As a fuckin nerd I must point out - Even if you get cutesy and build a Dyson sphere, focus the output into a series of stellasers using the sun's corona as a lensing medium, and fire the fucker as a Nicholl-Dyson beam (death star, it's how you build a deathstar) pushing laser to accelerate a spacecraft to as fast as you can go.
It's still only going to be 20% of C. Max. Which sounds like a lot, but that's still 20 years to the closest star. If you don't stop. Stopping means doing that in reverse so call it a half century to the nearest star. Anything beyond that speed and the interstellar medium turns from void into drag with the bonus of deadly particle radiation.
And this is with the most grandiose bullshit grampa sci-fi space dreams. Space is BIG.
Small things, and a few very, very large things. The interstellar medium ain't much, around 10-20 hydrogen atoms per square meter. But it adds up.
Particles zip around at larges fractions of C all the time, but because they're so small there's not much to interact with them out there so the only thing to slow them down is space stretching beneath them.
And black holes, neutron stars, binary dwarf stars, a few of these are in orbits at are at appreciable digits of C, but shit, good luck stopping those with anything.
Like, if you're willing to wait, you can just leave ur deathstar on for a few million years and it'll start pushing the star & everything bound to it with it for the ride. Make Sol a mobile home and go arbitrarily fast. But if you're willing that long, .2 is pretty fast actually.
Yeah, stopping gets a bit ridiculous. Like, you can brake off the interstellar medium/destination star magnetically, or you could shoot a mirror ahead, and the focus the beam on that & bounce it around to brake, but it just gets really comical. Cars don't work without roads and regular interstellar travel doesn't work without municipal doom lasers.
As a fuckin nerd I must point out - Even if you get cutesy and build a Dyson sphere, focus the output into a series of stellasers using the sun's corona as a lensing medium, and fire the fucker as a Nicholl-Dyson beam (death star, it's how you build a deathstar) pushing laser to accelerate a spacecraft to as fast as you can go.
It's still only going to be 20% of C. Max. Which sounds like a lot, but that's still 20 years to the closest star. If you don't stop. Stopping means doing that in reverse so call it a half century to the nearest star. Anything beyond that speed and the interstellar medium turns from void into drag with the bonus of deadly particle radiation.
And this is with the most grandiose bullshit grampa sci-fi space dreams. Space is BIG.
Why can't we reach beyond 0.2c? There are other things in the universe which travel at near light speed right?
Small things, and a few very, very large things. The interstellar medium ain't much, around 10-20 hydrogen atoms per square meter. But it adds up.
Particles zip around at larges fractions of C all the time, but because they're so small there's not much to interact with them out there so the only thing to slow them down is space stretching beneath them.
And black holes, neutron stars, binary dwarf stars, a few of these are in orbits at are at appreciable digits of C, but shit, good luck stopping those with anything.
Like, if you're willing to wait, you can just leave ur deathstar on for a few million years and it'll start pushing the star & everything bound to it with it for the ride. Make Sol a mobile home and go arbitrarily fast. But if you're willing that long, .2 is pretty fast actually.
deleted by creator
How would they slow down the vehicle if there wasn't already an identical Dyson sphere at the destination? Sounds completely infeasible.
Yeah, stopping gets a bit ridiculous. Like, you can brake off the interstellar medium/destination star magnetically, or you could shoot a mirror ahead, and the focus the beam on that & bounce it around to brake, but it just gets really comical. Cars don't work without roads and regular interstellar travel doesn't work without municipal doom lasers.
Which impressively isn't that far from theoretically buildable spacecrafts such as project Daedalus (12% of lightspeed).