If we could accelerate at a constant 1g, flip, and decelerate at a constant 1g, the trip would take ~152 years... from Earth's perspective. If you were onboard, time dilation would make the trip about 10 years.
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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1g! We have like 6g now!
C'mon billionaires! This is your chance to create a totally unique planet! Get onboard an X rocket and fly your teslas out there! We are all counting on you my friends! All of you! We will need the chip guys, the real estate and building tycoons, the medicine billionaires and everyone in between, all you must go!
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Cool lets pack up the billionaires and ship em over there.
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.
Guillotines are even closer than the sun.
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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302 years later the ship comes back with a pile of gold and a note:
"Delicious. Please send more."
Everyone likes gold. This would be a good movie!
It's a reference to Amazing Stories from the 80's (specifically the episode Thanksgiving, Season 2, 1986), starring David Carradine. In it, Carradine and his daughter discover a mysterious hole/well on their property. When they lower objects down in it, something living below fills the bucket with gold, jewels, and notes like “thanks for the food, send more”. Eventually Carradine is like, fuck sending shit down there, I'm gonna go down there myself with an AR and take all the gold.
When his daughter tries to pull him up it comes back with a bunch of gold and "Delicious. Please send more."
It was really well made for the time, I seem to recall, but I was a kid so YMMV.
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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
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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.
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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.
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50% chance of being in the habitable zone
Imagine sitting on a spaceship for 151 years just to discover your parents' bet was wrong
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None of you smelly monkeys are welcome; keep your filthy paws off my home.
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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Is there another similar format for this meme, but without this dipshit in it?
How cool would be to have radio communications with similarly tech-evolved aliens.
Edt: could
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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.
Our two guaranteed inhabitable worlds are in alpha centauri and sirius
Friday night HD 137010 b run boys, who is in?
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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