Interstellar Travel Tips
Read these 3 Interstellar Travel Tips tips to make your life smarter, better, faster and wiser. Each tip is approved by our Editors and created by expert writers so great we call them Gurus. LifeTips is the place to go when you need to know about Space-Astronomy tips and hundreds of other topics.
Wormholes, shormholes
Interstellar travel is possible, but not as quickly as most like to imagine. There are no wormholes to be found within any range humans could reach in a lifetime, even travelling at the speed of light. And advanced propulsion is still generations off. So, how will we get to the stars? Patience. Intergenerational ships, where communities live and die and reproduce on the ship, are the next big ideas among serious proponents of interstellar travel.
No need to streamline
On Earth you will notice that objects which wish to go quickly must streamline in order to slide through the Earth's atmosphere. However, in space, shape does not matter. The most common design for an interstellar ship is a cigar-shaped body with clumsy-looking solar panels jutting from the surface to catch solar radiation.
Sailing along
Scientists have known for quite awhile about a method of propulsion that requires no fuel at all. The solar sail is a giant solar panel consisting of heat-resistant carbon, which would be unfurled in space to a width of nearly half a kilometer. The constant pressure of sunlight (composed of photons) will accelerate a ship to speeds five times more than is currently possible with fuel-propelled systems. At that speed, a probe launched in 2010 would overtake the Voyager 1 spacecraft (the most distant spacecraft from Earth) in 2018.
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