How long would it take?

Question

in the news it states we have found another planet that could sustain life as we know it!

this planet is 20.5 lightyears away, does anyone know with the current technology how long would it take for us to reach this planet?

Nadisha

Thanks Sorry for my preivous rant!

XX

Answer 1

If we had a stargate it would only take 2 minutes!!

Answer 2

20 light years in round figures is 120 trillion miles, If it were indeed to take 5 billion years (by when our sun would become a Red Giant) that would mean we took a year to go 24,000 miles which seems rather low considering the Apollo missions went ten times that far in three days and the New Horizons probe to Pluto reached the Moon's orbit in half a day in 2006.

Taking the New Horizons mission speed as a basis for calculating ... the launch velocity was 36,260 mph and a recent gravity assist from Jupiter pushed this up to 51,449 mph relative to the Sun. Call that 50,000 mph and it will go 438 million miles in a year or 438 billion miles in 1000 years or 120 trillion miles in just over 250,000 years.

A quarter of a million years not 5 billion years and Radio 1 has produced an overestimation by about 20,000: 1.

Obviously that is far too slow to be practical. It would still take 50,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri at these speeds

Answer 3

The current space shuttle can travel an estimated 17,460mph in the vacuum of space. The new planet 'discovered' is said to be around 122.5 trillion light years (122,500,000,000,000) away, or 719,919,181,800,000,000,000,000,000miles so therefore if my maths is correct it would take:
41,232,484,639,175,257,731,958.76 hours (or)
1,718,020,193,298,969,072,164.95 days (or)
4,703,682,938,532,427,302.29 years
However, 122.5 trillion LY is an estimation (as is the speed of light and the velocity of the shuttle as they are all dependant on environment), allowing about 0.5 trillion LY either way. This could dramatically increase or decrease the travel time by several billion years.

Simply put, if humanity had created a space shuttle at the start of time (again an estimation), we wouldn't even be 1% of the way there yet.

Answer 4

If you consider that 100 years ago the maximum speed that humans were experiencing was around 30km/h and now we can send space probes/ships which travel at 30000km/h, I can easily assume that current technology will evolve further in the next 100 years to possibly allow us to go as fast as 30000000km/h which is still 3% of light speed. And it's trivial that even at light speed it would take 20 years...
So unless "they" come here and pick us up for a ride using their amazingly advanced technology, I don't see any reasonable way of getting there ourselves...
Apparently there are fictional methods for travelling at Warp Speed which would make the trip a thousand times shorter (if not more, google for "Warp Speed Defined") and in this case we could be there in just a week. Now you're talking!

Answer 5

Yeah I know it sounds good, but its long past us. Sadly, the human race will have been long dead then. There's no real way that we can get to planets fast enough, let alone transport people there! Its out of the question no matter how high we go.

Sometimes I think that science can be pointless - and even depressing - after all all this hope... for nothing?

Answer 6

First of all, I'd like to point out that a light year is a distance (distance travelled by light in a year) and not an amount of time, so whoever said it would take 5 billion light years to get there has obviously not understood a thing.
To answer your question, you first need to determine the distance of 20,5 light years.
Knowing light travels at 300 million metres per second (which is 1 080 million km/h), you multiply by 24 (24 hours in a day), then by 365,25 (number of days in a year) and finaly by 20,5.
The answer is approximately 194 trillion kilometres.

According to Nasa, the Voyager probes are currently travelling at approximately 70 000 km/h (614 million kms per year). If we assume that this is the maximum speed for spacecrafts of our current technology, then divide 20,5 light years (194 trillion kms) by the 614 million kms (distance travelled by the spacecraft in a year) and you find the amount of years that it will take to travel 20,5 light years at 70 000 km/h.
I find approx 316 000 years.
Far from the 5 billion anounced by radio one. Still, far too long.

Answer 7

To be honest, who really knows and with technology improving at a rate of knots and the potential for a technological breakthrough, it will be exciting just to see what develops in the next 15-20 years!

Answer 8

A bit too long is the simple answer - until someone cracks cryogenics or we actually do dig up a stargate it sounds like you'd better not make any holiday plans - anyway its a bit of a longshot isn't it?! Just shows some people don't listen though, 20.5 light years, thats how long it would take light from our sun to get there and vice versa..., so if we could travel at light speed (IF!!!) it would take 20.5 years...., do try to keep up Beeblebrox! ;-)

Answer 9

amazing! a planet that cold support life!

The thing is tho, 20.5 light years is toooooo far away.
We wouldn't be able to escape the s expanding if we had to evacuate there

unless, the people of the future sent back their technology in a time m/c and we started evacuated now to save them...

Answer 10

If you assume that you can travel at the speed of 36000 km per hour (which means 10km per second), you will need 30000 years to cover the distance of 1 light year and 615,000 years to cover the distance of 20.5 light years...!!!

Answer 11

even if we could travel their the fastest we could get their would be 20.5 years due to a certain chap called Einstein's theories. This means that to get a message back it would take 41 years as we have to send messages at the speed of light and get their first at that speed