I know enough physics to say no Even inter-Stellar is out of our reach (without generation ship).
We have zero reason to believe in an effective way to build wormhole, jump gates or anything similar. Even high energy cosmic rays have a limited range (due to collision with photons) which is a strong clue that there is no shortcut in space
I think the closest we will come is detecting radio signals from another species. But like obviously 2 way communication would be almost impossible due to sheer distance.
Sadly the universe is filled with enough random radio radiation that its unlikely any coherent signal is going to travel more than a few light years. With our current technology there could be an identical version of earth around the nearest star and we probably couldn't detect it.
The signal isn't destroyed though. So one could argue that isolating it in the noise is doable with enough math.
Obviously the real limit is still distance since we'd need a radio dish like the size of earths orbit or something to pick up a signal weakened from many lightyears away.
In theory yes... but the oldest frozen specimen of humans we've found is only a few thousand years old. We don't even know if long term cryogenic reanimation is possible.
Assuming the ship travels at 10x our current capabilities we're still looking at ~8,000 years to reach our closest stellar neighbour at only 5 lightyears away.
We'll still run into the same assumption/problem; shelf life.
Consider how memories work. Every time you remember something, your brain alters that memory slightly. Even looking at how the brain parses the data through several cortex (visual etc) implies that consciousness is potentially inseparable from the components of the brain. In this video about Cockatoo intelligence they speculate that birds brain anatomy causes them to think in ways that seem limited to us.
Basically we don't even know if its possible to preserve human consciousness for that long. Similar to cryogenics we have to question if reanimation is even fundamentally possible after centuries.
Then take the solar system with us. Strap a solar thruster to the sun, and off EVERYTHING goes. It's a byproduct of figuring out starlifting, and that buys us all the time in the universe, at least till we run out of Hydrogen and Helium to shove into the sun as fuel, but there's literally entire solar systems worth of that stuff hanging around in deep space. Like 72 solar masses per cubic light year of "empty" space.
So like if you visualize how the sun/planets actually move around the milky way. It seems plausible to focus solar flares to alter our trajectory. We'd still be stuck in the whirlpool but we could change lanes.
I think that you might think that the flares are a whole lot bigger than they actually are, or that the sun is far less massive than it actually is. You'd need a LOT more energy than those puny flares to move the sun.
The very slow is the issue. Assuming we can reach 10-20% of c, we can reach a couple of nearby stars in 200 years (Wikipedia gives me 50 stars with 30 ly).
200 years is roughly the time from the Napoleonic era from today (Taking an Euro reference). Do you remember what your ancestor were doing during Napoleon Russian campaign or when US purchased Louisiana?
Society changed massively since Napoleon. Over 200 years the society culture of a generation ship would also drastically diverge from ours. Moreover, I can't think of many piece of technology which can keep working for 200 years without a few massive overall.
Then just acceplerate the sun. If we can figure out starlifting, we have to do something with the excess gas and heat. Use that to make a solar thruster. Everything in the solar system will follow the sun, so now we have 1.8 generational ships called The Earth, and Venus.
This would also give us some protection against relativistic weapons, since we could make minor course corrections and still travel in the overall same direction.
Sort of - but there is no reason to think we will ever be able to make something that won't break. Even intersellar is questionable just because the odds of the ship breaking in the time needed are too high.
Fuck it, let's assume we can build jump gates.
Let's say they're just big enough to send a tiny unmanned drone through.
I hop into my space ship and accelerate with a conventional engine to 86% of light speed.
No violation of physics needed, just shitloads of energy.
I fly to another star, which takes 10 years from earth's point of view.
Due to time dilation at 86% light speed, time in my space ship passes half as fast as on earth.
If someone on earth had a strong enough telescope, they could look at a clock on my ship and see that it ticks half as fast as the clocks on earth.
But in my frame of reference, earth moves away from me at 86% light speed.
So if I look at earth through a telescope, I see that the clocks on earth tick half as fast as mine.
There isn't a universal time. Time is always relative to speed and this is no problem when the reference frames are separated.
I arrive at the star, after 5 years have passed on earth.
I activate a jump gate and send the drone through with a message. It arrives on earth instantly, 5 years after I left.
But from their reference frame, they could see my clock ticking only half as fast as theirs.
After earth's 5 years, only 2.5 years have passed for the space ship they see.
They activate their jump gate and send the drone back with a reply.
It arrives instantly at the star, 7.5 years before my space ship gets there.
This is why FTL travel isn't and will never be possible. Even with tricks like jump gates or wormholes, it creates time paradoxes.
That's not how it works. You're correct when you say that from your point of view it's Earth's clock going half speed and from Earth's point of view it's your clock going half speed while you're traveling away from Earth (or Earth is traveling away from you, both are equally valid), but that's only true as long as the distance between you and Earth continues to increase at 86% of the speed of light. As you decelerate at your destination your reference frame continuously changes until you're back in the same frame as Earth (or nearly so, we can assume the two stars aren't exactly maintaining their relative positions). While you're decelerating, from your perspective Earth's clock speeds up and goes faster than yours, how much is determined by your rate of change in relative velocity. Earth's reference frame isn't changing (ignoring movement around the sun, galactic center, the great attractor, etc.), so the Earth's perspective on your clock doesn't change, the Earth sees your clock gradually speed up as you "slow down" until it's going the same rate, but never faster. So once you're back in the Earth's reference frame both you and the Earth will agree that your clock advanced 5 years while Earth's clock (and your destination's clock, adjusted for any relative movement between it and Earth) advanced 10 years. This assumes a constant 86% light speed and ignores the time accelerating at departure and arrival so let's assume very fast acceleration so it doesn't change more than a couple days.
Edit: this is all completely ignoring gravity based time dilation from the spaceship climbing out of Sol's well and going down the destination's well and only considers velocity based time dilation. It would be more correct if you only considered two spaceships in a void where one accelerates to relativistic speeds and then accelerates back into the reference frame of the other.
Assuming a mechanism exists that changes the universe from being singly connected to multiply connected (i.e., wormholes exist), it is possible to have wormholes permitting faster-than-light travel without time paradoxes, though some additional restrictions may apply.
We have already shown that wormholes connect across both space and time, so that a trip between star systems could take you hundreds of years into the future, and the return trip takes you hundreds of years back in time. And this is even before we throw in how time slips between planets when considering relativistic time dilation due to different speeds and gravitational potentials.
Fortunately, all the weirdness of different time rates and going backward and forward in time can be ignored by the average person. This is because you never need to go from one world to another, or back, across the vast gulfs of interstellar space. You just take the wormhole between them. All you ever need to worry about is the coordinate frame that goes across the wormhole. When considering this reference frame, you're not hopping all over the place in time. If it takes ten minutes to cross the wormhole between the two planets, when you get to your destination world the clocks will read ten minutes later than they did when you left your departure world. By coordinating their time-keeping across the wormhole network, all of the worlds of the network can agree on a common time to coordinate their activities. This is all travelers ever need to worry about, and they can then ignore all the relativistic weirdness. Your network engineers will still need to keep track of relative time drift and how close a given configuration is getting to a time loop. But unless your protagonist is a network engineer, they can just ignore all that stuff. And, as an author, so can you! Assume your engineers are competent, you have good regulatory bodies and standards institutions, and don't worry about any of this "time travel" that doesn't actually let you cause paradoxes.
