Worlds more habitable than Earth? (nytimes.com)

We don't have fuel sources that can run long enough for the trip, and deep space won't have enough solar radiation. We would need reliable mining spots along the way to replace metals made brittle by exposure or punctured by micro asteroids.

Even travelling at 1% the speed of light, stray hydrogen atoms become a problem. Not counting acceleration or deceleration time, that would be over 400 years just to get to the nearest star, let alone one with a habitable planet.

But that water needs to be encased in something, and your problem now becomes protecting the encasement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst :

> (GRBs) are extremely energetic events occurring in distant galaxies that represent the brightest and most powerful class of explosion in the Universe.

> The sources of most GRB are billions of light years away from Earth, implying that the explosions are both extremely energetic (a typical burst releases as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime)[11] and extremely rare (a few per galaxy per million years).

> All in all, a GRB within a few kiloparsecs, with its energy directed towards Earth, will mostly damage life by raising the UV levels during the burst itself and for a few years thereafter.

I'm guessing without an atmosphere protecting a ship it'd be a bit worse? But it's like winning a very bad lottery to get hit by one. I guess if you're traveling thousands of years in deep sleep odds get higher?

This gives you energy, but I'm not sure how to turn that into velocity. Presumably you'd want some kind of ion beam emitter on board to propel your craft forward. Halfway through the journey, you'd turn the ion beam around to decelerate as you approach your destination.

In the Arthur C Clarke novel Songs of Distant Earth, spacecraft pushed huge blocks of ice ahead of them to absorb stray interstellar dust.

"The design and calculations discussed above are using 20%-enriched uranium salts. However, it would be plausible to use another design which could achieve much higher exhaust velocities (4,725 km/s) and use a 30,000-tonne ice comet along with 7,500 tonnes of highly enriched uranium salts to propel a 300-tonne spacecraft up to 7.62% of the speed of light and potentially arrive at Alpha Centauri after a 60-year journey."

Sure, not 99% the speed of light or continuous 1 g acceleration but IMHO good enough for an oversized nuclear squirt gun.

Or better yet, send some cancer cells so they can replicate during the journey, then switch from cancer mode to gamete mode for the final generation. That way they're fresh when you need them. You're gonna want DNA repair happening continuously, rather than all at once upon a thaw.

Nerds specifically kept the archaic forms alive, but they'd also tell you that Latin and ancient Greek were not static for their whole existence (Attic != Homeric != Koine), and modern Greek is somewhat different from what is taught as "ancient" Greek.

Treat Latin and (ancient) Greek like you would Quenya or Esperanto.

If this were to happen with English, I'd expect us to keep Chaucer, Shakespeare, and enough to understand Victorian literature, but it's anyone's guess if modern English would survive at all.

Arabic… kinda? It has an international standard form, but from what I've been told the language also comes with local dialects which can be difficult to mutually comprehend (though this is also the same with English just by going from central London to Sheffield).

Nobody would chose to sacrifice themselves and their descendants (because that's what such an expedition is about), for mere curiosity. And nobody would fund an expedition that will not reach destination before multiple hundreds of years, even if the said expedition doesn't consume the entire industrial output of a major nation.

Space is BIG.

With a sustained nationwide effort comparable to WW2 we could most likely send a spaceship out if the solar system in ten years or so. But why would anyone do that?

Maybe they even live inside asteroids or ships orbiting a dwarf star, because they are mostly in a Matrix-like existence and don't have much of a physical life?

If someone provided a matrix world where you could live your dream life, I think a lot of us would choose to live in it. It would be so much better than real life. Our physical bodies could be maintained by robots, providing us with the perfect mix of sustenance and physical exercise to increase our life spans. Your body would eat healthy, but your mind would experience whatever food you would like.

The 'biosphere 2' attempt at building a self-sustaining environment with humans, did not succeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2