How long would it take to get to the next nearest star in todays fastest space craft?

Question

Do electrons travel faster than the speed of light?

Answer 1

If we could travel at 150,000 miles per hour it would take almost 18,000 years to get to the nearest star. I believe the current record for the fastest space craft is something like 103,000 mph.

No, electrons do not travel faster than the speed of light. To the best of my knowledge, the speed of light is theoretically the fastest anything could travel.

EDIT:
zahbudar: your math is horribly wrong - as well as some of your numbers. Light travels 186,000 MPH (which translates to 5,865,696,000,000 miles in a light year - or 5.865 trillion).

The closest star is about 4.2 light years away or 24,635,923,200,000 (24.635 trillion miles).

A space craft traveling at 25,000 MPH would be solved by:
24,635,923,200,000/25,000/24/365 = 112,492.8 years.

A space craft traveling at 50,000 MPH would be 56,246.4 years

A space craft traveling at 150,000 MPH would be 18,748.8 years.

It looks like zahbudar dropped some decimal places when doing his calculations.

Answer 2

Electrons orbit the atomic nucleus at something like 2.5 cm per second- hardly fast enough to reach the nearest star (Proxima Centauri). Unbound electrons in wire, however, drift in the order of millimeter's per hour.
When the power is allowed to flow, by turning the on switch for instance, electron 'a' causes electron 'b' to move at something in the order of 75% the speed of light- but the electrons still aren't moving much faster- they are just acting like newtons cradle, and one electron jumps and knocks the next one, which knocks the next, etc, etc.

As to the time to reach the nearest star, if we could accelerate at 1g (roughly 10 m/s/s) to as close to the speed of light as possible for half the journey, then flip around and slow down at the same rate it would take around 43 years to reach Proxima Centauri.
Unfortunately, we don't have the technology to sustain a 1g acceleration........
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion could in theory, get a vehicle to Proxima in less than 100 years- although there are problems with that type of system. The main one being the total ban on atomic/nuclear weapons or similar, being used in space.

Answer 3

The fastest any object can travel THROUGH SPACE (note emphasis) is the speed of light. That's the point at which massive objects would convert to energy. This is due to the fact that as objects accelerate, they become more massive or heavier. As you approach the speed of light, an object would approach infinite mass and require infinite energy to sustain that momentum. The thesis thus is that only non-massive objects can reach the speed of light because they have no mass and don't weigh anything.

Both space-time and light are non-massive. We do know that galaxies at the edge of the universe are moving away from other galaxies at speeds that are far far greater than the speed of light. That's because "space creation" in-between those two objects is happening at a pace which when taking together the speed the galaxy is traveling through space is pushing the two galaxy apart at greater than light speeds.

If we can figure out how to either destroy space or create it to our advantage, then we could potentially barrel toward a star at speeds far greater than light while still simply traveling "THROUGH SPACE" at a league 150,000 to 200,000 mph.

An alternative to this would be to invent an Alcubierre drive which would bend space-time to make objects closes. The mass required to do this would need to be, for the lack of a better word, MASSIVE.

I don't see how either of these scenarios are going to be solved anytime soon. Consider this though. if it were possible -- even deep in the future -- for any being to create practical space travel that can far exceed the limits of the speed of light, then we would have likely been visited by now.

There are 300 billion stars in our galaxy and a trillion trillion galaxies in the known Universe. You have to be absolute ******* nut and humans would have be ridiculous naive to believe that out of the trillion trillion galaxies, our planet is the only one to have developed intelligent life? Our solar system is relatively young compared to the rest of the Universe.

In a million years from now, imagine the advancements and the technology humans will create. Now consider the fact that there are probably millions if not billions of civilizations out there that are a million+ years more advanced than us.

The fact that none has visited Earth or made their existence known suggests that light speed travel is probably theoretically impossible. We're talking through any means (bending space, creating space, exotic matter etc.).

Answer 4

If NASA really tried, it could probably build a space probe that could reach Alpha Centauri in 20000 years. If it didn't push for speed, the more likely estimate for the travel time is 50000 years. And, no, electrons do not travel faster than light.

Answer 5

Nothing with a positive rest mass, such as an electron, can exceed the speed of light.

Today's fastest spacecraft is probably still Voyager 2, which has travelled at around 36 km/h, but its speed varies according to massive objects nearby because like other spacecraft it used the gravity of massive planets to accelerate. It would take around 35000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the next nearest star, at that speed.

Answer 6

There's no drag in space, so speed is limited by nothing but those crazy theories that you can't travel faster than light, and then supposedly funny things start happening with time. There is no answer to your question, not yet.

Answer 7

Proxima Centauri is about 4.3 light years away...

Light travels 186284 miles per second through a vacuum

Voyager 2 is traveling about 54000 miles per hour....

you do the math.

To the person who doesn't see the point of going to the Sun (Proxima Centuri).... the difference of going to any orbiting planet is only fractional.

Answer 8

Using the Sun's gravity, deflect from the Sun at a distance 70 million miles from it, we can reach 150,000kmh with conventional chemical propulsion. With Ion Propulsion, can we reach 1,000,000kmh?

If we can reach it, going to the nearest star would take about 4587 years.

Answer 9

nothing to worry about the space craft will not take u to another star at least not in your lifetime.... about 17 000 to 20000 years will be required...

electrons can travel faster... in theory

Answer 10

That's two questions
Alpha Centauri is our nearest star 4.36 Light years away so it would take you 4.36 years travelling at the speed of light to reach it. Don't really know how that converts to our fastest space craft a few centuries as a rough guess