Strap a solar thruster to the sun, and the Earth and Venus can be used as generational ships. The rest of the solar system will follow the sun. The starlifting array needed to power the thruster will keep the sun "young." There's more than enough Hydrogen and Helium to dump in as fuel.
Venus is a fixer upper, but it just needs several oceans worth of water ice, and some cyanobactera flung at it to cool it down. Maybe we can look into diverting some comets into Venus, I dunno.
Isn't Venus's atmosphere dense? If so, you could just float a Bespin-like Cloud City on a convenient layer of the atmosphere to avoid the boiling temperatures below and the crushing weight of the air...
You could, or you can add water and cyanobactera. Venus's atmosphere is pretty close to what ours was minus the water and cyanobactera when the planet mostly coole d off after the collision with Theia.
If it takes thousands of years, monitoring air density can probably give you at least a couple centuries heads-up, like "we expect in 150 years from now that the atmosphere will thin to the point our cities lose buoyancy. That gives us approximately five generations to think of a solution."
Maybe land in the water that you plan to introduce? By the way, where's that coming from?
The solution would be to evacuate back to Earth, because the surface still would be hostile to human life. Or don't waste the resources, and have some patience.
Why do you say wormholes are impossible? We don't need a reason to believe it, because what we do or don't believe doesn't change whether or not something is possible.
Humans didn't have a reason to believe in electricity until they did. Humans didn't have a reason to believe in computers until they did. Humans didn't have a reason to believe in gravity, nuclear energy, relativity, or quantum mechanics until they did. Same deal for germs, internet, cell phones, the list goes on.
Point is, until someone solves Unified Field Theory and unless it definitively proves that wormholes, alternate dimensions, and parallel universes are fundamentally impossible, we can't claim to know what isn't possible a hundred or a thousand years from now.
We might not have a particular reason to believe, but we don't have any reason to disbelieve, either.
Bright flashes and jagged bolts of light doesn't necessarily lead one to intuitively believe "Oh, look, there's a source of energy in the sky which can somehow be generated and harnessed to power machines and light bulbs."
We think that way because we have the scientific knowledge of what it is and how it works, but that's all retrospective. Prior to the discovery of electricity as a concept, lightning simply appeared to be some divine weapon wielded by angry gods. Even atheists of the early-Enlightenment era wouldn't have understood it.
That's like saying "Humans have observed fire since prehistoric times, so they must have understood chemical bonds and exothermic reactions." It simply doesn't apply.
Why? Do you genuinely believe we won't solve some kind of suspended animation / cryonics in the next 10000 years, to be able to sleep as your ship takes 300 years to go to another star?
I wondered why I didn't remember a mini series to exist - then saw its Rotten Tomato rating...
So perhaps better watch the film instead.
It has a few 60s movie moments, but overall was really fun to watch, with most of the science being surprisingly solid, given its age.
Humans? Nope. Some kind of actual AGI that doesn’t care about long time scales and can be lashed to a metal rich asteroid and flung out of the solar system? Still probably not, but it could maybe make it to some interesting intra-galactic destinations.
This is basically the foundation for Stanislaw Lem's book The Cyberiad. What if robots built robots that write poetry and fight robotic dragons and travel the stars.
I was about to pedantically attack the term "underage kids," but then I realized how many juvenile adults there are out there and decided it was valid.
Unfortunately, the odds seem to be favoring the technofeudalism. But you never know, maybe a catastrophic breakdown of society could lead to a more enlightened civilization generations later...
Cloud Atlas was an interesting film about how things like this can change over time on a grand scale.
Stars yes, voyager is carrying a lot of that info already! But the delta between stars and galaxies is monumental. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. The time scales aren't even something we can grasp.
Greg Egan's Diaspora sets out how humanity could explore the galaxy and even the multiverse, which if you can't be bothered reading consists of:
Upload conciousness into computers, leave physical bodies.
Miniaturise computers until we have spaceships in the grams/nano grams
As we're no longer connected to time we can build massive solar system sized technologies, built by nanotech, that sure could take hundreds of years to build but in our virtual realms we could easily sleep.
Use Lasers to propel our nanogram spaceships to 90% light speed. Even then for the astronauts, time is almost nothing (time goes slower the faster you go). A trip across the galaxy would feel like mere weeks to you. We could explore the universe as immortals.
At this point we should have a pretty good understanding of dark matter/energy and how to move between universes (the multiverse, depending if you accept it as a base for explaining non locality)
Which would allow us become eternal.
In the here and now the only way to travel to another system with our current tech is via nuclear pulse engines.
Basically you build a large spaceship. Stick it on massive shock absorbers which are in turn connected to a metre plus thick steel plate.
Cut small hole in the middle. Have a door that opens closes.
Eject 1kt explosive device out door. Repeat 500x till you get to orbit.
Basically you could get a spaceship up to very high speed with nuclear pulse engines to turn a multi hundred year journey into less then 100 years.
That said the biggest problem with interstellar journeys is that our material science and manufacturing tolerances are pretty shit. Essentially all of the air will leak out through the metal skin of the spaceship.
I still think carving put an asteroid, sticking engine on it (see nuclear pulse engines) , covering it in ice and water will solve the problems radiation shielding, losing critical gases and provide ample fuel and water for a very long journey.
The big problem is energy. If we had almost infinite energy we could accelerate to a significant fraction of the speed of light at a leasurely 9.81 m/s² in about a year. The travel at almost lightspeed would feel instantaneous for us. Add another year to decelerate at the same rate. We could reach any point in the visible universe in 2 years.
Our destination would just be drastically different from what we observed, depending on how far away it was.
Oh, and apart from the tiny energy problem cosmic radiation will probably destroy our spaceship. I bet at relativistic speeds you'd even get enough neutrino collisions to make them a problem.
We could reach any point in the visible universe in 2 years.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
The observable universe is a spherical region of the universe consisting of all matter that can be observed from Earth; The radius of this region is about 14.26 gigaparsecs (46.5 billion light-years or 4.40×1026 m).
Traveling at the speed of light from earth to the edge of the visible Universe, would take around 23 billion years.
Technically the visible universe extends only about 13 billion light years from us. We can just calculate where that stuff is now because of expansion. And as I wrote the area we're aiming for will surely change drastically the further away it is.
These journeys wouldn't take billions of years for someone traveling near light speed because for them the lengths would shrink down so much that they'd be negligible. Of course once they had slowed down those billions of years will have gone by for everything outside the space ship. So it's not good for missions where you want to return home to your family afterwards.
No, I genuinely don't believe it will. I don't think the human race will ever reach another star, though I do believe it could be possible if we avoided going extinct for a few thousand years.
