Consider Delta Pavonis. In the book
Dune it is the home system of House Atreides.
It's the nearest sun which is like our sun, so there's a chance there is an earth like planet in the Goldilocks Zone.
If you want to know where it is relative to you now, it's straight down.
Straight out from the South Pole in Antarctica, and you are heading towards Pavo.
It's 20 light years away. If you are going 20% of the speed of light say, that's 60,000 kilometers per second.
That's mindbogglingly fast, more than two times around the earth in one second.
And yet its still going to take your a hundred years to get there.
People will live and die on the ship and only their children will be the ones who see it.
Unless you freeze yourself somehow.
None the less, one hundred years will have passed on earth in the meantime
It takes twenty years for a radio signal to get to you from earth, twenty years for you to answer.
How can you have an empire when you are that far apart?
The speed of light limit makes empire implausible
The colonists simply take whatever government they believe in with them, there's no way to run them from afar.
TheReal_ND wrote: ↑Tue Oct 29, 2019 1:20 am
There will be a way to travel quicker than the speed of light we just have to find it.
There is only a wormhole, you can't exceed 300,000 klicks per second, you could only find a shortcut.