LogFAQs > #979244516

OhhhJa posted...

I think it does but you'd have to have people willing to die to go there on a way trip and a good reason to devote a significant amount of money to it

The problem is that you'd need a ship with about a years worth of food and water on it (per person), and some means of disposing of your waste after eating all the food and drinking all the water. Then you'd presumably need some form of entertainment media or work to keep yourself occupied so you don't go insane from the loneliness.

Then all of that extra weight will require a ton of fuel. The weight of which will require even more fuel. And so on.

Some of that can be offset if we built a ship in orbit and then launched it from there so you wouldn't need to bring the entire mass of the ship to escape velocity in atmosphere all at once (you'd basically need to ferry all the supplies up to space and launch from there, which would require much less fuel for the outward trip).

Then the ideal launch window only comes around like once every 15 years (and the next one is somewhere around 2040).

Other problems would involve whether or not we could build a ship sturdy enough to even survive the trip, whether we could shield it effectively enough to keep cosmic radiation from killing anyone inside, health problems caused by prolonged weightlessness (unless we can develop some sort of rotational centrifugal force that can simulate gravity), and how to respond along the way if/when something goes wrong and it winds up being impossible to fix.

We might be able to overcome some of those issues over the next century or so, but we're definitely not at that point now, and even throwing tons of money at the problem isn't likely going to be enough to make it happen.