Another galaxy? No chance, not unless we figure out FTL, which I don't believe is likely. The only FTL I've heard of that might be possible is the Alcubierre drive, but it relies on things that are so exotic, it's likely impossible to create one.
With our current understanding of physics it is impossible. Sucks, I love sci fi but they all rely on inventing some magic machine to make it possible.
And to be clear, when you occasionally read about someone saying it’s not impossible……. That’s late night bs sessions on illicit substances. Usually the article is really “from our understanding of physics we have this math equation where we can actually enter values and the equation still gives a result, given a list of impossible prerequisites.
What form it will take is the question. FTL, not likely but long ago we didn't believe in breaking the speed of sound. Generation ships, solar sails, ion drives, folding spacetime, it will happen somehow if we survive as a species.
There is another layer. You are not only trying to travel through space, but also time.
We know the formula: s^2 = (ct)^2 - d^2
s: spacetime distance/interval (invariant no matter the observer)
c: speed of light
t: time
d: coordinate in 3D space
Now, let’s say we have 2 travelers who need to meet at a certain place.
Traveler A is 1 spacetime distance unit away
Traveler B is 2 spacetime distance units away.
If they are both at the same age when they started the journey, B would be younger than A even though A is closer to the destination than B! Because B experienced more time dilation, and A needs to either wait at the destination, or travel slower.
So to meet each other at a relatively same age, B needs to travel slower on purpose, or A can take a detour.
Millions of years become meaningless, people who have no spaceships would be a death sentence. They would never see loved ones again. So in a sense, enormous ships that can travel at near the speed of light are a norm for that type of civilization.
We are unfortunately at a very early time of the universe. If we are born later, we could probably see other civilizations travel to us :D
Everyone here saying confidently "no" hasn't kept track of science over the last several thousand years. There have been hundreds/thousands of things that have been "that is impossible" that we simply didn't have the knowledge for to be able to do.
200 years ago you would have been laughed at for thinking man could ever take to the skies, and now flying is a boring tedious thing for us.
75 years ago the idea of carrying a computer in your pocket with thousands of times the sum of the entire compute availability in the world back then would have been scoffed at, and people would have told you it's impossible. Now we use it to post on forums like this like it's nothing.
Both are examples of "it's impossible, the science says so", but that's the neat thing about science. We learn new things every day. Our thoughts change, you don't "believe" in science, you only learn new things.
So is it impossible? I think it's incredibly small-minded and dare I even say arrogant to say it's impossible. How do we know what will be discovered tomorrow, or 100 years from now, or 1000 years from now? We have absolutely no idea what will be possible then. With our current technology? Absolutely not. In 400 years? Who knows someone may be standing in line at security and see a meme making fun of us for thinking it was impossible.
Speed of light limitation. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. Even if someone debunks special relativity and finds you could go faster than light, you would be moving so fast relative to cosmic dust particles that it would destroy the ship. So, either way, you cannot practically go faster than the speed of light.
The only way we could have intergalactic travel is a one-way trip that humanity here on earth would be long gone by the time it reached its destination so we could never know if it succeeded or not.
But there are so many problems with a generation ship going that far, and no, none of the fun sci fi ways of travel are possible.
Bringing this back to reality, I can definitely see exploring more of the solar system and I can see making use of resources on hand for bulk consumables like fuel, oxygen, water, housing (we’ll have to to make it work). But consider how many things it would take to actually be independent of earth and how large the colony needs to be. Remote bases in our inner solar system can get away with that, but you can’t leave the solar system and expect to rely on any resupplies from earth.
Even if you could achieve the travel time to visit another star system and build a generation ship with enough supplies of everything and that could function that long, how would you survive without a preexisting functional colony of millions of people? Just start with the thousands of types of plastics we use every day and imagine trying to support that for a few people, without oil to drill or other organic chemicals to mine, and without a full scale chemical industry
I hope we come up with warp drive or something crazy, but technically I don’t see any way this happens.
But if we could, we would ruin wherever we find habitable, and it would be the impetus for us to totally trash the Earth because suddenly it’s disposable and we can just go to Elysium or whatever other place.
We’d find planets and just fill them with toxic waste factories, because who cares, “we” (the rich) don’t have to live there.
We’d take visa scams to the extreme, forcing people into slavery on planets they could never escape from, and quash uprisings with bombs or stranding the people there.
It's already possible in a "does it violate the laws of physics or not" sense, the real question is, will anyone that has the requisite resources to do it actually want to.
It would take such an incredibly long time (as in, millions of years or longer for the very closest galaxies) that anyone and any organization sending out such an expedition isn't going to get any meaningful return on their investment, so it would only bring a benefit to whoever was on the "ship" when it arrived. As such, to even have a motive for doing this, you either need a society that does things for the benefit of extremely distant descends, or which is extremely long lived and patient.
As to how you would actually do it, my guess (obviously though, the guess of someone from a society that lacks the technology to do a thing is likely to be wrong about how it later is done) would be that one would use a hypothetical type of structure called a stellar engine
These are similar to the "dyson spheres" that science fiction sometimes likes to talk about (usually inaccurately to the actual concept but still), except that they would use the energy emitted by a star, or its mass, to do some particular task, like propel the star in a given direction.
Doing this, your "ship" is actually an entire solar system. Getting that up to speed could take millions of years even for the most efficient designs, and obviously requires an economy capable of building stuff at incredible scales, and having an entire star spare to use for the trip. However, you're going to be taking that kind of time anyway, and so you're probably going to need an entire self contained civilization to have a hope of keeping things running that long, and literal worlds worth of raw materials. There's not much else that even theoretically has enough fuel to move all that to notable fractions of lightspeed. Since there's little point to going to live in another galaxy if there are still unclaimed places to go within your own, a whole star system is probably a relatively small expense for the implied size of civilization that would even want to try to sebd such an expedition. Galaxies contain a huge number of them after all.
While this is all obviously far beyond us now, both in technology and sheer economic scale, there's nothing physically impossible about it, and at least some logical motive (the future resources of a galaxy for one's descendants, if alien life is rare enough for uninhabited galaxies to exist). Given that and just how huge the universe is, I'd actually be willing to bet that somewhere there is someone or something doing this, and that if humans last long enough and keep advancing our technology and infrastructure all the while, some descendant of our species might, though they'd probably seem pretty alien to us by the time it took to reach that point.
Imagine humanity finds a cheap way to jump to another star system. In time all star systems in the galaxy are populated. The next frontier would be jumping to another galaxy and, given the previous experience in interstellar jumps, intergalactic jumps would be only an upgrade.
Theoretically we could visit things thousands/millions of light years away within a human lifespan, but the necessary energy to do so is just infeasible. You'd have to spend half the energy slowing down at your destination so you'd need all that energy onboard. Just not happening IMO. As a bonus you'd basically also be inventing a time machine (forward only)
Interstellar travel? Like to the nearest star systems? Maybe. In the far future. But not intergalactic. Andromeda is the closest galaxy and it's 2.5 MILLION light years away....
