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afreak | 9 years ago

Keep in mind that at best it would take maybe 1,000 years with current technology to get there with a probe or human-supporting ship. It would be highly unpopular however as it involves exploding nuclear bombs behind the craft to get it there that fast--that and it would probably cost trillions to build the thing.

discuss

order

sehugg|9 years ago

There's a $100 million effort to develop tiny spacecraft that are accelerated to 10%-20% the speed of light with ground-based lasers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

gene-h|9 years ago

Today at 2:55 EST Philip Lubin, who is involved with the Starshot project, will present some work on the study he is doing for NASA investigating the feasibility of this.

You can watch it live here: http://livestream.com/viewnow/NIAC2016

MOARDONGZPLZ|9 years ago

The craziest thing to me is that if we sent a generational spaceship there that was expected to take 1,000 years, it seems likely that better technology would allow the next generation of spaceships to get there much faster. So by the time the 1,000 year spaceship arrived, there would already be people there!

mrfusion|9 years ago

After we build the laser it might not cost that much more just to keep a constant stream of these guys going to the planet relaying their information back along the stream. Effectively giving us a streaming feed of what's happening on the planet.

A single probe in orbit could obviously do this but with this idea there's no way to slow down.

leftandright|9 years ago

This is from the same people who announced the "Breakthrough Message", an open competiton with a $1 million dollar prize pool, whose details were "to be announced soon". [1]

The press release was made in July 2015, and there has been no communication about it since then. I'm not sure how seriously to take this group.

[1] http://www.breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/2

mrfusion|9 years ago

This should be the top comment! Not the guy poo pooing on the idea of checking out this planet.

afreak|9 years ago

(ignore what I said here)

antiffan|9 years ago

This is the coolest project I've heard about in a while. Thanks for sharing!

ourmandave|9 years ago

I wonder what it would be like to be the Nth generation of guys-that-left-in-2016 finally arriving and be greeted by the descendants of the FTL guys that arrived 800 years before you.

zrail|9 years ago

This is the plot of at least one Star Trek: Enterprise episode.

ygjb-dupe|9 years ago

no shortage of fiction covering that scenario...

gnaritas|9 years ago

Since we're pretty sure FTL is pure fiction and not possible in reality, that likely won't be an issue. Just because we don't know everything, doesn't mean we don't know anything.

Bluestrike2|9 years ago

Maybe you'd get a nice little tech upgrade when you got there. And I'd hope that we'd at least develop some form of suspended animation to make things bearable.

loader|9 years ago

They'd just get picked up along the way.

raverbashing|9 years ago

Well, they can stop at the spaceship on their way back and then... I don't know

dTal|9 years ago

It's not quite that bad. Have you heard of fission-fragment rockets? Highly feasible, and travel times to Alpha Centauri on the order of decades, not millennia. Baffles me that no one talks about them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket

greglindahl|9 years ago

Someone mentioned them in this discussion ~30 minutes before you posted.

DominikR|9 years ago

Actually the 1000 year number comes from Project Orion in the 1940ties and 50ties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

An updated design from the 80ties calculated a time of 100 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot

And a nuclear fusion design is calculated to achieve 12% of light speed, thereby reducing time to reach the fourth nearest sun system in 46 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

So there are concepts that could make unmanned interstellar travel possible, even within a humans life span, it's just that it costs so much and the incentive is pretty low compared to the incentive countries had for getting objects into space. (primarily military incentives - get spy satellites and nuclear warheads into space to not fall back behind adversaries)

I believe that given a strong enough incentive humans could do it, no matter what current consensus is telling us.

Humans set out to work on reaching outer space without even having a design on how this could be achieved and we did it anyway.

jnicholasp|9 years ago

50ties - Fifty-ties -- Fifties - 50s / 50's

pjmlp|9 years ago

Yeah, I smiled when I read "Just over four light-years" as if just around the corner kind of thing.

It might be just around the corner in space travel time, but those are quite a few light years still.

beefman|9 years ago

Fission fragment rockets are well within current technology and can achieve delta-vs of 0.1c at reasonable payload fractions, getting us there in ~ 40yr.

Edit: Nuclear pulse propulsion is good for about half that (80yr, not 1000).

the_rosentotter|9 years ago

How does it slow down?

dogma1138|9 years ago

It doesn't hence its going to be used for flyby missions and not orbit/capture missions.

Many missions to the outer planets are flybys since we can't have enough fuel to actually slow down.

cloverich|9 years ago

I just died laughing. I'm reading all the inspiring comments on how we actually could get there, and could totally see myself being on an engineering team that builds this thing, and 100 billion dollars later you ask that question and we all go: "Oh... oh crap." On a constructive note -- does anyone have a list / book of generally smart people getting sidelined by such things?

seizethecheese|9 years ago

This comment left me flabbergasted. Great thinking.

What about orbiting the planet and using the lasers when the craft is orbiting towards us in blasts to slow it down gradually?

danielweber|9 years ago

Magsails would work.

defen|9 years ago

Imagine the political implications of choosing who will go onto that ship, as well (assuming the intent is to colonize the world and fill it up with humans)

dTal|9 years ago

Telephone sanitisers.

oslavonik|9 years ago

A poet.

ianai|9 years ago

Only the richest, elites. I say we ship them immediately! /s

Let's get real, they wouldn't go anyway. It's too good for them here where they have people to do things for them.

m_mueller|9 years ago

I think you're conflating a few things here:

1.) A probe and a human spaceship are vastly different problems. Since all a probe really needs is electricity to sustain itself, you could get away with a tiny payload and some long lasting radioactive energy source, light sails or even sending the energy from earth's orbit. Such a thing would be either slow and cheap or fast (a few percent of light speed) and expensive, but not both at the same time and I doubt it would be in the trillion dollar range whatever you do.

