles would like it.