I think it's just an engineering and more likely a desire problem right now. It is expensive to get things into orbit and we just haven't studied what other problems will arise.
If you mean faster than light speed, there is some intriguing things in physics but with our current understanding no we cannot move massive objects faster than light.
There are still a lot of gaps in our understanding though so perhaps we will learn that it isn't impossible.
If we weren't busy squabbling like neanderthals about who has a bigger stick and joined together we could have already come to some form of interplanetary travel and possibly colonization of other planets in the solar system but we're too busy fighting over this tiny speck of space dust to focus on anything else.
No, but yes- of course assuming humanity continues in a meaningful way. I mean technically we are already travelers- we're already traveling through space at high speed.. https://cosmic-odometer.vercel.app/
In terms of lightspeed travel, I think no, and definitely not sci-fi warp tech, BUT generational ships where people live and continue to reproduce over gigantic time scales could. If a ship had enough space, ecosystem of its own, etc- we could continue at "sub light" travel pretty much indefinitely without any ludicrous scientific advances beyond radiation shielding, etc.
Again though, that's a long, LONG way off and would require we stop trying so hard to off ourselves and the lovely little blue marble we currently traverse life on.
With a generational ship and a shield and a way of blocking cosmic rays I think it will eventually be possible, but take a very long time. I don't believe light speed will ever be possible, but going near light speed starts slowing down time a whole bunch for those on board the ships. So if for instance we came up with some trickery to get up to 99% the speed of light and wanted to go to a planet one galaxy over that's 25,000 light years away, in theory the ship and the people in it would get there in about 1200 years. Even though it would be like 25,000 years for anyone who wasn't on the ship. At 99.999% it would only take what would seem like about 115 years on the ship.
I'm not going to say that's flat out impossible that it could happen but we'd have to find one hell of a way to cheat the system.
Alternatively, I think it will come about (if humans don't kill ourselves off) that a person can "live forever" in one form or another. If we get to that point then pesky things like travel time and atmospheres and such will be much less an issue. I then wonder how long a person would want to be around before they decided they'd rather "self terminate".
I mean Im not even sure we will have planetary much less intergalactic. I mean like one offs sending people to some other planet. Im not sure that counts anymore than voyager would for interstellar. I mean I do think about it. Intergalactic, planetary, planetary, intergalactic.
I think it is more a question of will we make it that far. If so then it should be possible but I don't expect it would be the norm and likely single way. Communication back home would be almost pointless due to the distance.
Perhaps it will be like the Rimworld lore. FTL is never achieved, civilisations are unable to remain stable once communication takes more than a few years or decades between planets as culture drifts over time. This doesn't prevent intergalactic travel but it does make it a one way colonisation mission.
Well I wouldn't say it's completely impossible. A lot of technology exists that would have been seen as impossible in the past. But I think intergalactic travel is extremely unlikely. I can't imagine that we will ever create ways for the human body to withstand long distance travel as portrayed in shows like Star Trek
At least not casually; flying between star systems at will, faster than light between star systems, etc...
I'm sure at some point, if scientists confirm the habitibility of a world orbiting a star relatively nearby, some group or other would probably get a Generation Ship concept going and head out. Musk or some other fucking billionaire looking for a world to conquer. So technically that is interstellar travel, but not really as it's just a one way point to point, not a taxi service.
We have some huge hurdles to solve before we get there. Earth is on the fast track to developing permanent Kessler syndrome. As for just reaching Mars, whoever arrives, the astronauts might be too weak physically to even stand up. There was alot of talk about asteroid mining, but it turns out these asteroids are literally the junkyards of space. Not to imply all asteroids are useless star system leftovers. Its far too soon to be discussing interstellar travel.
My earlier comment regards the effects of space on the body. Going from zero gravity to 1G causes muscle degeneration. The people landing are likely to be overwhelmed after a single space traversal.
If you are talking about the zero G in the travel to Jupiter, it can be partially avoided by sending a wheel spaceship. At least until the spaceships can accelerate half of the travel at 1 G and decelerate at 1 G the other half.
We can't even make radio waves that travel that far. Our best radio telescopes focused on something near that we suspect might have life don't have enough power for us to think they can be received by an arbitrarily advanced civilization on the other end (assuming there is that happens to be listening when the signals arrive). And that is stars in our own subarm of the milky way.
People get really disappointed when they learn that there could be an identical version of earth complete with humans and television orbiting around the nearest stars and we wouldn't be able to detect them with our current monitoring abilities due to the amount of interference in space.
Other stars are at least a thousand times as far as distant planets, but other galaxies are only about 4 or so galaxy-widths away on average. So if distant interstellar travel is possible, then intergalactic travel is just a hard trip away. The problem is that statement continges on a very large "if".
Galaxies are closer together relative to their size than stars; but they're still a few orders of magnitude farther apart than this.
The scale I've seen is: If the sun were the size of a ping pong ball, the next nearest star would be hundreds of miles away. But if the Milky Way were the size of a CD, Andromeda would be on the other side of the room.
We could maybe eventually load up multiple asteroids with building materials, frozen embryos, a self-healing nanobot factory, blueprints for building artificial breeding chambers and humanoid robots, controlled by an AGI to serve as educators, and send them off to nearby stars.
Upon arrival on suitable planets, the systems wake up and jump-start colonies.
After several hundred or thousand years of development, those colonies could build their own seeder asteroids, kicking off an exponential progress.
If every colony in turn colonizes 4 new systems within 10,000 years, we could theoretically colonize every suitable star system in the Galaxy after 200,000 years. At a very reasonable ~0.1% of light speed.
But we would have zero control over the colonies, no shared culture, no trade, hardly any meaningful communication. So there would be very little benefit to it, and knowing human nature, a war of total annihilation would be likely as soon as suitable planets get scarce.
Intergalactic travel will never be possible for humans.
The nearest galaxy is 2.537.000 light years away. By the time we get there, we wouldn't be humans anymore.
I hold that the physics this world's establishment holds-to is obviously flatland "physics", as it doesn't include mind/will, and you CAN'T have real physics, if you're handwaving & saying "oh, but those phenomena aren't really real". The fact that .. Jacob? ( see Curt Jaimungal's videos, on yt ) discovered that the difference between statistical-probability theory vs quantum-probability theory, is that quantum-probability includes knowing. Knowing, aka "information", as physicists call it, is physics-real. Pretending that information is real, but knowing isn't, is .. defective. Pretending that knowing is real but mind isn't real, is absolutely shameless. Ideological-prejudice is what's really going on. Look for the "Non-Markovian" probability video, & you'll see it spelt out plain as day: knowing is physics-required.
The fundamental-technology should be possible, but the durations might be absurd.
the way it works is this:
Speed-of-light-limitation is WITHIN a given SPACE.
So, if you've got time & multiple different 3D-spaces ( think leaves on a branch: each leaf being a 3D-space ), then the speed-of-light-limitation in EACH is limited-to limiting speeds in THAT space:
There isn't any speed-limit BETWEEN spaces, see?
