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Punoxysm comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong
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Can anyone link a deep discussion, including energy and time requirements, issues with spaceship shielding from radiation and collisions, etc., that would be involved in interstellar travel? I ask because I am wondering whether this is substantially more difficult than we often imagine, and perhaps a bottleneck in the Drake Equation
tl;dr: It is definitely more difficult than most people think, because most people's thoughts(even scientifically educated ones) are heavily influenced by sci-fi, which is almost invariably premised on having easy interstellar transport. Even the authors like Clarke with difficult interstellar transport assume that the obvious problems(e.g., lightspeed) remain, but the non-obvious problems(e.g., what happens when something breaks when you're two light-years from the nearest macroscopic object) disappear.
Some comments on this from Charles Stross. Not optimistic about the prospects. Somewhat quantitative, at the back-of-envelope level of detail.
Project Icarus seems like a decent place to start.
You might want to check out Centauri Dreams, best blog ever and dedicated to this issue.
A fair bit of this is either cited or calculated within "Eternity in six hours." See also my interview with one of its authors, and this review by Nick Beckstead.