relativistic interstellar travel

gonna happen

relativistic calculator:
http://home.att.net/~srschmitt/script_starship.html

compound interest:
http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calculator.htm

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[Zurround100]

pyrrho this is not exactly the same because early explorers DID eventually return (except for pilgrims fleeing persecution) for the most part (not always) yet these people would KNOW that they cannot return. It would have to be people with no families because it would be cruel and selfish to abandon one's family forever.

[pyrrho314]

@Zurround100 : many many people, most, never saw their families again, their descendants could return and meet descendants that didn't leave... in the interstellar case, the traveler could return (but likely would not) and meed descendants of their brothers and cousins that did not leave. Strange, but humans, I think, have endured stranger.

[Zurround100]

Who could you get to volunteer to leave their world, friends, and family behind forever? it is part of what made the original planet of the apes so unrealistic. Maybe they will use prison convicts serving life sentences? They might volunteer.

[pyrrho314]

@Zurround100 : when people left europe to go to america, there was no return, there was no reliable mail, and it took a long time to be delivered. There are people that will leave their homeland to pioneer, and there always have been.

[Curas1]

One gloomy little fact is that there is a tipping point in high technology that anything that can be a power source can be a bomb.

If you can have interstellar travel you will have a 'atomic fuel', a way to get atom splinting energy out of your power source vs the large mass of chemical reactions.

That's like having a oil tanker in a d sized battery and what a great world, until someone steals one and put's a timer on it.

I'm saying the more advanced we get the closer to a fall we come ...

[pyrrho314]

@Curas1 : we will unlock the powers of the universe... if by then we havn't gotton over our species-suicidal kick... it's game over.

[jimbobubbadj]

*****

[DereenigneEsrever]

@donnachaidh The biggest thing in the way of intersteller travel is convincing people to reverse accomplishments in nuclear disarmorment and increase the nuclear bombs from the less than 20,000 in existance to the 300,000 to 30 million bombs needed (Wikipedia Orion craft(nuclear propulsion)). Finding people out of a world of billions w/out families willing to go however should be very easy.

[Curas1]

@pyrrho314 It could be that the thing that drives us to create a society destroys us or that once that is gone so is the drive to achieve anything as a species.

I think intelligent species, just like people planets and suns go through a life cycle and fade out after a while.

i could be wrong though, the alligator is going strong.

[donnachaidh]

To power a ship to reach relativistic speeds, Carl Sagan realistically suggested that the ship be powered by nuclear warheads once it has cleared the atmosphere of the earth. It would fire/drop nuclear bombs at intervals out a bay on the back, they would detonate at a preset optimal distance that would both propel the ship with the force of the blast and leave it undamaged. As he put it, much better use for all these nuclear weapons lying around than what they were designed for.