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Q&A

How can I know where to point my spaceship?

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Let's assume we have a working FTL drive and thus interstellar travel is possible, either by traveling at very high speeds or by instant teleportation (the two main subtypes of FTL drives in sci-fi). A question arises: how to know where we are going?

All information we have about stars come from their light (or other EM emissions); but since the speed of light is limited, it takes some time to reach us. If we travel to the apparent position of a star which is 50 light years far from us, we'll go where the star was 50 years ago; now multiply that by hundreds or thousands, and you get the picture. A given star might not even exist anymore because it has gone nova, but we simply can't know that before the light from the explosion reaches us.

How can interstellar navigation be achieved, assuming interstellar travel is possible?

(Also note that if we don't have a working FTL drive, the question is exactly the same... but worsened by needing years to get to our destination, at the very high risk of wasting lots of resources to get to a place that isn't there anymore).

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/120255. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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