NASA Press conference.

[Metalartin]

Imagine how the scientists who spend their lives researching this must feel, wont even get to see the fruits of their labour. Unless they've designed their own cryogenic chamber and even then there's a chance they could wake up to a zombie apocalypse.

 

[TCIB]

I love reading stuff like this, but it's sad as well.

We can't even send humans further than the moon. We'll all be long dead before humanity is ever ready to travel to other solar systems.

Then I think our solar system is just a tiny speck of shit in the milky way, which is in turn a tiny speck of shit in the universe.

Makes everything seem pointless.

Christ Phil haha, don't volunteer as a samaritan hehehe.

I have just had a smoke and just keep looking at this artistic impression of one of the new earth like planets...

 

[aguero93:20]

I heard £45 but they're raising a beer to £20 and it's index linked so by the time we get there that will be about £30m a pop. A beer even more...,

I'll make sure to stick some money in indexed funds before I go.

 

[aguero93:20]

Also I understand it takes solar/light energy but not sure how the propulsion mechanically works and how do they stop when they reach their destination?

Can't answer on the propulsion side but the obvious answer for the second part imo would be to accelerate half of the way there and then decelerate the rest of the way to the planet's orbit.

 

[LWashington]

 

[mrtwiceaseason]

Wonder if utd will still be 6th when they get there ?

 

[Chippy_boy]

I thought that as well as I read it would take us 17 thousand years to travel to the nearest star to us which is only 4 light years away!

Keeping things "imperial" because it makes the numbers easy:

Light travels at 186,000 miles / second, which means 186,000 x 3,600 miles per hour = roughly 670 million miles per hour. Our fastest spacecraft can manage about 36,000 miles per hour, so about 1/18,600th of light speed.

So if it takes light 4 years, it would take our fastest spaceship 4 x 18,600 = roughly 75,000 years.

700,000 years according to the BBC

Well they are wrong.

If you want it in metric, (2.998e+5 x 3,600 x 24 x 365 x 4) / (58,000 x 24 x 365) = 74,400 years

 

[Centurions]

A light year is the distance light travels in a year.

Does light travel further or less in a leap year Karen?

 

[Chippy_boy]

Does light travel further or less in a leap year Karen?

Funny :-)

We use 365.25 as being the standard "year", when defining a light year. Hence it is 9,460,730,472,580.8 KM exactly. 9.5 Trillion KM in round numbers.

 

[Chippy_boy]

You're probably aware that Einstein's special relativity shows how the passage of time for a body in motion is slowed, compared to that of a stationary observer. So the faster you go, the slower your personal clock ticks (although you would not be aware of this yourself - everything appears normal). But you have to get very fast indeed before this starts to have a useful consequences.

What it does mean though is that if we could travel fast enough, we could traverse these vast distances in more "manageable" timeframes. In a spaceship travelling at 97% of the speed of light, we could make a journey in only 1/4 of the time, so about 1 year to the nearest planet. And if we could manage very very close to light speed - say 99.99999999% - we could get there in half an hour!