[rdtsc]

I can also recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FT-oz9aZU4 Time Dilation Visualized (by The Overview Effekt).

It talks about the distances and times involved and how time compression and astrophage infection rates work out. As a fan of the book and the movie it was nice to see the actual 3D star chart of everything. (warning: there may be spoilers there)

[titanomachy]

The time dilation aspect of it is cool, but doesn’t discuss how far we are from a propulsion system that could credibly pull this off. Even if we solved fusion it wouldn’t get us remotely close. Maybe if you could somehow produce 50 tonnes of antimatter you could do it. But we have no idea how to produce antimatter efficiently or at scale, and even if we could do it with 100% efficiency, it would take many years of humanity’s current energy budget just to make the antimatter fuel for a single manned trip.

To me it seems like we’d need new physics (not just new technology) to have any chance of pulling this stuff off.

The book dodges these inconvenient numbers with a bit of a deus ex machina plot device that I won’t spoil here :)

[rdtsc]

Definitely, the amounts of energy needed are is beyond anything realistic today or anytime soon. It’s still clarified the principle for me that we could in theory at least reach those points in a human lifetime.