Quote:
Originally Posted by (E)
There may be opportunities to hitch a ride on a passing chunk of reaction mass. A hypothetical chunk of ice might heading in roughly the right direction. Other once in a thousand year occurances might be exploited as well. A wandering planet sized object might have the resources to support a population for quite a long time.
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The problem is that they take a
very long time to travel between star systems, of the order of one light-year every 20,000 years. You're talking about setting up a permanent colony on an interstellar object, which has to be a closed cycle for everything except what you can replenish from the object. Something will go wrong over the next half-million years.
Meaningfully travelling between stars on a human timescale needs much higher speeds.