Talk:Interstellar travel

speed and viscosity

New anonymous addition:

Another effect that should be accounted for is the thickening (increase of viscosity) of the fuel and of the exhaust gases at relativistic speeds. (refs omitted)

I'm skeptical. The speed of the exhaust relative to the rocket does not change. —Tamfang (talk) 03:31, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

"So? nothing else in this article is, either" comment in article

Generation ships are not currently feasible because of the difficulty of constructing a ship of the enormous required scale and the great biological and sociological problems that life aboard such a ship raises.

An then a comment says: So? nothing else in this article is, either

Yes, nothing else in the article is currently feasible, but the matter here is the reason why generation ships are not currently feasible, not the mere fact that they aren't currently feasible. While interstellar probes are also not currently feasible, the enormous required scale and the great biological and sociological problems do not apply to them. If there is consensus, I think the comment could be removed. MGeog2022 (talk) 09:02, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

Well, interstellar probes are currently feasible (I didn't think probes such as Voyager were considered strictly interstellar, because they don't get information from other star systems, but I see they are considered as such, only because they travel through interstellar space), but the existing interstellar probes would not be strictly considered interstellar travel, since they do not arrive to other star system. MGeog2022 (talk) 09:09, 26 October 2025 (UTC)

Energy Requirements

A significant factor contributing to the difficulty is the energy that must be supplied to obtain a reasonable travel time. A lower bound for the required energy is the kinetic energy  where  is the final mass

The energy requirements for an interstellar craft should be 1/2 γmv^2, because the ship may be moving at relativistic speeds. DevLehen (talk) 15:46, 4 December 2025 (UTC)