Alien life found?

[Farmageddon]

mrstickball said:

Farmageddon said:

highwaystar101 said:

Also, if you could travel to another star at near the speed of light, you could travel to another star within a life time as time is relative (the faster you travel towards the speed of light, the slower your time ticks). It would be feasible for some hyper advanced alien race capable of travelling close to the speed of light (I would love to know where they got the energy from to do that lol) they could travel to many stars within a single life time. But because there are hundreds of billions of stars in the milky way I find it unlikely that they come across other intelligent life very often (if at all). The milky way would require a lot of exploration.

How much time of Sun's irradiated energy would we need to get a few ships to, say, 0,9999c if we could keep it all?

At 0.9999c, it'd take awhile, likely.

But to get to 0.9c, it'd take a few seconds..If that.

Going by E = mc²(1/V( 1 - v²/c²) - 1) it would land something like 4,5 x10^26 joules per kilo ton. It seems the Sun outputs around 3.86×1026 J/s. So it'd take a little over a second (supposing you could harness all of it's energy with no loss at all and perfectly convert all this anergy into aceleration, which is obviously incredibly far from realistic) to have enough energy to accelerate a kilo ton to 0,9999c.

My point is I think the source of energy isn't really the problem as much as the entire technology and logistics to make it work.

Edit: fun bit: it seems it would take over two thousand times as long as the universe has existed to get enough energy at the present rate the sun outputs it (sure it'd be long gone by then) to get the sun the earth and the moon up to that speed.