gatwick express overpriced overmarketed rubbish always has been, its must be the shortest distance high speed train in the world ? 22 miles as the crow flies 27 miles by road rail prolly somewhere between the two ? say 25 miles and yet somehow it can still take 45 minutes and cost £27.90 open return ? just over 50p a mile on trains seems to be the standard and to be honest cars can beat that now 60mpg car equals 10p per mile at current fuel prices, for a single driver ? multiple occupants and it falls further ? trains need to be more efficient and cheaper than cars how come they fail at this ? yet this franchise train network seems to become increasingly fleecingly expensive at every turn, gatwick is not worthy of a high speed train, in germany they would do a better job of it with their standard train service, a normal limited stopping efficiently run standard service would do fine, and yet the traveller and tourist is unecessarily gouged to get to this horrible airport, if only the tourist knew how short a distance it really was, gatwick is a horrible spread out rubbish airport, half the time the terminal shuttle never works, and involves overcrowded horrendous cattle like crammed bus journey form north to south terminal shuttle service. and the expensive and overmarketed express trains just the icing on the cake of irritation, considering one has to sit and watch them depart but cant get on if ones getting a normal train, its class division at the entire train level. in fact it seems that the trains to here are just a form extra airport tax in general, making the whole gatwick airport seem a worse experience than necessary, cameron we dont need more capacity at airports, we just need better airports, after all more capacity means even laxer border controls which you are failing at. If you want to experience a nice airport arrive in london at heathrow terminal 5 BA now thats a nice airport, reminds you of what air travel can be like, when one isnt pressurised at every turn and hurded like cattle and made to unecessarily stand up queue like egits wherever possible, travel is unecessarily stressfull, from heathrow purchase an oyster you can get back into london the 14.5 miles by tube nice and cheaply, Gatwick Express parent company GoAhead made more than £150 million profit in 2010, and its executive director’s renumeration leapt up from £965,000 in 2009 to an eye-watering £1.4 million in 2010.
Tag Archives: distance
Time for humanity to reach nearest possibly habitable planet
Current Nearest possibly habitable planet other than in our solar system.
A: 20.3 light years away
current fastest record for spacecraft velocity :
A: 150,000 mph
the speed of light : roughly 186,000 miles per second
to get our fastest spacecraft speed into the same units of seconds, as the speed of light : (150,000mph ÷ 60) ÷ 60) =
A: 41.6 miles per second is the fastest an unmanned human spacecraft has ever travelled.
Dividing the speed of light in miles per second, by our fastest speed in miles per second.
186,000 mps ÷ 41.6 mps = we currently are able to travel in space 4471.15 times slower than the speed of light.
so how long would it take to travel one way to a star 20.3 light years away ?
4471.15 × 20.3 light years = 90,764.345 years to reach a solar system only 20.3 light years away at a speed of 150,000 mph ?
ok lets enhance that situation by saying theyre might be a habitable planet in nearby alpha centauri 4.3 light years away were still talking.
4471.15 × 4.3 = 19,225.945 years of travel
to make this alpha visiting journey even a 100 year project would involve travelling at a velocity of 7998 miles per second which with accelerating and breaking slowly would no doubt involve going at some speeds faster than that at some point.
basically at a speed of 28,792,000 mph, anyone fancy manouevering at that speed ? through small but hard particles perhaps, the vaporiastion shield and random rock avoidance technology’s would have to be very very very advanced to say the least, steering manually might be out of the question.
being that the speed of light in mph is 6,69,600,000 mph.
and that in a year light travels 5 trillion 865 billion 696 million miles.
you can kind of see that travelling, just one light year is the kind of distance that means unless the LHC discovers something as yet incomprehensible, life is too separated by space to meet up, outside our solar system with current our understanding of science in relation to speed and distance travelled.
id be interested to hear anyone elses view on this