Interstellar Travel Impossible?
Penguin August 19th, 2008
I love scifi and this “news” comes as a real wet blanket.
The major problem is that propulsion — shooting mass backwards to go forwards — requires large amounts of both time and fuel. For instance, using the best rocket engines Earth currently has to offer, it would take 50,000 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri, our solar system’s nearest neighbor. Even the most theoretically efficient type of propulsion, an imaginary engine powered by antimatter, would still require decades to reach Alpha Centauri, according to Robert Frisbee, group leader in the Advanced Propulsion Technology Group within NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
- Wired
Luckily for us writers, most people don’t know that much about space or how difficult it is. But it also goes to show how important “magic” is, such as “hyperspace” (Star Wars), “FTL” (Battlestar Galactica), “Gates” (Stargate, Babylon 5), and of course “warp” (Star Trek).
Most of them take the right approach by not getting into the technicalities of these systems. They just assume that they “just work” and thus, we assume it too. And it’s a good thing too, otherwise, there would be a lot of boring scifi out there.
-Penguin
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