Notices |
The others are slower, by a fair margin - Longshot theoretically tops out at .07c for roughly a century transit time and Orion .03c for a time-in-transit of about 150 years. |
4.2 LY to Centauri A divided by .9 LY travelled per Year |
Getting there isn't as hard as people think. Getting there intact is harder, because it's not about science, it's about sociology and psychology. Physics is generally predictable, and you usually have a general idea of what to do and where to look. People are anything but predictable unless you use particularly powerful tools and make sure the people don't know enough about those tools to double-guess and thus throw the pattern awry. (Think Isaac Asimov's Foundation series). Is it possible to built a ship that will get us there? Theoretically, yes. Will the people who arrive there follow what we would consider recognisable human sociological patterns as followed by any of our societies? Not a chance. |
Children brought up on the ship would simply get used to the culture (no alternative offered and no harmful external influence ). The culture should be, presumably: -still well educated; -treating their mission as a kind of sacred duty and maybe even starting a semi-religion belief system around it (in the same way as nationalistic mythology can keep the same function as religion mythology); -absolutely used to any inconvenience of the trip; -used to different political system that would evolve on the ship and treating it as natural. |