or go see if coyote is habitable... well, once we get some higher speed things that is. it is around... 4.1 lightyears?
Get to a high-enough speed and it'll seem like no time at all!!!
Well, even with light speed (unrealistic), that would still be at least 4 years to get there
...but seem like an instant.
(Snipped "unmanned mission", because that wasn't the point. And I wasn't seriously suggesting we would get such relativisticly high speeds, just jokingly pointing out what would happen if we
did them. We
could always work out how long the perceived journey would last if we were to steadily accelerate to 1c for the first 2ly then decelerate for the last 2ly. Or perhaps work on the 'safer' option of going for an experienced acceleration (1g? 2g?) and corresponding deceleration for either half of the journey[1]...)
Back to current
foreseeable reality, once we get space habitats up and running and not
(totally!) reliant upon either direct or 'electrified' solar power whilst being self-providing for most things then what we could do is apply this principle to a 'mobile' space-station to which we cram on storage-pods full of varying amounts of hard-to-recycle substances and bolt on whatever propulsion systems we have by then (something ionic?) and let it go boldly where no-one has been bold before. (To paraphrase for the benefit of split-infinitive decriers.) Yes, I imagine allowing for a generation or two of travel (one way[2]), and that it not even
start until we've had a generation or two of
local space-colonisation to get our feet 'wet' with the relevant technology and get it up-to-spec, develop anything new that we can, improve
that and (most importantly) beat most of the bugs out of it as well...
If we end up sending tin-cans of frozen humans (or embryos?), I'd be quite disappointed, but I'm not ruling that out either if it turns out that's the 'best' solution at the time of launch. But unless we get some sort of 'Zefram Cochrane' moment out of someone's experimental/theoretical physics dissertation, sometime soon, I very much doubt I'm going to see the start of (let alone take part in!) any
sort of journey like this. But you can probably leave me to my dreams.
[1] Let's see, ignoring the relativistic effects that we seek, with 9.8m/s per second increase over two years that would take us to 61,852,896m/s, wouldn't it? c= 3x10
8, so a tad over 0.2c, so we'd reach only 96-ish percent of the time passing (at the top end) of what 'actually' passed for the non-travelling observer... So doesn't sound like we need to bother too much with integrals to work out how that all works when you add in the changing T/T
0 factor, it'd still take almost four years (apparent) to get there, such a short distance away. Now, sustaining
3g (possible in the long term? ...probably would need a lot of risky training/acclimatising) would give a "raw max" time dilation that would make 4y seem like 2.5-ish... still not good enough, especially as most of the time you woukdn't be going that fast in the first place... but such a book-ended journey to somewhere more than 10ly distant could give us some calculations to do that give far more worthy "trip-shortening" tricks... albeit for a longer trip both in objective and subjective POVs...))
[2] And let those who actually reach the New World work out whether they want to try settling themselves there indefinitely (orbitally or any bit of rock they can find), try to return back here or even send themselves on yet another hop. Assuming there's nobody there already (one of us, or Someone Else) with some form of hop-drive that makes their little Kon-Tiki trip passé and out-classed.