So, "rotating" from another space into OUR space, then moving 100km within our space, then "rotating" back into their space, means you've now moved 3 parsecs..
Simply because our 3D-space & their 3D-space don't happen to be at the same "angle" to the universe's underlying-structure..
then travel which is simultaneously slower ( from the perspective of the traveler ) & faster ( from the perspective of they got from point A to point B faster than light within this space could have done ) becomes doable.
So, it'd be required to 1. know the underlying-structure of the universe, 2. be able to engage a "rotation" from our 3D-space to another one, intentionally, & make it be one that is travel-useful ( that may not be possible ), & then 3. do that rotation, move within that other space, & then "rotate" back into our space, at a drastically-different location.
All that'd be required is for the "rotation" to remove our having inertia/mass within this 3D-space for it to be useful, but more-complete "rotation" may be required for accomplishing real interstellar travel.
IF you go look for Susskind's "Time as a Fractal Flow" video, on yt, watch it to the end, as the lightbulb goes on at the end, mentally..
but consider the implications of that:
IF time is fractal, THEN space must also be, since they're part of the same 4D thing.
NOBODY in physics is dealing with it that way, ttbomk.
& if space is fractal, then it simultaneously is, & isn't, there, & that may be usable.
( it's there from within it, but it can be not-there from the perspective of other 3D-spaces which simply don't "see" it: because each is only fractionally-dimensional, they can all be crammed into some kind of superspace, without colliding with each-other )
Anyways, this is just how the shape of it feels, & as I figure-out more, this understanding gets revised, but that's the fundamental sense of it.
There are .. thousands? of 3D-spaces in this universe, & we're in 1 of them.
Electromagnetism is limited to within a 3D-space, but gravity isn't: it diffuses throughout them all.
"Dark Matter" is just conventional matter in other 3D-spaces which are .. how to say that .. "coincident" with our 3D-space, but the falsifying-quotes are important: their 3D-space & ours are not-colliding, they are each fractional-dimension/fractals.
So, we've got "Dark Matter" galaxies simply because there isn't any matter in OUR 3D-space, but in other 3D-spaces which are coinciding with ours, without colliding, there ARE actual-matter galaxies, & their gravity is present, weakly, in our 3D-space ( I'm presuming that gravity is weaker between-3D-spaces, that may not be true, or if it is true, it may be .. anywhere from slightly-weaker to orders-of-magnitude weaker )
We've got a couple diffuse galaxies with NO "Dark Matter", simply because there's matter in OUR 3D-space, but not in the other, underlying-us 3D-spaces..
etc.
It also affects the smoothness of the Cosmic Microwave Background, too: instead of requiring that space inflated at zillions-of-times-the-speed-of-light, you can instead have thousands, or zillions, of dimensions expanding, all of the 3D-spaces expanding, but none of them going translight..
& you get the same degree of smoothness, because it's happening in more dimensions, simultaneously, instead of happening in only 1x 3D-space, at translight speed..
The fact that gravity is nonlinear & QM is linear ( another of Curt Jaimungal's videos, some utterly-hyper balding scrawney guy explaining this ), so if you put mass somewhere, the mass's gravitational-field ITSELF has gravity/gravitational-field: it's self-amplifying, whereas all quantum-mechanics stuff is linear.. proves that the 2 theories are fundamentally incompatible: they're different KINDS of mechanics.
I'm saying that all the QM stuff is within-a-3D-space, & that gravity isn't within-a-single-3D-space: it's affecting ALL of them, simultaneously.
& that we need to discover the underlying-structure which gets both perspectives into the correct relationship.
I know enough physics to say no Even inter-Stellar is out of our reach (without generation ship).
We have zero reason to believe in an effective way to build wormhole, jump gates or anything similar. Even high energy cosmic rays have a limited range (due to collision with photons) which is a strong clue that there is no shortcut in space
This is the correct answer.
I think the closest we will come is detecting radio signals from another species. But like obviously 2 way communication would be almost impossible due to sheer distance.
Sadly the universe is filled with enough random radio radiation that its unlikely any coherent signal is going to travel more than a few light years. With our current technology there could be an identical version of earth around the nearest star and we probably couldn't detect it.
The signal isn't destroyed though. So one could argue that isolating it in the noise is doable with enough math.
Obviously the real limit is still distance since we'd need a radio dish like the size of earths orbit or something to pick up a signal weakened from many lightyears away.
Probably with virtual telescopes, smaller receivers arrayed throughout the entire solar system, like EHT but biiiiiiiigger
Of course, astronomers find the Oort cloud and want to turn it into a telescope! Figures.
oooh, such a cool idea. I imagined the array in orbit around other planets' Lagrange points but scattering them in the Oort cloud is way excitinger
But we are talking about intergalactic here.
Radio is only lightspeed, and that is much too slow to cover such distances.
But doesn't the generation ship / cryogenic technology / nuclear technology make intergalactic travel possible (albeit very slow)?
It makes interstellar travel plausible but not intergalactic.
In theory yes... but the oldest frozen specimen of humans we've found is only a few thousand years old. We don't even know if long term cryogenic reanimation is possible.
Assuming the ship travels at 10x our current capabilities we're still looking at ~8,000 years to reach our closest stellar neighbour at only 5 lightyears away.
Then don't do it that way, put a human consciousness into a machine and wait. They said ever, we can get as sci-fi as we want here
We'll still run into the same assumption/problem; shelf life.
Consider how memories work. Every time you remember something, your brain alters that memory slightly. Even looking at how the brain parses the data through several cortex (visual etc) implies that consciousness is potentially inseparable from the components of the brain. In this video about Cockatoo intelligence they speculate that birds brain anatomy causes them to think in ways that seem limited to us.
Basically we don't even know if its possible to preserve human consciousness for that long. Similar to cryogenics we have to question if reanimation is even fundamentally possible after centuries.
It's a simulation of a human consciousness, it can be paused and restarted when certain conditions are met.
Then take the solar system with us. Strap a solar thruster to the sun, and off EVERYTHING goes. It's a byproduct of figuring out starlifting, and that buys us all the time in the universe, at least till we run out of Hydrogen and Helium to shove into the sun as fuel, but there's literally entire solar systems worth of that stuff hanging around in deep space. Like 72 solar masses per cubic light year of "empty" space.
So like if you visualize how the sun/planets actually move around the milky way. It seems plausible to focus solar flares to alter our trajectory. We'd still be stuck in the whirlpool but we could change lanes.
I think that you might think that the flares are a whole lot bigger than they actually are, or that the sun is far less massive than it actually is. You'd need a LOT more energy than those puny flares to move the sun.
The very slow is the issue. Assuming we can reach 10-20% of c, we can reach a couple of nearby stars in 200 years (Wikipedia gives me 50 stars with 30 ly).
200 years is roughly the time from the Napoleonic era from today (Taking an Euro reference). Do you remember what your ancestor were doing during Napoleon Russian campaign or when US purchased Louisiana?