2.) I completely agree that sending humans would currently not be feasible within a single nation's budget and the technology for that is still at the very least decades out (cryogenics, EM shielding, better propulsion systems, using mass from cheaper solar system bodies than earth etc.).

3.) 1000 years is what we'd need with conventional current technology. The theoretical limit for a nuclear impulse propulsion drive is 20% of light speed if you want to break or 40% for a fly-by.

gene-h|9 years ago

Well using laser propulsion, we might be able to get a very lightweight probe up to 1/4 c using technology that isn't too far off.[0]

Coincidentally, the group working on this will be presenting some of their most recent work on this at 2:55 EST today. You can watch that live here[2].

[0] http://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/projects/directed-energy-inter... [1]https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/2016_sy... [2]http://livestream.com/viewnow/NIAC2016

ams6110|9 years ago

Don't forget that halfway there you have to turn it around and start slowing down.

mikro2nd|9 years ago

The bigger deal is, How do you deal with the ablation problem at those speeds? Given the likely density of H in interstellar space, erosion is your primary problem.

boxy310|9 years ago

I'm interested in NASA's work on the Alcubierre drive [1]. Still likely to require much more energy than we'll be able to produce in the near future, but 100 years ago we were just getting a firm handle on the basic mechanics of flight.

[1] http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2011001...

krastanov|9 years ago

The Alcubierre drive is just a solution to the equations of general relativity that most probably can not be achieved in practice. Sure, maybe one day we will have drives like that, but we do not have any idea currently that even remotely resembles a warp drive permitted by the laws of nature.

openasocket|9 years ago

That would require us to create matter with a negative energy density, which has never been detected and is likely impossible.

gnaritas|9 years ago

Still fiction; it relies on magic, i.e. things not known to actually exist.

c3534l|9 years ago

According to Niel DeGrasse Tyson, you could send a tiny, pocket-sized payload and get it there in only a few decades. So if we just want a couple snapshots and not the sort of thing we typically send to orbit planets, it could be done in a reasonable amount of time.

ams6110|9 years ago

Why would it be unpopular? On the scale of the space involved, any "pollution" would be literally inconsequential.

On the cost, I agree and think we have much bigger fish to fry on our own planet than to spend huge sums to discover what is in all likelihood a barren rock.

mikeash|9 years ago

Frying every piece of electronics on the ground below the ship when you fire it up, and every satellite visible above the horizon, would be bad PR.

You could potentially boost it far away from Earth by more conventional means before turning on the nukes, but suddenly it becomes a far larger and more difficult thing.

Merad|9 years ago

Didn't Project Orion determine that it's theoretically feasible to accelerate to not-insignificant fractions of c using NPP? If your journey could average even 0.05c, you can potentially make it within a human lifespan.

pc86|9 years ago

I thought the issues were:

  - navigation at any non-trivial fraction of *c* (not running into something that would obliterate the vessel)
  - slowing down and actually arriving where you wanted to and not overshooting it or stopping .5 LY away

dghughes|9 years ago

I think speed is only one part of it you'd be dead from radiation over such a long period of time unless you were surrounded by lead.

Nadya|9 years ago

Proxima Centauri is 4ly away. New Horizons (the Pluto Probe) was travelling at 15.73km/second (just over 34,000/mph)

You're looking at closer to 75,000 years - not 1,000 years - to reach Proxima Centauri.

E:

Did actual maths. Closer to 75,000 not 100,000.

simplemath|9 years ago

This whole conversation reminds me of Europeans who have never been to the states thinking of flying over for a week, renting a car and visiting the Florida Keys, Times Square, the grand Canyon and Disneyland.

At 34k MPH it would take 75 Millenia to reach our literal stellar next door neighbor.

Makes the blood boil how vast and empty space really is, when you think about it

Retric|9 years ago

New Horizons is a traditional design with chemical propultion. Ion drives should hit ~5.5x that speed fairly easily. (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/144296-nasas-next-ion-dri...)

A larger issue is RTG's are not useful on a very long long timescale.

ITER style fusion is likely the best power source for such missions and should hit ~1-10% of light speed fairly easily. But, building something that large is a major issue.

On the upside, we have already gone 18.1 light hours, 4.2 light years is not an unreasonable jump.

cheez|9 years ago

Can you link to more information?

afreak|9 years ago

Not the best link but here's something to chew on:

http://www.universetoday.com/15403/how-long-would-it-take-to...

>However, despite these advantages in fuel-efficiency and specific impulse, the most sophisticated NTP concept has a maximum specific impulse of 5000 seconds (50 kN·s/kg). Using nuclear engines driven by fission or fusion, NASA scientists estimate it would could take a spaceship only 90 days to get to Mars when the planet was at “opposition” – i.e. as close as 55,000,000 km from Earth.

> But adjusted for a one-way journey to Proxima Centauri, a nuclear rocket would still take centuries to accelerate to the point where it was flying a fraction of the speed of light. It would then require several decades of travel time, followed by many more centuries of deceleration before reaching it destination. All told, were still talking about 1000 years before it reaches its destination. Good for interplanetary missions, not so good for interstellar ones.

There's talk of other drive systems being able to pull it off but this is the only one that actually has been tested but never built to scale.

brazzledazzle|9 years ago

I'm reminded of the books Illium and Olympos by Dan Simmons.

civilian|9 years ago

I've read them--- how and why are you reminded of them by this story?

Trufa|9 years ago

[deleted]

fapjacks|9 years ago

<Obligatory flamewar-starting "Em Drive" comment>