• Question: how long would it take for humanity to make it to another planet like proxima centauri b?

    Asked by Murray111 to Alan, Ciorsdaidh, Lauren, Leonie, Martin, Neil, Shuo on 6 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      Proxima Centauri B is 4.25 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance traveled by light in one year; around about 9,450,000,000,000,000 metres. Probably the fasted man-made objects out in space are the Voyager spacecraft. These are currently leaving the Solar System at a sedate 17,000 metres per second! If either is heading in the direction of Proxima Centauri B, it will take them around 556,000,000,000 seconds (or over 17,600 years) to get there!

      Basically we a limited by both the speed of light (we can’t go faster than it) and our current technologies! But there’s no harm in wishing for better technology or a way around the speed of light! Those are problems scientists and engineers are looking at!

    • Photo: Neil Keddie

      Neil Keddie answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      I think Martin has covered the physics and the distances here quite well already! I think we’re a long way from developing the technology for that sort of distance of deep space travel – in our lifetime I think we will get back to the moon, and also get the first humans on to (and back from) Mars – but we’ll be using rockets to do that, not star trek type space ships.

    • Photo: Alan McCue

      Alan McCue answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      Great answers already I see 🙂

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