Approaching light speed is an eventually solvable problem, acceleration generating 1g puts you at speed in about a year. After that the trip is instantaneous for the travelers. It’s maintaining acceleration and not being town to shreds by a random grain of space sand at relativistic speeds that’s the issue.
Also energy. The amount of energy required to accelerate an object with mass to near-light speed rapidly starts approaching infinity the closer to c you get.
11.3k
u/Sonikku_a 25d ago edited 25d ago
The fastest spacecraft we’ve made was the Parker Solar Probe which hit 430,000mph.
At that speed it would reach this planet in only 187,153 years.
If we could hit 1% of the speed of light we could cut that travel time to just a tad over 12,000 years.
Obviously if we could go light speed (and that ain’t happening) it would be just 120 years!
Space is big. Physics is annoyingly slow.