Project Icarus: an Interstellar Mission Timeline 265
astroengine writes "What would the infrastructure supporting an interstellar mission look like? Considerations such as fuel sources, mining methods, interstellar spaceship construction activities and maintenance are being analyzed, all of which would be carried out before even reaching the ultimate interstellar goal. Project Icarus is currently unravelling the complexities of this operation and recently created a nifty animation of how one of the many fuel tanks may be recycled as communication relay pods en route to nearby stars."
Re:Escape the Solar System, and Galaxy (Score:3, Informative)
I care. Because 100 billion years of life is better than 4 billion years of life.
You aren't going to have either, though. Those billions of years of life are nothing more than a phantasm in the here and now. You will never, ever know whether we as a species will make it a hundred billion years, four billion years, or four thousand years. It might as well be a gazillion years, because you won't be around for a hundred. And nothing, nothing you do in your lifetime will make a difference to the longevity of the species as a whole, and how we face problems four billion years in the future.
Nice that you are thinking ahead, though. Fantasizing about the impossibly distant future is no different than fantasizing about becoming a superhero or the King of Westeros. It's a great way to ignore real-world, present day problems while puffing up your own ego by imagining that you are pondering the really weighty, long term problems.