General / Off-Topic The terrifying thought that interstellar travel just isn't possible.

Dakron Nova

Dakron Nova
I had a disturbing thought, we have become used to technology moving forwards in human history. Sometimes it moves forwards in bursts, sometimes it crawls, and sometimes we see a seemingly steady rate of progress.

But in terms of interstellar travel, what if this just isn't possible. What would that mean for the human race if we couldn't ever get to other stars. The human race is quite young, given the number of extinction events on earth. But I can't help think that there must be intelligent life in other solar systems that must have been around far longer and if interstellar travel is possible would have branched out across our galaxy, and that we would have picked up some evidence by now either by direct communication or by picking up on radio transmissions etc. Is the human race so closely tied to that of our own sun.
 

ozrix84

ozrix84
Interstellar travel is still a fantasy. We better realise that we already live in paradise before throwing other planets on the garbage heap. There isn't any need to travel anywhere anyway, since you have already everything you could possibly want on this planet.
 
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Agarthan

Agarthan
If I told you under the veils of the national security state the tech is 50 years ahead of where you think it is right now, you wouldn't believe it so it doesn't matter.
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Dakron Nova said:
But I can't help think that there must be intelligent life in other solar systems that must have been around far longer and if interstellar travel is possible would have branched out across our galaxy, and that we would have picked up some evidence by now either by direct communication or by picking up on radio transmissions etc.
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You seem to not fully grasp just how much space and time there is. Even advanced alien life exists in our galaxy (rather than any of the billions of other galaxies), and even if they exist today, and even if we knew *exactly* where to look, we probably wouldn't be able to detect them. Interstellar travel should not be a major problem in and of itself by the way. Making it practically applicable and affordable however is something quite different, and due to the relatively of time I don't see gigantic space empires as in ED ever emerging.
 

Dalkeith

Dalkeith
Interstellar travel looks very very difficult also suggests it would take tens of thousands of years. I suspect that what is more likely is concentrated genetic libraries sent out in every direction much like seeds in the wind by dandelions.

I suspect it will be thousands of years before we are forward looking enough to even consider this as even this would be a tremendous undertaking.

Assuming the speed of light is a maximum (lets face it Einstein keeps being proved right rather than wrong) I'm sure we will eventually figure out how to make moving planets / asteroids and then speed them up to 3/4 the speed of light at least. Again that's going to take tens of thousands of years and it will be one way tickets with success coming down to luck as much as anything else.

If we can stay alive I reckon we will work something out though.
 
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medwyn

M
The research of the big is going on with examining the very small.
Quantum mechanincs has some very firm standpoints but they tend to rush and generalize their results too soon.
The speed of light is an interesting treshold if we stay Newtonian, other than that it's the tissue of time and space which is now aimed to be revisited (actually Einstein had some hard moments with these and especially with Bohr and Heisenberg to check on the continuity issue).
All on the go, maybe not in this life or the next of ours but getting there steadily :)
 
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Lunchmoney

Lunchmoney
ozrix84 said:
Interstellar travel is still a fantasy. We better realise that we already live in paradise before throwing other planets on the garbage heap. There isn't any need to travel anywhere anyway, since you have already everything you could possibly want on this planet.
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Yes, however eventually the sun will explode and the Earth will be no more. Either we learn how to leave this system, as a race, or we perish.
 

ozrix84

ozrix84
Lunchmoney said:
Yes, however eventually the sun will explode and the Earth will be no more. Either we learn how to leave this system, as a race, or we perish.
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Why do you bother? If it is true, it's gonna happen billions of years into the future. A safer bet is that we will destroy ourselves long before then. Back in the 70's, it took only 10 days after the australian oil crisis began for the first shot to be fired. That gives you an indication at where we stand now.
 
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Alex Brentnall

Alex Brentnall
Resources and living space easy to find within 1 or two interstellar jumps so why would aliens want dominion over everything when they have more than enough...

I see no reason why any civilisation would want to branch out across the entire galaxy except for scientific reasons. Even with exponential exploration growth rate as the population increases it would still take millennia to explore the constantly changing universe.
 
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ste

S
I would guess its physically impossible. I think the game shows you that on how impossibly fast you need to travel to get anywhere and still how long it takes.
 

Ben Parry

Ben Parry
I think there's a big gap in difficulty between the kind of interstellar travel we want - empire, commerce, or at least a galactic culture - and the kind that would let humanity outlive the death of the sun - sub-lightspeed seeds, arks, etc that would probably arrive and unpack long after everyone back here were dead. I do wonder whether a species as short-lived and fickle as ours is equipped for making plans on a million/billion year timescale.
 

Gregstrom

G
Technically, the technology required for interstellar travel already exists - see the 1950s Orion programme for details. The propulsion method is considered politically undesirable, and the travel time might be measured in generations.
 

WhosYourDaddyNow

WhosYourDaddyNow
Dakron Nova said:
I had a disturbing thought, we have become used to technology moving forwards in human history. Sometimes it moves forwards in bursts, sometimes it crawls, and sometimes we see a seemingly steady rate of progress.

But in terms of interstellar travel, what if this just isn't possible. What would that mean for the human race if we couldn't ever get to other stars. The human race is quite young, given the number of extinction events on earth. But I can't help think that there must be intelligent life in other solar systems that must have been around far longer and if interstellar travel is possible would have branched out across our galaxy, and that we would have picked up some evidence by now either by direct communication or by picking up on radio transmissions etc. Is the human race so closely tied to that of our own sun.
Click to expand...

If wormholes are not the answer (therefore Gen. Relativity doesn't work exactly as we think it does) for faster-than-light travel through bending spacetime itself then it will be nearly impossible for a being of our nature that lives ~ 80 years on average to travel even relatively small cosmic distances.

But there is another possibility: Why do we have to live for only a few decades? We have already created machines that do not require oxygen and food and whose bodies deteriorate much slower with time. So if OUR bodies cannot travel these distances in suspended animation or in some other way, then we could do the next best thing: upload our consciousness/brains/memories/thought patterns into a machine that is not so fragile as the human body.
It would still take decades to travel from one star system to the next, but that wouldn't be such a big percentage of our lifespan.
 
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