Society changed massively since Napoleon. Over 200 years the society culture of a generation ship would also drastically diverge from ours. Moreover, I can't think of many piece of technology which can keep working for 200 years without a few massive overall.
Then just acceplerate the sun. If we can figure out starlifting, we have to do something with the excess gas and heat. Use that to make a solar thruster. Everything in the solar system will follow the sun, so now we have 1.8 generational ships called The Earth, and Venus.
This would also give us some protection against relativistic weapons, since we could make minor course corrections and still travel in the overall same direction.
You are talking about a trip that would last longer than human civilization has existed.
Sort of - but there is no reason to think we will ever be able to make something that won't break. Even intersellar is questionable just because the odds of the ship breaking in the time needed are too high.
Fuck it, let's assume we can build jump gates.
Let's say they're just big enough to send a tiny unmanned drone through.
I hop into my space ship and accelerate with a conventional engine to 86% of light speed.
No violation of physics needed, just shitloads of energy.
I fly to another star, which takes 10 years from earth's point of view.
Due to time dilation at 86% light speed, time in my space ship passes half as fast as on earth.
If someone on earth had a strong enough telescope, they could look at a clock on my ship and see that it ticks half as fast as the clocks on earth.
But in my frame of reference, earth moves away from me at 86% light speed.
So if I look at earth through a telescope, I see that the clocks on earth tick half as fast as mine.
There isn't a universal time. Time is always relative to speed and this is no problem when the reference frames are separated.
I arrive at the star, after 5 years have passed on earth.
I activate a jump gate and send the drone through with a message. It arrives on earth instantly, 5 years after I left.
But from their reference frame, they could see my clock ticking only half as fast as theirs.
After earth's 5 years, only 2.5 years have passed for the space ship they see.
They activate their jump gate and send the drone back with a reply.
It arrives instantly at the star, 7.5 years before my space ship gets there.
This is why FTL travel isn't and will never be possible. Even with tricks like jump gates or wormholes, it creates time paradoxes.
That's not how it works. You're correct when you say that from your point of view it's Earth's clock going half speed and from Earth's point of view it's your clock going half speed while you're traveling away from Earth (or Earth is traveling away from you, both are equally valid), but that's only true as long as the distance between you and Earth continues to increase at 86% of the speed of light. As you decelerate at your destination your reference frame continuously changes until you're back in the same frame as Earth (or nearly so, we can assume the two stars aren't exactly maintaining their relative positions). While you're decelerating, from your perspective Earth's clock speeds up and goes faster than yours, how much is determined by your rate of change in relative velocity. Earth's reference frame isn't changing (ignoring movement around the sun, galactic center, the great attractor, etc.), so the Earth's perspective on your clock doesn't change, the Earth sees your clock gradually speed up as you "slow down" until it's going the same rate, but never faster. So once you're back in the Earth's reference frame both you and the Earth will agree that your clock advanced 5 years while Earth's clock (and your destination's clock, adjusted for any relative movement between it and Earth) advanced 10 years. This assumes a constant 86% light speed and ignores the time accelerating at departure and arrival so let's assume very fast acceleration so it doesn't change more than a couple days.
Edit: this is all completely ignoring gravity based time dilation from the spaceship climbing out of Sol's well and going down the destination's well and only considers velocity based time dilation. It would be more correct if you only considered two spaceships in a void where one accelerates to relativistic speeds and then accelerates back into the reference frame of the other.
Assuming a mechanism exists that changes the universe from being singly connected to multiply connected (i.e., wormholes exist), it is possible to have wormholes permitting faster-than-light travel without time paradoxes, though some additional restrictions may apply.
source: Galactic Library
Strap a solar thruster to the sun, and the Earth and Venus can be used as generational ships. The rest of the solar system will follow the sun. The starlifting array needed to power the thruster will keep the sun "young." There's more than enough Hydrogen and Helium to dump in as fuel.
Venus is a fixer upper, but it just needs several oceans worth of water ice, and some cyanobactera flung at it to cool it down. Maybe we can look into diverting some comets into Venus, I dunno.
Isn't Venus's atmosphere dense? If so, you could just float a Bespin-like Cloud City on a convenient layer of the atmosphere to avoid the boiling temperatures below and the crushing weight of the air...
You could, or you can add water and cyanobactera. Venus's atmosphere is pretty close to what ours was minus the water and cyanobactera when the planet mostly coole d off after the collision with Theia.
But the cyanobacteria will take time to work. What about the thousands of years in the meantime?
I wouldn't want to build a city that I know will fall to its doom at some nebulous point in the future.
If it takes thousands of years, monitoring air density can probably give you at least a couple centuries heads-up, like "we expect in 150 years from now that the atmosphere will thin to the point our cities lose buoyancy. That gives us approximately five generations to think of a solution."
Maybe land in the water that you plan to introduce? By the way, where's that coming from?
The solution would be to evacuate back to Earth, because the surface still would be hostile to human life. Or don't waste the resources, and have some patience.
Why do you say wormholes are impossible? We don't need a reason to believe it, because what we do or don't believe doesn't change whether or not something is possible.
Humans didn't have a reason to believe in electricity until they did. Humans didn't have a reason to believe in computers until they did. Humans didn't have a reason to believe in gravity, nuclear energy, relativity, or quantum mechanics until they did. Same deal for germs, internet, cell phones, the list goes on.
Point is, until someone solves Unified Field Theory and unless it definitively proves that wormholes, alternate dimensions, and parallel universes are fundamentally impossible, we can't claim to know what isn't possible a hundred or a thousand years from now.
We might not have a particular reason to believe, but we don't have any reason to disbelieve, either.
Lightning. Humans have been observing the effects of electricity since they first evolved. They didn't have a reason not to believe in it.
Bright flashes and jagged bolts of light doesn't necessarily lead one to intuitively believe "Oh, look, there's a source of energy in the sky which can somehow be generated and harnessed to power machines and light bulbs."
We think that way because we have the scientific knowledge of what it is and how it works, but that's all retrospective. Prior to the discovery of electricity as a concept, lightning simply appeared to be some divine weapon wielded by angry gods. Even atheists of the early-Enlightenment era wouldn't have understood it.
That's like saying "Humans have observed fire since prehistoric times, so they must have understood chemical bonds and exothermic reactions." It simply doesn't apply.
The fact that it took eons to figure out how it worked and harness it is irrelevant. They knew it existed based on observable evidence.
They didn't know what it was, so my point stands.
Humans have known the sun exists for as long as humans have been around. That doesn't mean cro-magnan man believed in nuclear fusion.
You are nitpicking. Get lost.
You're the one nitpicking. You didn't have to reply to my comment, so it seems you're the one who can get lost.
Why? Do you genuinely believe we won't solve some kind of suspended animation / cryonics in the next 10000 years, to be able to sleep as your ship takes 300 years to go to another star?
300 light year is the planet direct neighbourhood, not intergalactic.
