Fun fact: astronomers recently proved that Proxima Centauri is in fact in orbit around the Alpha Centauri.
There was a chance it just happened to be crossing our line of sight and was not a part of the system - similar to you looking at a plane and a bird happening to fly by at the same instant so that they are close together in your line of sight for a short time.
New measurements of radial velocity have proved the stars are gravitationally bound.
Everyone is forgetting AI.
When AI is achieved, the world as we know it will be forever dramatically different.
Humans will no longer be figuring out this problem but AI will.
I suspect with AI coming in the next 20-50 years, that these type of problems will be solved in less than 100 years.
So the answer is YES, 100 % we could get there if we or the AI wanted to!
Yorktown Hospital wrote:
Will any manmade object get to our nearest star (I believe it's Proxima Centauri) within 500 years?
With a 500-year time-frame, it's very close to a certainty that IF technological progress is allowed to continue, we will reach the stars, one way or another.
With that much time, you don't need anything terribly radical, just a practicable way to get some sustained acceleration to boost you up to a few percent of light-speed.
That's not all that hard.
The big problem, of course, is that for technological progress to continue for very much longer, Mankind needs to somehow tame its incredible capacity for stupidity and appetite for self-destruction.
Anyone with eyes sees that that's not happening.
(Even if you've tended to lean towards cock-eyed optimism, events of the last two months have made it incredibly, painfully clear that Humanity, at the most crucial juncture in history, is rapidly heading backwards.)
Even if we weren't liable to kill ourselves directly in fairly short order --which we are-- unabated progress will fairly soon lead to sentient AI of one sort or another, and once the machines take over, they will probably decide pretty quickly that they can do just fine without us. (Honestly, who could blame them?)
So then it really becomes a question of whether the machines that succeed us will travel to the stars, and they certainly might --except that my best guess is they kill themselves in short order as well.
When folks (in the broadest use of the term) get smart enough to do anything great, like travel to the stars, they've also gotten smart enough to kill themselves without trying too hard,... and I expect that that's what they generally tend to do.
That's the answer to Fermi's Paradox.
So, in summation, if we don't kill ourselves, of *course* we'll get to the stars in 500 years, but we'll most likely kill ourselves. (Anyone who can look at the results of this election and deny that that's the most likely outcome is deeply deluded.)
Of course, it's entirely possible we'll manage to send something off to the stars *before* we kill ourselves, and one of Dr. Hawking's 'star-chips' will be floating around the Centauri system taking pictures long after we're dead and gone.
Which is kind of a beautiful absurdist Cosmic Irony, if you think about it.
But it's the most stimulating question anyone's asked on LetsRun in quite a while, so I'll give you that.
Happy New Year.
your lit review wrote:
Definitely possible. A recent idea was floated to accelerate a miniature probe, basically the size of a cell phone, up to 10% of light speed using lasers and get it there in 40 yeas.
That's great! Then we can talk and send pics and stuff.
sails propelled by lasers sound like the most viable current possibility, because they depend largely on existing technologies, have been demonstrated as viable, and can reach a very high proportion of c, and this can be done in the relatively near future, given the will to try them, which exists on a small level.
d3 wrote:
The smartest guy on earth thinks it could be done in less than 20 years.
Do you consider Stephen Hawking to be the smartest guy on earth?
Bolt!
No.
sp2 wrote:
...
With a 500-year time-frame, it's very close to a certainty that IF technological progress is allowed to continue, we will reach the stars, one way or another.
With that much time, you don't need anything terribly radical, just a practicable way to get some sustained acceleration to boost you up to a few percent of light-speed.
That's not all that hard.
...
There is matter in interstellar space in the form of individual molecules. Let's say it's about one molecule per cubic meter. You will not be able to avoid hitting these molecules, and if you are traveling at a significant portion of the speed of light, then you are essentially recreating an underground particle accelerator collision every meter for 6 trillion miles.
A simple collision with a dust particle, consisting of billions of atoms, would likely be fatal.
No one ever seems to take this into consideration when talking about near light speed flight. There would be a significant head wind!