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 Originally Posted by CoccoBill
"bodies x20 larger" so yeah, way smaller.
That should give some perspective about distances and how unlikely it is that we'll ever travel anywhere outside the solar system.
The Voyager Probe has already left the solar system.
If we can have a sustained human biosystem in a spacecraft, then traveling between stars is viable. Time scales are long, but relativity helps if you can get a spacecraft up to a decent fraction of the speed of light. Even small accelerations acting over long time scales can do this. It would still be a years-long journey to the closest star.
There's a practical design for a spacecraft that accelerates off the shock waves of nuclear bombs dropped out it's back side. It could probably launch a small town into orbit.
The designs for that craft are decades old, and it was intended to be made with materials available at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projec...ar_propulsion)
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