Relativistic Generalization of the Incentive Trap of Interstellar Travel with Application to Breakthrough Starshot · HackerPapers discussionshttps://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1705.01481/Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.enMon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMTRelativistic Generalization of the Incentive Trap of Interstellar Travel with Application to Breakthrough Starshot — mentioned by tunesmithhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20946468urn:hackerpapers:mention:1705.01481:20946468Thu, 12 Sep 2019 00:55:16 GMT<p>I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it will take for us to arrive there. One common recommendation for annual energy growth rate is 1.4%, and then taking the square root to get velocity growth rate since velocity has a…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/1705.01481/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>physics.pop-ph