(October 24, 2014 at 11:24 am)vorlon13 Wrote: No kidding, Freeman Dyson and others did some work on pushing Orion Nuclear Impulse technology to it's limits and felt we had the capability for interstellar travel, albeit slowly.
The engineering is scary, but it doesn't involve any violation of physics.
For mere interstellar travel that is slow, we hardly need even Orion. Voyager spacecrafts are doing interstellar travel as we speak.
But slowly is the catch. We humans have a detailed planning horizon, that is at most 1-2 life spans. For realistic policy involving interstellar travel to be formulated, instellar travel must be fast enough to be accomplished within our detailed planning horizon.
That even the Orion can not really do.
