John J. Bannan
Registered Senior Member
Is there any realistic prospect of interstellar travel on the horizon before I grow old and die?
Travel to another star: How close are we?
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John J. Bannan
Registered Senior Member
That's depressing news - unless I live a lot longer.
Maybe if we could invent a spaceship with an on-board community, that is not afraid to live all their lives traveling to another star, with no hope of comming back or even getting to the star. Thats why I say "cummunity", because there would have to be generations in the spaceship in order to achieve this.
just randomly speaking here
just randomly speaking here
Good idea. However, one of the biggest problems of long term space travel is long term exposure to radiation for humans. The development of the craft would have to protect all aboard from this harsh environment yet still unto itself, not harm those aboard from the materials required for such protection.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
How old are you? If you're a teenager like so many of our members, and if you dodge the major causes of death during your youth (road accidents are in the top three everywhere, even in Africa), you have a very good chance of living almost to the end of this century, and a not insignificant chance of seeing the next one.
As others have pointed out, the technology to launch an interstellar ship is within our grasp. However, as has been inferred, that ship, powered by that technology, will take a couple of millennia to reach the nearest star.
So we have three choices:
- Send an unmanned probe. Even with the lightspeed lag, we can still exchange telemetry with it to receive any interesting data it gathers along the way and to alter its commands. When it finally gets close to the next star it will send back some really nice close-up shots to our distant descendants. It will never take more than a couple of years for a radio message to reach us. This is an attractive choice because it is far cheaper and safer than a manned voyage. But it will be difficult to rouse the interest of the taxpaying public to fund something they won't live to see to fruition; these are the people who don't even care about the heat wave they're bequeathing to their own great-grandchildren. Still, it could easily be funded as a vanity project out of pocket change by Bill Gates or even a far less multi- millionaire.
- Send a generation starship. Hard sci-fi writers have thought this one to death. It will require a crew of several hundred people and it will need to be a genuine city with all the resources and culture of a city, to ensure that when their 400th-generation descendants get there they will still be civilized, high-tech modern humans. That means it will be collossal, something built in orbit probably by hollowing out an asteroid. The materials and the great gobs of fuel will require great gobs of money, a project that only one of the largest governments could tackle. Remaining so close to home will allow a large bandwidth of communication despite the lightspeed lag, so that will help maintain both our interest, and their feeling of still being Earthmen. Unfortunately when they arrive the odds are really small that the star will have a planet on which they can establish a colony, even with bubble cities. So volunteers for this mission will be real one-percenters, people who just want to get the hell off of this planet, the people who 200 years ago would have set out for the Klondike. Those people aren't the kind who build smoothly running communities. This desciption contains a plethora of reasons why this choice won't be the one taken.
- Do nothing. The payoff from the first two choices is minimal, and so long-term that it will be hard to get anyone but Mr. Bannon and a few others like him to vote for the project. Technology will improve. Without hoping for sci-fi to become real and yield a Warp Drive, Star Gate or Worm Hole, even within the limits of Einsteinian physics we should be able to develop ships that can travel faster than the one we could build today. Somewhere on SciForums I either did the math or saw it done, and it's conceivable that using the principles we've already mastered, we could get a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri within John's lifetime, assuming he's nowhere near my age. Powered by a Bussard ramjet, a moon-sized solar sail, or something like that which now only exists in sci-fi stories but the science is valid. However, I still don't see any way that it could be manned. That would just make it too frelling big for anybody to come up with the funding. Whatever it is, it would pass the primitive rocket we launched in 2007 like it was standing still, making anyone who paid for that one feel a little silly.
Now that would truly be a disappointment of cosmic proportions. Frankly I'm not sure I want to be around to experience it.
Fortunately, since I'll be lucky to live another 25 years, I won't have to worry about that. John J. Bannan
Registered Senior Member
What else are you going to explore? Frankly, I am probably closer to your age than a teenager's.
letts ad a 4th option
You already stated that sending a probe is cheaper then a mannend mission,
how abouth we build a verry good space telescope capable to not only detect planets but to also fotograph their surface I doubt we will ever be able to make one big enough to read the small letters of the centurion newspaper but we could make one good enough to tell how much % is covered in water and if there seems to be vegetation, rising Co2 levels artificial gasses etc.
well maybe not as far as you would think neanderthales where pretty intiligent changes are if aliens stay out humanity will get bored and revive them a intiligent species like most proberly their going to terraform mars before they colonise a other planet that already has living conditions.
It's simple, all humans alive will become one, they can then build starships and move throughout the galaxy, oh wait we've got women nevermind
huh?
Or how about this, we get lucky and find intellegent life on alpha centauri. We send our little blinking lite probe over to establish communications; and the xenophobic monstrosities that live there blow it out of the sky and declare jihad on our asses. They capture one of our ships, deduce the location of earth, and send hypervelocity missles down on all population centers.
Or, as you said, all nearby stars may be deserted. Perhaps we could soup up our radio telescopes to the point they could pick up normal TV/radio broadcasts from nearby stars? As it stands they can't.
First you have to kill off all the "debunkers" who keep labeling productive lines of research as "pseudoscience." Then the progress of science will accelerate and we will have star travel in a reasonable time.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
A civilization that advanced will have discovered electromagnetic communication technology way, way more than two years ago, so we will have already been picking up their radio waves across the short distance. The whole reason for SETI is that we haven't intercepted any radio waves from planets orbiting stars close enough to us that they would have been easily detected.
There could be a civilization there that has advanced to where ours was as recently as 200 years ago. But if they haven't yet developed electronics, they're not going anywhere. If our best scientists had discovered an alien starship in 1807, figured out a little of the physics, used it to design an entire new toolset, learned how to use that to decipher some more of the physics, applied that new physics to the design of even more advanced tools, etc. for at least ten iterations of incremental reverse engineering until they really understood how the thing worked, how many years would that have taken? And how many more before they could build one of their own? Meanwhile the aliens are improving their own technology so the weapons we develop using their obsolete stuff will seem pretty primitive and easy to intercept.
An advanced technology will have already betrayed its existence to us. A more primitive one won't be able to do us much damage. I think that particular fear is groundless.
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