Can Interstellar Travel Be Achieved Through Advanced Relativity Calculations?

[bahamagreen]

Couple of things...

1] All the discussion about getting up close to c traveling speed might be better based from the idea of maintaining just 1g of acceleration. Without accounting for relativistic velocity addition, just plain 1g for one year just about reaches c, so with taking into account the relativistic velocity addition one can make a 500ly trip accelerating and decelerating to arrive in about 12 years passenger time.

There is a space travel calculator here to play with some assumptions...

2] While experiencing 1g is nice for the trip, experiencing the exposure to hard radiation is a problem. Heavy shielding becomes a further problem, but the human genome project is way ahead of schedule and the solution to radiation damage may turn out to be not shielding but simply continuous repair (medical nanobots, or similar).

3] Not yet space traveling, we continue to hold a tight grasp to the comfort of being in a particular "time"... clearly a serious space traveling society must learn to be comfortable with the idea that all one's possible connections must be local, at whenever the encounters occur...

 

[bcrowell]

experiencing the exposure to hard radiation is a problem. Heavy shielding becomes a further problem, but the human genome project is way ahead of schedule and the solution to radiation damage may turn out to be not shielding but simply continuous repair (medical nanobots, or similar).

If technology is such that you can accelerate continuously at 1 g for 20 years of proper time, then the technology is pretty godlike -- many centuries more advanced than anything we have. The amounts of energy involved are insane. Given that, I can't imagine that exposure to ionizing radiation is such a technologically difficult problem. We have plenty of perfectly reasonable ways of dealing with it using present or near-future technology.