Thanks to time dilation.
I always thought of interstellar travel as impossible. If light takes so long to travel a certain interstellar distance, Who. Am. I.?? But what I didn’t know was that time dilates.
Let’s first fix a target. Epsilon Eridani. Why? Because I love the name. Also it’s roughly 10 light years away from Earth, easy math, but that’s really secondary, mainly because of the name. If I travelled at a speed of 100 km/hr towards Epsilon Eridani🛵💨, it would take me about 108 million years to reach there. Dinosaurs will probably be back by then, I would probably be reborn as a Dinosaur myself. Now if I increase the speed to 0.7c, it would take me about 10 years to reach. That’s what I experience. Earth, however, experiences about 14 years by the time I reach Eridani. Anything above 0.7c would take me less than 10 years. At 0.9c, it would take roughly 5 years, Earth experiences ~11 years. And at c, I reach Eridani instantly, in a flash of light, literally, whereas Earth experiences 10 years. That’s the fastest. Claude plotted a beautiful looking graph to give us a perspective of this madness.
If I accelerate at 1.5g continuously for 231 days, my speed would be 0.7c, so it’s not unrealistic as such. The amount of fuel required to do so though, would be more than what we have on earth .Even if I had the fuel, the mass of my spaceship would be too much. So let’s wait till someone comes up with a lot of anti-matter.
💡Fun fact – Anti-matter when combined with matter will produce only energy, leaving no mass behind. That is, if 1kg of anti-matter combines with 1kg of matter, a massive Joules of energy is released! It’s the best fuel theoretically possible.
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