We Won't Have Enough Power For Interstellar Travel Until At Least 2211, According to New Calculations
On the bright side, that's sooner than others suggest Interstellar travel won't be possible for at least 200 years, according to a former NASA propulsion scientist who has some new calculations. And by then, the spaceships we would design for the trip will be obsolete. Forget cost, political will and all the other variables - simply obtaining enough energy will take until 2196, according to Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project and founder of the Tau Zero Foundation, which supports interstellar travel research. Millis did plenty of extrapolating to reach this conclusion, which he presented at an astronomy meeting in Prague last fall and posted to the physics archive this week. He crunched 27 years of data on energy trends, mission energy requirements, individual energy use and even societal priorities, and chose two possible trips: An aimless interstellar colony ship, and a 75-year-long mission to Alpha Centauri. Related ArticlesVoyager 1...