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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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You need to caveat that with “current tech”. If you had asked someone 2-300 years ago if we’d be flying regularly, they’d look at you like you were insane. 100 years ago if you asked if we’d ever leave the plaent, they’d say “no”.
It seems impossible until you get that one technological breakthrough though and then suddenly it feels trivial.
The tech they used to fling Voyager out of the system was gravity. Not a lot of advances in that area unless they plot some crazy ping-pong to bounce something around enough times to get it going faster.
My opinion is that any tech that might generate the amount of energy required to get us out will be used a weapon first and we'll great filter ourselves.
Gravity is a multiplier though. Double the initial fuel and you can plot a much faster route.
If the goal is max interstellar speed and not doing interesting science on the way out, there's probably a lot of other routes that they could have maximised for velocity
Sure you could use the sun to sling shot you out of the solar system many times faster than voyage but we're still talking hundreds of years to move a fraction of a light year.
Exactly, and with modern advances, we could probably even get better initial velocity with the same fuel mass. Higher exhaust velocity from the same exhaust mass will get you higher total acceleration. Another factor is the duration of acceleration. And there are a couple of options we now have that can do that.
NASA has successfully used ion drives on interplanetary space craft. They use very little exhaust mass, but at such a high velocity and for such a long duration that it can provide useful propulsion. The DAWN spacecraft used ion drives which allowed it to be the first craft to make extended stays at two different celestial bodies, Vesta and Ceres.
NASA has also been experimenting with solar sails. These don't require you to carry any fuel for at least part of the flight. Once deployed, the sails get you constant if minimal acceleration from the solar wind. That minimal acceleration over a period of months can add up to a lot of velocity.
That higher initial velocity combined with a gravity assist, like Voyager used, and newer probes could conceivably overtake the Voyager probes in a few decades without necessarily using any more fuel mass and still be able to carry tools to do exciting science.
Nuclear bombs were dropped from planes and we didn’t filter ourselves then.
Almost have several times since.
I mean we did pivot table a significant portion out of the reporting dataset tho
Nuclear energy is not dense enough for efficient interstellar travel
The first manned flight of a hot air balloon was in 1783. I'm sure a lot of people thought flying would be a regular occurrence in the future. Maybe 100 years earlier it would have been an outrageous thought though.
I knew someone would nitpick the dates and miss the point.
If they hadn’t I would’ve, and it’s not a nitpick it’s an irritation that people just seem to have this weird obsession with acting like the things that we do today would just be impossible to imagine to people not that far removed in time from us now.
For instance you also said you didn’t think that people would talk about leaving the planet 100 years ago, and yet Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon came out in 1865…
Let me rephrase it for the pedantic. I can imagine FTL travel, but can we do it with existing technology? No. Could we do it in the future: it’s possible. Someone may develop a way of folding space, or we may figure out propulsion that gets up to 0.9x, who knows. That’s the part I’m getting at.
Just like now, there were people back then that said “without a doubt, that will not be possible”. Human understanding is constantly shifting and growing.
It’s not pedantic to point out that people in the 1920s absolutely thought about leaving the planet. I understood your point, as I said it irritates me when people act like people in the past had no clue what was coming or were too stupid to think of things like space or air travel. Leonardo da Vinci was designing “flying machines“ in the fourteen-fucking-hundreds. People were thinking about this shit.
FTL is almost certainly impossible because the laws of physics limits the speed of information to the speed of light, which is why we can't use quantum entanglement to communicate information. So the only way I can see it happening is with wormholes, but we've never proven that they can actually exist in a stable form.
We can still get close to the speed of light but the consequences for those doing so are pretty severe. If you wanted to go farther than the nearest stars, everyone you know would die from old age by the time you got back.
We have also not found a way of merging quantum physics with regular physics models so there is still a possibility al be it slim
What a grand day it was.
All those cavemen capturing farts in animal hides were finally vindicated.