You said no to interstellar and that's what I'm responding to
Totally.
The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda, so we are already on our way!
Maybe Andromeda is coming to save us. Isn't that what The Andromeda Strain was all about?
That reference was a bit strained.
You are confusing that with Galactica from Andromeda out of the "Hello Spencer" TV series.
The "Andromeda Strain" was about human hubris and the reasons we are probably not going to become intergalactic travellers...
That was an interesting mini series, albeit nothing to do with Andromeda Galaxy.
I wondered why I didn't remember a mini series to exist - then saw its Rotten Tomato rating...
So perhaps better watch the film instead.
It has a few 60s movie moments, but overall was really fun to watch, with most of the science being surprisingly solid, given its age.
Humans? Nope. Some kind of actual AGI that doesn’t care about long time scales and can be lashed to a metal rich asteroid and flung out of the solar system? Still probably not, but it could maybe make it to some interesting intra-galactic destinations.
This is basically the foundation for Stanislaw Lem's book The Cyberiad. What if robots built robots that write poetry and fight robotic dragons and travel the stars.
Also the Bobiverse books. Human brain uploaded to a machine and strapped to an engine to sail the stars where stuff happens
Ooh! I love Lem! I do recommend him for any sci-fi lovers.
Nope
i think we'll destroy ourselves before we get that far
Me, trying not to write a political comment on a non-political question.
I'd guess we're either going to reach futuristic Star Trek communism or a dystopian world-wide techno-feudalism.
Just need to convince the billionaires that there are underage kids to rape on the other side of the galaxy
I was about to pedantically attack the term "underage kids," but then I realized how many juvenile adults there are out there and decided it was valid.
Can't get to the United Federation of Planets without World War III first.
Unfortunately, the odds seem to be favoring the technofeudalism. But you never know, maybe a catastrophic breakdown of society could lead to a more enlightened civilization generations later...
Cloud Atlas was an interesting film about how things like this can change over time on a grand scale.
Not for humanity, not as we currently understand ourselves as humans anyway.
I'd argue that it may not happen for individuals. But our DNA? Our culture? Or knowledge? I'm pretty sure these things will travel the stars one day.
Stars yes, voyager is carrying a lot of that info already! But the delta between stars and galaxies is monumental. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. The time scales aren't even something we can grasp.
Greg Egan's Diaspora sets out how humanity could explore the galaxy and even the multiverse, which if you can't be bothered reading consists of:
In the here and now the only way to travel to another system with our current tech is via nuclear pulse engines.
Basically you build a large spaceship. Stick it on massive shock absorbers which are in turn connected to a metre plus thick steel plate.
Cut small hole in the middle. Have a door that opens closes.
Eject 1kt explosive device out door. Repeat 500x till you get to orbit.
Basically you could get a spaceship up to very high speed with nuclear pulse engines to turn a multi hundred year journey into less then 100 years.
That said the biggest problem with interstellar journeys is that our material science and manufacturing tolerances are pretty shit. Essentially all of the air will leak out through the metal skin of the spaceship.
I still think carving put an asteroid, sticking engine on it (see nuclear pulse engines) , covering it in ice and water will solve the problems radiation shielding, losing critical gases and provide ample fuel and water for a very long journey.
The big problem is energy. If we had almost infinite energy we could accelerate to a significant fraction of the speed of light at a leasurely 9.81 m/s² in about a year. The travel at almost lightspeed would feel instantaneous for us. Add another year to decelerate at the same rate. We could reach any point in the visible universe in 2 years.
Our destination would just be drastically different from what we observed, depending on how far away it was.
Oh, and apart from the tiny energy problem cosmic radiation will probably destroy our spaceship. I bet at relativistic speeds you'd even get enough neutrino collisions to make them a problem.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
The observable universe is a spherical region of the universe consisting of all matter that can be observed from Earth; The radius of this region is about 14.26 gigaparsecs (46.5 billion light-years or 4.40×1026 m).
Traveling at the speed of light from earth to the edge of the visible Universe, would take around 23 billion years.
Technically the visible universe extends only about 13 billion light years from us. We can just calculate where that stuff is now because of expansion. And as I wrote the area we're aiming for will surely change drastically the further away it is.
These journeys wouldn't take billions of years for someone traveling near light speed because for them the lengths would shrink down so much that they'd be negligible. Of course once they had slowed down those billions of years will have gone by for everything outside the space ship. So it's not good for missions where you want to return home to your family afterwards.
No, not unless we have made some serious mistakes in our understanding of physics.
I would say it's pretty likely that we have made some serious mistakes but also probably not possible.
I suppose it all hinges on what humanity manages to figure out, physics-wise. I like to keep the door open
No, I genuinely don't believe it will. I don't think the human race will ever reach another star, though I do believe it could be possible if we avoided going extinct for a few thousand years.
Another galaxy? No chance, not unless we figure out FTL, which I don't believe is likely. The only FTL I've heard of that might be possible is the Alcubierre drive, but it relies on things that are so exotic, it's likely impossible to create one.
With our current understanding of physics it is impossible. Sucks, I love sci fi but they all rely on inventing some magic machine to make it possible.
And to be clear, when you occasionally read about someone saying it’s not impossible……. That’s late night bs sessions on illicit substances. Usually the article is really “from our understanding of physics we have this math equation where we can actually enter values and the equation still gives a result, given a list of impossible prerequisites.
Absolutely.
What form it will take is the question. FTL, not likely but long ago we didn't believe in breaking the speed of sound. Generation ships, solar sails, ion drives, folding spacetime, it will happen somehow if we survive as a species.
There is another layer. You are not only trying to travel through space, but also time.
We know the formula:
s^2 = (ct)^2 - d^2s: spacetime distance/interval (invariant no matter the observer)
c: speed of light
t: time
d: coordinate in 3D space
Now, let’s say we have 2 travelers who need to meet at a certain place. Traveler A is 1 spacetime distance unit away Traveler B is 2 spacetime distance units away.
If they are both at the same age when they started the journey, B would be younger than A even though A is closer to the destination than B! Because B experienced more time dilation, and A needs to either wait at the destination, or travel slower.
So to meet each other at a relatively same age, B needs to travel slower on purpose, or A can take a detour.
Millions of years become meaningless, people who have no spaceships would be a death sentence. They would never see loved ones again. So in a sense, enormous ships that can travel at near the speed of light are a norm for that type of civilization.
We are unfortunately at a very early time of the universe. If we are born later, we could probably see other civilizations travel to us :D
Space travel is weird. Brain hurty.
Everyone here saying confidently "no" hasn't kept track of science over the last several thousand years. There have been hundreds/thousands of things that have been "that is impossible" that we simply didn't have the knowledge for to be able to do.
200 years ago you would have been laughed at for thinking man could ever take to the skies, and now flying is a boring tedious thing for us.
75 years ago the idea of carrying a computer in your pocket with thousands of times the sum of the entire compute availability in the world back then would have been scoffed at, and people would have told you it's impossible. Now we use it to post on forums like this like it's nothing.
