Where do you get any number? It's a back of the envelope, order-of-magnitude thing. We don't have anything close to faster-than-light spacecraft and there's no reason to think we will in the near future, except for pure religious hope.
If you took 100,000 years that would be a speed of 0.00014c. That is pretty pessimistic - we have put objects into space that are travelling away from earth faster than that already! (Yada yada accleration :).)
At 0.1c you can go 14 lightyears in 140 years. There are stars closer than this.
> If you took 100,000 years that would be a speed of 0.00014c. That is pretty pessimistic - we have put objects into space that are travelling away from earth faster than that already!
Citation needed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 travels now at 17 km/s which is cca 6e-5 of c, twice slower than your 1.4e-4. However the bigger the object, the inertia is bigger too, so it is harder to speed up the bigger things, especially anything that would sustain life long enough for more generations. Then don't forget, as much as you speed up something, you have to speed it down too and you need the same amount of energy for that.
70 km/s. I personally wouldn't want to take that specific trip, but regardless :)
Inertia is a much smaller problem than subjecting humans to acceleration :) You can't afford to accelerate fast anyway. Thankfully spacecraft speed up and slow down quadratically with respect to acceleration.
To get to a speed of 0.00014c if you were accelerating at 9.8m/s^2 ("Earth gravity") you would need to wait...
1 hour and 15 minutes to reach top speed. (The same to slow down (ignoring relativistic effects.)) This is a drop in the bucket vs. 100,000 years, or a human lifetime :)
>It's a back of the envelope, order-of-magnitude thing.
No, that's not how you get "any number". Just some of them, the more sloppy ones.
The nearest star is like 5 light years away. With 1/10 of the speed of light that's like 50 years. Wanna make it 1/100 and 500 years?
In any case much less than the 100,000 years estimation.
>We don't have anything close to faster-than-light spacecraft and there's no reason to think we will in the near future, except for pure religious hope.
First, we don't need "faster than light" to make it to there to less than 100,000 years.
Second, we actually DO have some ideas about that, too:
