Re:Billions’ worth of high-tech research seeking to make dea...
by m-j-fox on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @12:24AM
(#13974064)
I had this thought but the downer is: where are you getting your energy? And all of the mass you need to eject to keep your rocket accelerating, you'll have to carry with you. I guess if you could stop and eat some suns along the way -- but we're not talking about current technology anymore.
Due to the principle of special relativity, if you could build a spaceship that accelerates at a constant 1g, the people on the ship could get anywhere in the entire galaxy without aging more than 24 years [1]. So a person could easily travel from one end of the galaxy and back in a normal human lifespan. Of course to a "stationary" observer (e.g. on Earth) watching the spaceship, it would appear to take a couple hundred thousand years for the trip to take place. But this doesn't matter a bit to people aboard the ship (well, aside from the fact that everyone they left behind on Earth would be dead just a few months into their trip).
So the hard part isn't getting people to live long enough. It's building a ship that can accelerate at a constant 1g for years on end. :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_ac...