In space, although the cosmic gas is very dispersed and we talk about the cosmic vacuum, it is not really empty, if you have a ship that moves almost at the speed of light you are going to have a very big problem, because you are going to end up having a pressure wave in front of the ship product of the molecules and atoms that you encounter along the way and that can be very dangerous according to a study published in 2016.
The study in question is titled “the interaction of relativistic spacecraft with the Interstellar medium”, relativistic spacecraft refers to those spacecraft that reach speeds close to light, in that article it was concluded that the The impact of dust and gas particles scattered throughout space would end up destroying a spacecraft traveling at 20% of the speed of light; only 20% of the speed of light was considered a normal spacecraft.
By the way, the physicist Avil Loeb was a co-author of the study. He became more famous in the media for the topic of Oumuamua since he defended that it was the rest of a solar sail, the rest of extraterrestrial technology has strange things. Avil Loeb, I admit it , but he is a working machine and has done a lot of work and research, he is passionate and I give credit to the passionate people who work, even though sometimes they say things that seem crazy.
So in the future, if we do not find some alternative method, interstellar ships should be highly armored even for speeds that do not even reach a quarter of the speed of Light. However, if a recently discovered interstellar tunnel is used, the trip would be much easier, since you would have much less resistance from the Interstellar medium.
The calculation is that in that interstellar tunnel there is an average of about three atoms for the equivalent of approximately two cans of soda, that may seem almost nothing, but clearly to think, a ship like the StarShip that is 9 meters in diameter and the calculation was that in the distance traveled by one second of light you ended up accumulating the impact of approximately two trillion atoms.
They would be hydrogen atoms, almost all of them are the least dense, but still, that impact is brutal, keeping in mind that any atom, any molecule that travels close to the speed of light, because the speed of light is something with mass. It cannot travel, anything that travels close to the speed of light reaches an energy almost similar to its energy value, that is, it would have an atomic value.
Then you would have the impact in one second every second of that trip that would take more than 4 years to reach the nearest star every second of that trip, an impact on your ship with a capacity of at least almost half a bomb. atomic bomb constantly, imagine the protection shield you have to have, that is the problem of traveling at speeds close to light, perhaps we can invent some other alternative method
It would be necessary to build a deflector like the Enterprise ship because every second your spaceship sweeps away tens of millions of cubic meters of space, and that hits constantly and that without taking into account that you might find on that trip something bigger than a simple atom, there are also particles of dust and nano meteorite the size of a grain of sand, a grain of sand at almost the speed of light and goodbye the ship you need a good shield.
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