Will our generation have the chance to go to Proxima Centauri?
The answer is no. The reason is as follows.
Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light years away, which is 40,208,000,000,000 kilometers away from Earth. This is approximately 25,000,000,000,000 miles. That’s about 40.2 trillion kilometers, or 25 trillion miles.
The fastest speed ever achieved by a long margin is the Parker Solar Probe at 364,660 miles per hour (163 km/s) as it orbits the Sun.
If we were to travel to Proxima Centauri at the speed of the Parker Solar Probe, it would take us about 17,855 years to get there. However, with our current technology, it would take us much longer. The fastest interstellar spacecraft we have ever built, Voyager 1, is traveling at a speed of about 38,000 miles per hour. At this speed, it would take Voyager 1 about 76,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. We will work with the speed of Voyager 1 for illustrative purposes.
Above: Hubble Space Telescope image of Proxima Centauri, the closest known star to the sun. Proxima Centauri is not visible to the naked eye on Earth. Image via ESA/ Hubble/ NASA.
Our super fast spaceship will take 76 thousand years to get to Proxima Centauri, and once arriving, it would take 4 years and 3 months for the signal from the spacecraft to arrive back on Earth to tell us it arrived. We don’t even know if humans will still exist on Earth in 76 thousand years.
Therefore, it is unlikely that humans will ever achieve interstellar travel.
No comments:
Post a Comment