Cool lets pack up the billionaires and ship em over there.
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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I like the way you think. I think the sun is closer though. Probably easier to get too. I don’t know I don’t work on space travel.
Its actually easier to launch stuff out of the solar system than to slow stuff down enough to fall into the sun
I keep hearing that. Again - I don’t work on space physics, so forgive my ignorance on why. However- I’m good with billionaires taking as long as needed to get to our sun, some other maybe hospitable planet, or just dying in the cold of interstellar space while we observe a new holiday of them all fuckin’ off from terra firma.
Earth is traveling 29.8km/s around the sun. In order to go to the sun, you have to slow down. But to escape the sun from earth, you need to accelerate to 42km/s or just 12km/s relative.
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shhhhhh they don't understand Hohmann Transfers, we can send them there regardless.
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302 years later the ship comes back with a pile of gold and a note:
"Delicious. Please send more."
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Found a calculator: https://www.calctool.org/relativity/space-travel
Assuming we want to accelerate at a constant 1g for half of the travel and then brake at 1g for the second half of the travel we would need 151 years to get there but only 9.794 years would pass on the ship. Depending on the mass of the ship we would need coupe million/billion tons of fuel (anti-matter).
Oh only a billion tons of anti-matter. Good thing we've already made a few nanograms, so in a billion years or so we'll have plenty.
Yeah, and antimatter converts to pure energy with e=mc^2 what means that 60 grams contains like Hiroshima worth of energy
In theory yes, in practice we have absolutely no idea how to actually do that and use the energy in an efficient or practical way. Even just on paper without limitations of technology or costs, we have no idea. Physics simply isn't as clean or neat like that in real life.
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How can it take 151 years to go 150 light years when not close to lightspeed most of the time? I get the 9 year thing, but 151 years seems wrong.
Smarter people than me on the internet calculate that at constant 1g you only need 2.5 years to get very close to speed of light. So I guess you accelerate fast enough and reach 'almost speed of light' very early in your travel and total time is almost as if you traveled at speed of light the whole time.
The main advantage of keeping accelerating when you're at >90% of the speed of light is that it means you arrive faster in subjective time. You could take 160 years to get there and use ten times less fuel (or thereabouts), but the subjective travel time would go up by decades.
I think having constant gravity on the ship during the entire flight is also a big plus. Designing a ship where you can live in 0g for years and in 1g for years would be like designing two ships in one.
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The closer you get to lightspeed, the slower you accelerate (from an outside perspective). It's actually close to lightspeed for most of the time.
I just used the calc, it's closer to 152 years. Which I assume means acceleration at 1g for about a year to reach .999c, and deceleration for the same time.
I just confirmed with dV= a*t, a year of 1g(9.8m/s/s) gets you just over the speed of light. I think it's more complicated than that, If I remember right relativistic speeds require more and more energy to accelerate so you can't ever "reach" light speed.
Most of the journey is spent traveling very close to light speed. It's not a linear ramping up and ramping down of speed, since it takes more energy to accelerate the closer you get to light speed. Rather you quickly accelerate to near light speed and spend most of the trip working on that last small bit of velocity.
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Time for Bussard to invent those collectors
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Is there another similar format for this meme, but without this dipshit in it?
Only 150 light years away?! Wow, that's practically next door! Now all we need to do is figure out how to go light speed and even then it'll take a further 300 years just to know if the colonists got there safely or not!
When the first colonists arrive the planet will already be inhabited by humans since 100 years after they left we invent the warp drive. And trying to intercept them mid travel and board them on to the new ship is impossible since they travel near the speed of light in the darkness of space.
I'm pretty sure that's a sidequest in Starfield. The ECS Constant colony ship set off in 2140 to colonise a planet, arriving in 2330 at the planet Paradiso, which had become a luxury resort planet for the rich, because shortly after the ship left, humanity invented the grav drive and every ship just zoomed right past them.
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Now all we need is an FTL drive
Yeah then we can use that to go back in time and save Harambe, and then we won't need another planet!
If we can go back in time, we can recount the election, find those missing votes and have the person Americans actually wanted become president. Al Gore
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Quickly, let’s build a rocketship so we can fuck that planet up, too.
For 150 light-years I'm afraid we'll need something more advanced than rockets
I’ll just ask Grok to build me something…
The inhabitants of HD 137010 b thank you for that decision
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How cool would be to have radio communications with similarly tech-evolved aliens.
Edt: could
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Well. This is quite a pearl.
I don't have time to read a 16-page paper in detail, but I did want to know how the host star compares to everyone's favourite local solitary K-type dwarf, Epsilon Eridani. It's slightly less massive (~0.7 solar mass versus 0.8 for ε Eri) and quite a bit less bright (difference of about 0.1 solar luminosity), but I especially wanted to know about the age of the star. ε Eri is quite young and frothy, but the investigators here infer from the star's motion that it belongs to the thin disk, up to a whopping 10 billion years old.
So we are definitely not talking about an ε Eri-type system. So that should be mean no dust disks, no crazy activity from the star, and no newish planets still carving out their places through the system.
You've really got to wonder about such an old planet, however cold and quiescent it may be. The potential paths for climatic evolution on such a world boggle the mind, however cold it is. You could get an episodically or formerly active world like Mars, a beautifully unstable oscillatory world like Earth, or something completely different. Assuming any atmosphere, of course (safe assumption?). And that's without considering whether there are any other planets in the system.
I really wouldn't spend too much time thinking about this candidate detection, as we have literally seen just the one transit, and we will need to observe this fellow for a while to confirm the discovery, learn about other planets in the system, and so on. The investigators themselves note that the transit was shallow (meaning difficult to detect), but the good news is that the host star is fairly bright, well within reach of amateur equipment. I wonder if citizen scientists will be able to follow the transits.
Exciting times.
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Alright, Jimbo, let's see its atmospheric composition. Does it have a gas giant in its system?
No, your mother is in the kitchen.
Imagine arriving there after 150 years only for the colony to fail due to a random prion in the environment.
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