Or an idiot bought an EV company and forced this on his team.
@Lulz4l1f3 @JeffreyMHebert 😡😤 MELON HUSK IS NOT ... ummm ... not ... 😶
Aww, fuck it! He's a flaming moron. 😑
Did anybody explain the distances involved to him?
The closest star system to ours is alpha centauri, and it takes light (186, 282 mps) 4.25 years to get here.
So assuming you could go in a straight line (you cannot, it's moving) and assuming you could go 1/10th the speed of light (you can't because space dust would rip your spacecraft apart), it would take 40 years to travel the 40, 000 billion kilometers.
I read a lot of science-fiction, but, unlike Musk, i don't confuse fiction with reality.
I think I disabused myself of that by Jr High, but if there was any doubt in my mind, engineering classes and listening to folks with various expertise level-set my expectations.
@Lulz4l1f3 Approximately the same relationship applies to relativistic mass increase as to time dilation; at 0.8c, effective mass is about double, but the momentum is so high, that even a pea-sized pebble would have the approximate equivalent energy of a small nuclear weapon, so serious shielding is in order, which increases weight, requiring more energy, blah, blah, blah.
@POOetryma @JeffreyMHebert
Accelerating one ton to one-tenth of the speed of light requires at least 450 petajoules or 4.50×1017 joules or 125 terawatt-hours (world energy consumption 2008 was 143,851 terawatt-hours), without factoring in efficiency of the propulsion mechanism.
And then there's the problem of "what if you hit something tiny that you don't pick up on radar (etc) at those speeds.