The best idea right now on how to travel fast in space if you would want to reach very far (like outside of our solar system), seems to be solar sails.
But why would light waves alone from the sun be able to push anything at all on a human scale and even more so at really high speeds, like 10-50 % of the speed of light is numbers I’ve seen, which seems insane. Of course this haven’t been done yet, but the basic idea seems to be based on solid science.
I don’t understand how this could work even in theory tho. Like light waves have energy so I could see how that could apply force to an object, but just a small amount. Space have no resistance so if you push something you can keep it going for pretty much forever.
But how do people think that it could get you speeds that even mattered in space and even more so those mind boggling speeds?
In: Physics
Don’t underestimate the time scale of things here, and how very little things over that kind of scale really di add up.
If you use a more traditional rocket burn to get you up to speed, that burn is measured in seconds, and then you coast for months, if not years, if not decades (e.g. voyager).
A solar sail does not have to add a lot of thrust to be equivalent, because it will be adding energy for months/years/decades.
If a solar sail had just 1/31536000th (about 32 million) the energy output of an engine, it could “freely” achieve in a year what the engine could achieve in a second.
Additionally, traditional propulsion methods require engines, tanks, control mechanisms, … all of which increase mass and therefore decrease the velocity you get from kinetic energy.
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