Assuming Einstein was correct and one can’t ever travel faster than the speed of light and further assuming that we wanted to travel to another star and could attain near light speed in a reasonably fast time period, how would you actually navigate to the destination?

Stars are not where we on Earth see them to be. If you could somehow jump say 100 light years from Earth instantaneously, nothing would be where you thought it would be if you depended on the destination position being where it was as viewed from Earth because of the delay in light reaching Earth. If you start from Earth in a light speed capable ship and merely point at where you want to go, you are really looking at where the star was at some point in the past.

So your destination is now somewhere else in the heavens from where an Earth person would see it. For all we know in present time, the object might have gone nova or there might be another star in the way now. Even the very closest start system (Alpha Centuri) is 4 years away at light speed. A lot can transpire in 4 years!

With light speed as a maximum limit, it would seem that you would (1) only reasonably be able to travel to very close star systems from any point and (2) would need some sort of real-time stellar location calculation computer with an en route object detection and avoidance system that would function at near light speed (don’t want to run into some sun traveling at light speed), which (3) would require some really major computer power (which is not in existence at this point) to somehow track the object you want to get to while constantly updating the flight path/course as you got ever closer while avoiding objects in the way.

So the question is: Has anyone (outside of SF authors) given any thought to the mechanics of navigating to other stars? This might make for a good story in Discover.

thanks,

Michael

*Matsuoka, T. & Shimizu, K. Nature 458, 186–189 (2009); and Ma, Y. et al. Nature 458, 182–185 (2009)

Handedness is an emergent phenomenon. It disappears below its pitch length. Required are centimeter-scale self-similar aggregates of single-atom helices, all left-handed and separately all right-handed. Crystallography volunteers enantiomorphic space groups P3(1)21 and P3(2)21 with respective all right-handed and all left-handed 3-fold screw axies, no racemic screw axes, no conflicting screw axes. The US hosts superlative Eotvos balances. Large single crystal quartz, berlinite and analogues, tellurium, selenium… are all commercially grown. Do left and right shoes fall identically?

Alternatively, where did the mc^2 go when matter entered the Krell disintegrator field in Forbidden Planet?