|
|
|
|
|
|
by martey
3513 days ago
|
|
|
Most of that article deals with interplanetary travel. The only reference to interstellar travel is in the "Theoretical Applications" section. If you look at the chart in that section, you will note that the two theoretical spacecraft are using 300 thousand or 30 million bombs. This is a problem, since estimates of current worldwide nuclear weapon stockpiles range between 10 to 15 thousand. I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion is a better article, since it talks about a variety of theoretical spacecraft. You'll note that almost every single application uses a unmanned craft in order to reduce mass and keep travel times down to about a century. Charles Stross (cstross) has written on his blog about the difficulties of human interstellar travel multiple times: - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high... - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth... He also has written about the difficulties of radiation shielding on interstellar travel: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/08/san-trom... > "Anyway, the point I'd like you to take away from this is that while it's really hard to say "sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible", the smart money says that it's extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We'd need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances ... and that's for a flyby mission like New Horizons that would take not significantly less than a human lifetime to get there." |
|
|