You mean to say millions of years. The tech needed to accelerate enough to make the trip in hundreds of years is also far outside the realm of physics as we know it
The orion drive is basically an engineering challenge. Very little new tech required. It could reach nearby stars in hundreds of years with no new physics.
The problem isn’t travel time, it’s speed. Space itself is continuing to expand, at a faster and faster rate. It’s expanding so fast that we’ll actually never reach far out with conventional means. We’d just endlessly drift through the darkness because we wouldn’t be able to go fast enough to reach anything. A generation ship would simply not be able to get anywhere, ever.
I mean, maybe we can make it into another very close system, but what are the chances that there’s anything even close to being habitable?
On a local level the expansion of space cannot overcome gravitational attraction to a certain scale, roughly around the size of our local galaxy cluster. We’ll always be able to reach anything in our local galaxy cluster without FTL travel.
Your sense of scale is off. The amount of stuff held together by local group gravity is more than we can ever get bored with.
The amount things that we can reach without FTL is so large that humans could explore and colonize for billions of years without ever feeling like we are running out of space.
What about those generational ships with closed ecosystems where people live and inbreed for hundreds of years until they reach another system?
You mean to say millions of years. The tech needed to accelerate enough to make the trip in hundreds of years is also far outside the realm of physics as we know it
The orion drive is basically an engineering challenge. Very little new tech required. It could reach nearby stars in hundreds of years with no new physics.
The problem isn’t travel time, it’s speed. Space itself is continuing to expand, at a faster and faster rate. It’s expanding so fast that we’ll actually never reach far out with conventional means. We’d just endlessly drift through the darkness because we wouldn’t be able to go fast enough to reach anything. A generation ship would simply not be able to get anywhere, ever.
I mean, maybe we can make it into another very close system, but what are the chances that there’s anything even close to being habitable?
On a local level the expansion of space cannot overcome gravitational attraction to a certain scale, roughly around the size of our local galaxy cluster. We’ll always be able to reach anything in our local galaxy cluster without FTL travel.
Your sense of scale is off. The amount of stuff held together by local group gravity is more than we can ever get bored with.
The amount things that we can reach without FTL is so large that humans could explore and colonize for billions of years without ever feeling like we are running out of space.
Our galaxy is not ripping apart yet. And our galaxy is moving closer to several others. You can certainly get to other stars without FTL
Well, good luck then. We’ll await your journey reports.
I’ll get back to you in a million years. brb