1st interstellar journey, would you go?

Originally posted by wolfgang59
It's a good point you make. But how does Earth (who have invested trillions
into your journey) ensure payback? What incentive do you and your mates
get to continue with research?

20 years is a long time and as well as the adventure I think the crew would
want big financial compensation and a means to spend it! Otherwise they
go rogue!

At 0.5c you still have the possibility of communications. At 0.999c you get that nice relativity boost in ship time but the data rate goes down by a thousand. At 1/2c you only lose half data, which should be enough to get a few megabits per second across. So they would have money in accounts for you and you can access the accounts and see how much money you have in the bank.

There can be reality shows a bit like the astronauts do aboard the ISS which pays someone.

The science payoff would come from things like the increased parallax base which, like I said before, even at 180 billion miles out would increase the parallax baseline by a thousand which means you get direct distance data to stars a thousand times further away. That happens when you take a picture of a section of sky and you send that image home and they use that image in a parallax hunt on stars. When you get to AC your parallax baseline is over 250,000 times the old baseline which is just the orbit of Earth around the sun, 288 million km. So you can now do parallax studies on stars that much further away from Earth. You might begin to think about direct parallax studies of stars in Andromeda galaxy. The crew might be up for a Nobel Prize in physics.

Originally posted by sonhouse
At 0.5c you still have the possibility of communications. At 0.999c you get that nice relativity boost in ship time but the data rate goes down by a thousand. At 1/2c you only lose half data, which should be enough to get a few megabits per second across. So they would have money in accounts for you and you can access the accounts and see how much money you ...[text shortened]... arallax studies of stars in Andromeda galaxy. The crew might be up for a Nobel Prize in physics.

Yep I agree. I was questioning twhitehead's "no-return" option. I cannot
see that working because the crew would become mavericks.

Originally posted by sonhouse
That would be valuable information so they could pay you back in kind, if you have, for instance, a great 3D printer on board, all the latest toys from Earth could just be printed and you would have the latest gadgets, TV broadcasts, porn if you wanted, lectures, all that would be possible. You could be the star of your own reality show and be making money back home that would be waiting for you when you get back and so forth.

I'd be tempted, simply because I could really see using the trip to do mathematics with minimal interruptions (porn gets boring after an hour). I'd be like that guy in the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last."

YouTube&noredirect=1

Originally posted by Soothfast
I'd be tempted, simply because I could really see using the trip to do mathematics with minimal interruptions (porn gets boring after an hour). I'd be like that guy in the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAxARJyaTEA&noredirect=1

The study options would be very limited if everyone was canned in a cryofreezer or some kind of hibernation scheme. On the other hand, you would not get a chance to be bored.