[jl6]

It’s not that light speed is too slow, it’s that our lives are too short. If you can solve mortality, you just hop on board your 17km/s ship, turn YouTube on (all of it), and spend a relaxing 72,000 years getting to Alpha Centauri.

[danielheath]

If you accelerate at 1g half way there, then decelerate equally fast for the second half, you can reach almost any point in the galaxy in a single human lifespan - thanks to time dilation.

[ozim]

Obviously just don’t forget aiming for where we see it now is not where it is and not where it will be in 100 years.

I have never seen anyone writing about us having solid reference points to travel that far in case we can reach those speeds.

If you miss you end up in some empty space you won’t be able to mine anything for fuel to have more shots.

[actionfromafar]

Stuff keep moving predictably. Plus you can course correct during a fair bit of the acceleration / deceleration phase.

[ben_w]

Just remember to account for blue-shifted CMB.

I'm not sure if the CMB itself will decay fast enough with the expansion of the universe to avoid 1g eventually getting you hull eroded by positron-electron pair production from photons blueshifted above 1022 keV, but that's in the set of things you need to think about.

[Scarblac]

Is it possible to take enough fuel and mass with you to accelerate that long without turning into a black hole?

[MichaelRo]

>> and spend a relaxing 72,000 years

This just shows a juvenile and naive level of thinking. You can't spend 72,000 years with our current brains in full conscience without going insane.

[DonHopkins]

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Hope_I_Shall_Arrive_Soon

[jl6]

> current brains

[greenbit]

Are we nearly there yet?

[MichaelRo]

We live to 72 on average so only off by a factor of 1000x :)