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Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5nutv wrote

Reply to comment by hdufort in Couldn’t we land on an asteroid that is passing through our solar system and use that as a vessel for interstellar travel? by [deleted]

Indeed, though this would be easier since you could send multiple smaller payloads that coalesce on the object. Not only this, if you somehow managed to mine and create small scale industrial works, you could maybe even make the fuel to bloody get off asteroid.

If you decided to send humans they could live inside the asteroid as a fortress from the elements, as a place from which to further develop the asteroid as a spacecraft itself. Creating many of the sensory instruments and propulsion technology or fuel, spaces for living aka creating agriculture and processing essential gasses.

If you ask why would you send humans on such a journey? Why would you send them on a voyager 1 like journey? You wouldn’t, you’d send them to a desired location, like near a habitable planet. Only it seems easier to me to do it this way than to try and send a single manned ship.

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pmMeAllofIt t1_jd5y2e6 wrote

How is the object going in a desired location. The chances of it's trajectory being exactly where we want it to be is unlikely. But even so, we manage to hitch a ride. Oumuamua at it's perihelion was doing 87km/s, but climbing away from the Sun slows it down. From what I see it will average about 26km/s. At that speed it will take 15,000> years to leave the solar system, and about 50,000 years to reach the nearest star.

As crazy as it sounds, it's not fast enough.

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Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd62qcb wrote

Not oumuamua specifically, just an omuamua like object. As an example that such a thing does exist.

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pmMeAllofIt t1_jd65yd2 wrote

The point stands. Come back in a hundred years or so, but it's like asking to hitch a ride on a log to cross the Atlantic, but the log is in China.

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Nerull t1_jd63gc2 wrote

Asteroids are not traveling nearly fast enough to be useful to transit from one place to another.

Realize you're talking about transit times measured in millions of years.

Even at these slow speeds, we basically get one shot to intercept it before its out of reach. There is no time to slowly launch many smaller probes to it, or build up a base on it.

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