Too much sci-fi media has poisoned people's brains. You're absolutely correct about how much energy it would require to leave a solar system, then travel to another. Traveling at the speed of light would still take several years to go to our nearest neighbor. And the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy you need to go forward as your mass increases.
If you fired a speck of dust at the speed of light at something, it would hit with more force than a nuclear bomb. So imagine how much force is required to propel a huge ass ship.
traveling at high fractions of the speed of light means that trip time from the travellers perspective is reduced due to relativistic effects. that said, this changes nothing about the other challeneges.
Too much sci-fi media has poisoned people's brains. You're absolutely correct about how much energy it would require to leave a solar system, then travel to another. Traveling at the speed of light would still take several years to go to our nearest neighbor. And the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy you need to go forward as your mass increases.
If you fired a speck of dust at the speed of light at something, it would hit with more force than a nuclear bomb. So imagine how much force is required to propel a huge ass ship.
traveling at high fractions of the speed of light means that trip time from the travellers perspective is reduced due to relativistic effects. that said, this changes nothing about the other challeneges.
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