If someone were to record a flawless, 4K video of an actual alien walking around or a spaceship flying overhead, people would just think it’s a deep fake.
If someone were to record a flawless, 4K video of an actual alien walking around or a spaceship flying overhead, people would just think it’s a deep fake.
A persistent assumption about advanced interstellar travel is that engine efficiency is monumentally better to the point that the “tyrrany of the rocket equation” is no longer a factor, and extra mass can be carried without absolutely exploding your fuel requirements into absurdity.
If adding 10kg of payload didn’t mean also potentially many times more mass of propellant we’d be sending up more robust spacecraft, no question.
Rocket equation notwithstanding, there is the tyranny of development. Electric motors, rocket engines, ion thrusters… All of these locomotive technologies went through iterations. Even if alien scientist invented a warp drive capable of carrying an infinite amount of mass an infinite distance with no energy, there would still be a development process to implement and integrate that drive into a spaceship.
Technological progress, or the accumulation of knowledge does not happen overnight, it’s built layer by layer.