upvote
> If you accelerate at 1g constantly for 1y you travel 0.5 light years

Can't we accelerate past 1G constantly? Or do we expend so much energy doing it that we can't realistically do it with today's technology?

reply
Sadly there is no realistic approach to get there (even assuming fantasy-levels of technology).

Chemical rockets are currently the only thing that allow sustaining such accelerations briefly for human-size payloads, but the low exhaust velocity and exponential reaction mass requirement make sustaining it for days/months/years completely impossible.

You'd have to supply the energy externally (i.e. some sort of beam propulsion), but getting any significant fraction of g out of such a system (with human-sized payloads) seems unlikely within the next centuries, especially as the distance increases.

reply
> You'd have to supply the energy externally (i.e. some sort of beam propulsion), but getting any significant fraction of g out of such a system (with human-sized payloads) seems unlikely within the next centuries, especially as the distance increases.

Or some form of ram scope, plenty of H everywhere, but those also have the issue of you collecting things while going at relativistic speeds.

reply
We can't do it with any rocket-like propulsive technology. By the time you get anywhere close to c the front of your spacecraft is being abraded into nothing by interstellar gas, larger particles of dust will kill you, and colliding with anything bigger creates an explosion that can be seen for light years. You need to be flying a large asteroid to even think about surviving it - you still won't for long, but you will have time to think about it - and the energy requirements are wildly impractical.

Magic warp bubble tech is the bare minimum, and we're nowhere close to inventing that.

reply
We need a massive rocket to escape the earths gravity (1g). That takes us minutes and a crap ton of fuel. The issue is to keep doing that with fuel and oxidiser constantly for 1, 2 or 10 or 25 years is a monumental amount of energy, which is a monumental amount of weight, which is a monumental amount of volume... Also you also need the exact same amount of fuel to stop again.... So yeah ... We don't got it yet
reply
We can easily accelerate past 1g... 1g is just chosen for human comfort, but running any rocket engine continuously for a year requires an impossible amount of fuel.
reply
We can't necessarily survive that well when under acceleration greater than 9.81 metres per second per second for extended periods of time.
reply
Gravity on Earth varies about .7%.

Increasing the acceleration a little bit more than that (eg to 1%) would make a difference.

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

reply
> "Increasing the acceleration a little bit more than that (eg to 1%) would make a difference."

Wouldn't that be only a few months on a decades-long journey at 1.01G vs 1G??

reply
> math get's really counterintuitive to grasp

People always say that about speed of light stuff, but I don’t get it. Do you have any more examples of counterintuitive math?

Because what you’re describing is basically the equivalent to compound interest in finance. (e.g. investing $100 at 10% interest over 10 years results in $260)

reply
The proper time (that is, the time the traveler measures on a clock) goes to zero very quickly towards the end. Even with both axes plotted logarithmically, it's just a sudden drop at the end towards light speed.

- [pic](https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hackernews/proper-time-one-li...)

- [plot](https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hackernews/proper-time-one-li...)

reply
Links seem to be broken?
reply
No, but IPv6 only these days. I never set up dynamic DNS.
reply
One million seconds is 11 days, a billion seconds is 31 years.
reply
Thanks! But same here imho:

              1,000 seconds =          ~0.01 days (~17 min)
          1,000,000 seconds =         ~11.57 days (~12 days) 
      1,000,000,000 seconds =     ~11,574.07 days (~32 years)
  1,000,000,000,000 seconds = ~11,574,074.07 days (~32k years)
It all seems quite logical once you put everything into the same unit, I think.

Maybe it's just our human calendar/time unit rollercoaster (60*60*24*30*12) that's playing tricks on us here.

reply
Of course it is logical, we are not discussing the math.

But it isn't intuitive, you're not used to numbers that big or that grow that fast.

Few things go from a million to a billion, especially when related to time.

reply
It’s the units that make it seem unintuitive. 12 days is roughly 0.032 years, and 17 minutes is likewise 0.000032 years. It’s relative to how we were taught to view smaller lengths of time.
reply