Here's your slick Off Topic tech subject for today!
It looks like those brilliant minds at NASA may have a line on future Interstellar travel options. They have a viable theory for an electromagnetic light-accelerated propulsion system which could get a small unmanned spacecraft to Mars in only 3 days and a manned mission in only a month.
To put it in perspective, with current chemical based propulsion systems it would take a manned craft around 6 months to travel to Mars. Here's a quote with more of the details,
"Electromagnetic acceleration is only limited by the speed of light while chemical systems are limited to the energy of chemical processes,” Lubin recently wrote in a paper about the technology.
Creating such a propulsion system would entail “using a very intense light source to accelerate matter,” Lubin explains. While this may sound simple, designing such a system would nonetheless be hugely challenging. As ScienceAlert explains, building this system could require “a lot of complicated and expensive equipment — such as the ring of superconducting magnets that make up the Large Hadron Collider,” which “hasn’t been easy to scale up to the size required for space travel.”
Source: BGR