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Old July 10th 18, 06:40 AM posted to sci.astro.research
jacobnavia
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Default Spaceship Oumuamua

Le 09/07/2018 Ã* 20:42, Eric Flesch a écritÂ*:
For interstellar travel, the Sun itself can be used for a slingshot
assist for (say) travelling outwards in the Galactic disk. The key
question, I think, is whether the object approached on a similar
vector as the Sun's but travelling a bit faster so as to catch up to
the Sun..


Obviously I thought about that. But wait...

The problem of spaceship Oumuamua is that is... VERY slow. It takes
thousands and thousands of years for a hop. At 38 Km sec, it takes 7894
years to make a single light year. Stars are about 5 or 6 ly from each
other, so each hop takes around 40 000 years.

You rather be patient in such a spaceship.

The oldest living being on earth (a pine tree in California) has around
5 000 years. Bacterial spores can survive 30 000 years (Wikipedia).
Living beings adapted to such an environment as this piece of rock could
do it, maybe.

There could be beings that arrive to steer their rock by outgassing a
collimated beam of 340g of material, as R. D. Saam calculated.

But that is total speculation. Fact is, as a spacehip it is not very
fast. Faster than anything we can achieve now, but not fast enough for
an interstellar spaceship.

I think we will come back to it in some years.

A fast machine will start from earth and catch up with it. And resolve
its mystery.