What are Some Proposed Means of Interstellar Travel?
Because the stars are so far apart, proposed means of interstellar travel either involve very long trips, or very fast means of getting there. We’ll focus on the fast means, because nobody likes to wait a long time to get to their travel destination. There are four possible means of interstellar travel that are taken seriously. They are nuclear pulse propulsion — one of the first proposed, fusion-powered rockets, light sails propelled by lasers, and antimatter-based propulsion. Of these, antimatter propulsion and light sails seem the most promising as they are the fastest. Antimatter or light sails could reach speeds similar to that of light, taking advantage of the relativistic effect of time dilation, which could make the interstellar trip to Alpha Centauri, which is four light years away, seem like less than a year in duration. The remaining methods of interstellar travel, nuclear pulse propulsion and fusion rockets, are limited to speeds of about 10% of that of light at max, making
