Here is some fun dreaming for the middle of your day: How close are we to being able to travel to Alpha Centauri, the star nearest to our own?
The answer, as you’d suspect, is not close, but as George Musser explains in the latest issue of the new science magazine Nautilus, some approaches are tantalizingly more feasible than others.
Alpha Centauri is 300,000 Astronomical Units from Earth (an AU is defined as the average distance from Earth to the sun), an expanse that would take a starship moving close to the speed of light something on the order of a decade to traverse. The hard part (or, one hard part) is finding an energy source capable of powering a ship that far.
Musser, who was a longtime editor at Scientific American, considers five potential energy sources, each with its own pros and cons.
Not "might." "Will." But only if we have the will to do so. To read more, click here.