<story><title>Relativistic Spaceship</title><url>https://dmytry.github.io/space/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AlexAndScripts</author><text>I suppose you would also have to worry about surviving the trip - every atom in the interstellar medium would damage your ship, likely penetrating the entire way through, and electromagnetic repulsion would only work with charged particles.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>Great visualization of the unintuitive nature of special relativity. It&amp;#x27;s kind of mind blowing to realize that if we could accelerate our spaceship at a mere 1G continuously, we could visit the center of the Milky Way in under 20 years (spaceship time), totally do-able in a human lifespan. Of course 27900 years would have passed on Earth, so you wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to tell anyone about your vacation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MilStdJunkie</author><text>Every proton would have the energy of a baseball. It&amp;#x27;s bananas. Granted, space is &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; empty, but it&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; empty, somewhere around a hundred atoms per cubic meter. Your ship might look like a very, very long shooting star. Probably dialing the speed down a touch would be worth it for whatever your shielding material is, but who knows? We&amp;#x27;re talking miracle engines here. I think in the &amp;quot;Valkyrie&amp;quot; ship-on-a-string concept, they had some sort of magnetic thingummy that generated more power as more stuff smacked into it, then as they decelerated they let out this sort of gas mist to go ahead of the ship and smack into things.</text></comment>
<story><title>Relativistic Spaceship</title><url>https://dmytry.github.io/space/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AlexAndScripts</author><text>I suppose you would also have to worry about surviving the trip - every atom in the interstellar medium would damage your ship, likely penetrating the entire way through, and electromagnetic repulsion would only work with charged particles.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>Great visualization of the unintuitive nature of special relativity. It&amp;#x27;s kind of mind blowing to realize that if we could accelerate our spaceship at a mere 1G continuously, we could visit the center of the Milky Way in under 20 years (spaceship time), totally do-able in a human lifespan. Of course 27900 years would have passed on Earth, so you wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to tell anyone about your vacation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>perardi</author><text>Unless you could somehow make an Alcubierre warp drive.&lt;p&gt;Of course…even if that was possible, it’s conjectured that the colonists already at your destination won’t appreciate you boiling the atmosphere when you hit them with blue shifted radiation.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.universetoday.com&amp;#x2F;93882&amp;#x2F;warp-drives-may-come-with-a-killer-downside&amp;#x2F;#ixzz2FaZsXDuM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.universetoday.com&amp;#x2F;93882&amp;#x2F;warp-drives-may-come-wit...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>