Suppose the Breakthrough Starshot program (Stephen Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner and others) launches a probe to Proxima Centauri, the nearest Earth-sized planet. It’s supposed to take around 100 years to arrive, which means it will likely be beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this in 2019.
When has this ever happened in human history, that say an event will happen and someone will think of how that thing was started in my great-grandparent’s time, and now the spaceship has reached another Earth.
Of course, way before that time successors of the Kepler space telescope might have imaged the planet well enough to know more details. Is is habitable? Is there life on it? Will humanity colonize another Earth-like planet? None of us will know, but possible some of us will tell of it.
That’s some serious Oregon Trail shit.
One of the cooler concepts I’ve read about for interstellar civilization is a “lockstep” system: suppose technology exists for people to hibernate or exist in a state of suspended animation.
And let’s say there’s a network of X stars and it takes at most N years to travel between them.
N might be a lot. Hundreds, thousands of years.
Let’s say it’s 1000 years to travel from one end of the empire to the other.
So every planet exists in lock step with one another: every 1000 years the population of every planet “wakes up” and lives for a period of time, say 1 month, 1 year. Then, as people book their flights to travel to another planet, everyone goes into hibernation / cryo sleep for another 1000 years. So to the civilization, interstellar travel is in effect instant.
