I was watching the 2018 adaptation of Aniara the other day, and it got me thinking about how close we are to space travel between other exoplanets. In the movie a ship accidentally gets blown off course on the way to Mars, and plunges into deep space. Spoiler alert, the ship doesn’t encounter another solar system for 6 million years.
We don’t know exactly where the Aniara ended up, since the movie only reveals that it’s in the constellation Lyra, which contains stars of varying distances from earth. This stack overflow post explains the math to find Aniara’s speed and distance given the time it took to get there (at least, it seems correct from my minimal astronomy knowledge…). Apparently, the ship would have been going between 1 and 31 km/s (traveling between 25 and 620 light years away).
The good news is that we have faster spacecraft than the Aniara was going, and there are closer exoplanets than where they ended up. The fastest spacecraft we have right now is the Parker Solar Probe which travelled at ~200km/s, and the closest exoplanet is around the star Proxima Centauri (4.2 light years away). Given those new parameters for our earlier calculations, we could potentially get to an exoplanet in 6,300 years, longer than our written history, but easier to comprehend than millions of years.
As a developer, I felt the need to go a bit further and make a tool to calculate the time it would take to travel to the closest exoplanets given different speeds, so that’s what I did! Here’s a gif showing the arrival time to the different exoplanets (assuming constant speed):
I’ve noted the speeds for:
- Aniara’s low and high estimates
- Parker Solar Probe max speed
- And just for fun, 10% light speed (where time dilation starts to be more noticeable)
- 99% light speed (close to the theoretical max speed physically possible)
The project is written with Typescript and Javascript, I used a puppeteer script to scrape the exoplanet data from wikipedia, and the UI uses React and Material UI. The calculations were a bit difficult given javascript’s well-known decimal arithmetic issues, but using the BigNumber.js library solved most of the problems.