alt Hacker News48 light years is in our back yard.
Close enough that we could probably develop a probe to get there in the next few centuries and check it out. What are the current popular candidates for propulsion systems capable of accelerating to near the speed of light?
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Probably more likely that we work out how to fold spacetime than we get there in anything like a high enough percentage of the speed of light - the fastest object we ever made travelled at something like ~0.064% * C so we are looking at ~750 years with current technology and presumably we'd need to switch on the probe in 3/4 of a millennium and figure out how to slow it down and get it into some sort of orbit around the planet.
750 years is hard for me to get excited about even as a vampire.
Back yard meaning we can see it but never touch it. If the ship to get there was ready today, it would get there in the year one-million? Back yard is Mars, Venus, moon. And I'm being generous with Mars and Venus.
If we design a probe that travels at speed of light it would reach there in 48 years and it would send back what it's seen after another 48 years. It would take multiple generations of scientists to work on this project. The longest we have worked on, are Voyager projects. Can we expect that level of commitments from our governments or corporations? Voyager became successful because people could see distant futures. We can barely plan few years ahead.
We have as much chance as a human stepping inside a bacteria (i.e. physics makes it near impossible)
This is so exciting.
> in the next few centuries
assuming we can make it another few centuries, which seems increasingly unlikely.
need to get small fusion reactors online, then many options blossom.
And work out safe systems for hibernation, maybe rotate the crew in shifts
Oh yeah this is the stuff of science fiction coming to life
laser propelled solar sails are the only plausible solution at the moment and it is not a given that even that is possible. Lots of engineering challenges there that may not have solutions.
other ideas: 1. be way more patient 2. anti matter based propulsion (more out there than solar sails) 3. nuclear bomb based propulsion
One issue is as you get to these speed little bits of dust will anhillate the probe, so you need some kind of shielding, raising the mass budget, making it all the harder. A solar sail has to be able to survive holes getting poked it in it and still working, etc.
Just going to recycle this comment I made in reply to an almost identical comment as yours. I don't think you folks realize how big space actually is.
The speed of light is 1079 252 848 km/h, the fastest space craft ever made was the Parker Solar probe (using a sling shot) clocking in at 692 000 km/h. So at that speed it would take, 1559 years to travel one light year.
This planet sits at a distance of 48 light years, so it would 74 832 years to get there. Just for good measure, when it gets there it would also take 48 years for us to know that since radio travels at the speed of light.
Note, that the speed of the spacecraft I mentioned was the peak speed. Space is big, really big.