The longest / optimum journey time to Alpha Centauri

.... is of the order of 50,000 years!

http://firstarktoalphacentauri.wikia...tauri_Princess

Abdul Ahad
"I did not invent the system. The system invented me."

I remeber a sci fi story on such a trip, the crew goes in suspended
animation - when they wake up at the destination they're greeted as heroes
by the Earth colony that was started some years after they left using faster
than light drive, and has now populated the planet.





"Abdul Ahad" wrote in message
...
... is of the order of 50,000 years!

http://firstarktoalphacentauri.wikia...tauri_Princess

Abdul Ahad
"I did not invent the system. The system invented me."

In article , Val Kraut
wrote:

I remeber a sci fi story on such a trip, the crew goes in suspended
animation - when they wake up at the destination they're greeted as heroes
by the Earth colony that was started some years after they left using faster
than light drive, and has now populated the planet.

There's a number of stories like that. I like one from the Japanese
comic 2001 Nights, which first shows a colony ship consisting of one
couple and a few dozen children landing on a new planet. The adults are
robots, the kids having been raised from frozen embryos when the ship
was a decade or two away from its destination. A few short stories
later, we see the ancestor of those kids arriving at the planet
thousands of years earlier to start terraforming it so there'd be a
home for them.

--
Chris Mack "If we show any weakness, the monsters will get cocky!"
'Invid Fan' - 'Yokai Monsters Along With Ghosts'

On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:53:09 -0700 (PDT)
Abdul Ahad wrote:

... is of the order of 50,000 years!
[...]

There was a study a few years ago that considered that Earth based
civilization has been improving in controlled energy generation by 1.5%
per annum for all of history (on average). They projected this out and
determined that this would allow optimal travel times to nearby stars
by about the late 31st/early 32nd century. Optimal as in anything
launched later could not overtake that mission. But optimal mission
profiles could overtake pre-optimal missions.

I'd suspect this was looking at the classical Bussard ramscoop flight
profile (or something similar) as "optimum", but I'm not sure.

I'm blanking on any further details, but the right search should turn up
something about it.
--
T. M. Pederson

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On Mar 12, 12:53*am, Abdul Ahad wrote:
... is of the order of 50,000 years!

http://firstarktoalphacentauri.wikia...tauri_Princess

Abdul Ahad
"I did not invent the system. The system invented me."

One has to have a place to go. A decent planet of some sort.
Either that over the colony will have to be much like the generation
ship itself except with less propulsion or the same level propulsion.

Nor should it be assumed that the passengers live for 100 years, they
may
live 10 000 years with some genetic engineering of the species.

On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:56:32 -0400, "Val Kraut"
wrote, perhaps among other things:

I remeber a sci fi story on such a trip, the crew goes in suspended
animation - when they wake up at the destination they're greeted as heroes
by the Earth colony that was started some years after they left using faster
than light drive, and has now populated the planet.


But they smelled bad, and couldn't understand electron psychology.
--
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
-- Ed Abbey