Can We Make it to a Nearby Star Yet?

How long would it take for humanity to colonize a planet in a nearby star system? With our current level of technology and available materials, and hypothetically choosing Barnard's Star (as it is the closest star to us that remotely similar to our sun), which is 6+ light years away from us, estimated travel time would be around 12,000 years with the fastest propulsion we can muster, and that's only if we can use the gravity wells around the Jovian planets to increase the ship's velocity beyond what we could normally reach (New Horizons will be travelling at about 15km/s when it finally crosses the orbit of Pluto), and we'd need to keep accelerating to approximately 10x that to keep our itinerary of 12,000 years. There are other drive technologies that have been tested on extremely small scale, but no full scale tests have been attempted.

The #OrionDrive could get us there in either 1330 years or 133 years (to Alpha Centauri, according to Dr. Freeman Dyson's calculations in his paper "Interstellar Transport," Physics Today, Oct. 1968 p.41-45; reasonable conjecture to add 50% to it, as the distance is 6ly not 4ly) depending on the design we used. The larger one would be ideal, being as its top velocity is about 0.1 light speed, which compared to the other options available is fast. Now that is approaching a reasonable amount of time, on the order of 5-8 generations, given we can accumulate enough fuel to maintain for that long. It would require a megaton of Deuterium to detonate at a rate of once every 100 seconds, for about 200 years, possibly only the first half of that, but even that is an obscene amout of fuel to accrue. It could be possible to find more deuterium along the way, but that will increase travel time and make other supplies diminish during the mining (for lack of a better word).

#SolarSails are another option, though in many ways is far more limited because it relies on photons to accelerate, and as we all know, photons disperse more quickly the further away from the source you travel. One workaround is building a high-power photon emitter as part of the sail rigging, and keep it in reserve until the nearest natural sources become to weak to continue being efficient. With ideal materials, sail size, and course (one that optimizes the #Oberth effect, as described earlier), the craft can cruise at about 69.6 km/s, which is not even close to what the #OrionDrive is capable of, but requires almost infinitely less fuel to operate. But now were back into the 1000's of years of travel time, though food and water are seriously the biggest concern, with outside forces being the next biggest threat to the ship and crew.

So, there are the options we have available to us with the technology we have today. In the future, we may figure out what is necessary to achieve faster than light travel, using propulsion like the Alcubierre Metric Tensor drive and then the length of time it would take to arrive would seem instantaneous. However, being as technologically castrated as we are, we must either discover the right mathematics or physical materials, or use one of the other methods covered previously.

Alas, we are not likely to set sail for the stars unless something threatens to destroy Earth entirely, given we detect it early enough to actually set an escape plan into motion. Until that time, we should make the best of the time we are here.

Sources:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=915 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

All materials in this article are meant to be used in an educational manner, any similarity to other articles/videos/pamphlets/etc. is strictly coincidental, no animals were harmed in the production of this article.