Both are examples of "it's impossible, the science says so", but that's the neat thing about science. We learn new things every day. Our thoughts change, you don't "believe" in science, you only learn new things.
So is it impossible? I think it's incredibly small-minded and dare I even say arrogant to say it's impossible. How do we know what will be discovered tomorrow, or 100 years from now, or 1000 years from now? We have absolutely no idea what will be possible then. With our current technology? Absolutely not. In 400 years? Who knows someone may be standing in line at security and see a meme making fun of us for thinking it was impossible.
Even just a computer that can pass a turing test seemed completely impossible ten years ago. It's crazy how much people keep moving the goalposts
The kind where one can get to a different galaxy in a single lifetime? I doubt it.
Speed of light limitation. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. Even if someone debunks special relativity and finds you could go faster than light, you would be moving so fast relative to cosmic dust particles that it would destroy the ship. So, either way, you cannot practically go faster than the speed of light.
The only way we could have intergalactic travel is a one-way trip that humanity here on earth would be long gone by the time it reached its destination so we could never know if it succeeded or not.
We will just have to let Andromeda come to us.
I can picture the possibility of a probe visiting our nearest neighbors
But there are so many problems with a generation ship going that far, and no, none of the fun sci fi ways of travel are possible.
Bringing this back to reality, I can definitely see exploring more of the solar system and I can see making use of resources on hand for bulk consumables like fuel, oxygen, water, housing (we’ll have to to make it work). But consider how many things it would take to actually be independent of earth and how large the colony needs to be. Remote bases in our inner solar system can get away with that, but you can’t leave the solar system and expect to rely on any resupplies from earth.
Even if you could achieve the travel time to visit another star system and build a generation ship with enough supplies of everything and that could function that long, how would you survive without a preexisting functional colony of millions of people? Just start with the thousands of types of plastics we use every day and imagine trying to support that for a few people, without oil to drill or other organic chemicals to mine, and without a full scale chemical industry
Depends how long you have.
I hope we come up with warp drive or something crazy, but technically I don’t see any way this happens.
But if we could, we would ruin wherever we find habitable, and it would be the impetus for us to totally trash the Earth because suddenly it’s disposable and we can just go to Elysium or whatever other place.
We’d find planets and just fill them with toxic waste factories, because who cares, “we” (the rich) don’t have to live there.
We’d take visa scams to the extreme, forcing people into slavery on planets they could never escape from, and quash uprisings with bombs or stranding the people there.
Humans are too greedy and flawed.
It's already possible in a "does it violate the laws of physics or not" sense, the real question is, will anyone that has the requisite resources to do it actually want to.
It would take such an incredibly long time (as in, millions of years or longer for the very closest galaxies) that anyone and any organization sending out such an expedition isn't going to get any meaningful return on their investment, so it would only bring a benefit to whoever was on the "ship" when it arrived. As such, to even have a motive for doing this, you either need a society that does things for the benefit of extremely distant descends, or which is extremely long lived and patient.
As to how you would actually do it, my guess (obviously though, the guess of someone from a society that lacks the technology to do a thing is likely to be wrong about how it later is done) would be that one would use a hypothetical type of structure called a stellar engine These are similar to the "dyson spheres" that science fiction sometimes likes to talk about (usually inaccurately to the actual concept but still), except that they would use the energy emitted by a star, or its mass, to do some particular task, like propel the star in a given direction.
Doing this, your "ship" is actually an entire solar system. Getting that up to speed could take millions of years even for the most efficient designs, and obviously requires an economy capable of building stuff at incredible scales, and having an entire star spare to use for the trip. However, you're going to be taking that kind of time anyway, and so you're probably going to need an entire self contained civilization to have a hope of keeping things running that long, and literal worlds worth of raw materials. There's not much else that even theoretically has enough fuel to move all that to notable fractions of lightspeed. Since there's little point to going to live in another galaxy if there are still unclaimed places to go within your own, a whole star system is probably a relatively small expense for the implied size of civilization that would even want to try to sebd such an expedition. Galaxies contain a huge number of them after all.
While this is all obviously far beyond us now, both in technology and sheer economic scale, there's nothing physically impossible about it, and at least some logical motive (the future resources of a galaxy for one's descendants, if alien life is rare enough for uninhabited galaxies to exist). Given that and just how huge the universe is, I'd actually be willing to bet that somewhere there is someone or something doing this, and that if humans last long enough and keep advancing our technology and infrastructure all the while, some descendant of our species might, though they'd probably seem pretty alien to us by the time it took to reach that point.
Imagine humanity finds a cheap way to jump to another star system. In time all star systems in the galaxy are populated. The next frontier would be jumping to another galaxy and, given the previous experience in interstellar jumps, intergalactic jumps would be only an upgrade.
Probably not. Main problem is energy density.
Theoretically we could visit things thousands/millions of light years away within a human lifespan, but the necessary energy to do so is just infeasible. You'd have to spend half the energy slowing down at your destination so you'd need all that energy onboard. Just not happening IMO. As a bonus you'd basically also be inventing a time machine (forward only)
Interstellar travel? Like to the nearest star systems? Maybe. In the far future. But not intergalactic. Andromeda is the closest galaxy and it's 2.5 MILLION light years away....
I sure hope not
Forever is a long time.
Possible? It's possible today!
I think it's just an engineering and more likely a desire problem right now. It is expensive to get things into orbit and we just haven't studied what other problems will arise.
If you mean faster than light speed, there is some intriguing things in physics but with our current understanding no we cannot move massive objects faster than light.
There are still a lot of gaps in our understanding though so perhaps we will learn that it isn't impossible.
If we weren't busy squabbling like neanderthals about who has a bigger stick and joined together we could have already come to some form of interplanetary travel and possibly colonization of other planets in the solar system but we're too busy fighting over this tiny speck of space dust to focus on anything else.
No, but yes- of course assuming humanity continues in a meaningful way. I mean technically we are already travelers- we're already traveling through space at high speed.. https://cosmic-odometer.vercel.app/
In terms of lightspeed travel, I think no, and definitely not sci-fi warp tech, BUT generational ships where people live and continue to reproduce over gigantic time scales could. If a ship had enough space, ecosystem of its own, etc- we could continue at "sub light" travel pretty much indefinitely without any ludicrous scientific advances beyond radiation shielding, etc.
Again though, that's a long, LONG way off and would require we stop trying so hard to off ourselves and the lovely little blue marble we currently traverse life on.
yhea, but that depends on timescales and if we don't kill ourselves.
It already is and so is time travel but you wouldn't believe someone on the internet?
With a generational ship and a shield and a way of blocking cosmic rays I think it will eventually be possible, but take a very long time. I don't believe light speed will ever be possible, but going near light speed starts slowing down time a whole bunch for those on board the ships. So if for instance we came up with some trickery to get up to 99% the speed of light and wanted to go to a planet one galaxy over that's 25,000 light years away, in theory the ship and the people in it would get there in about 1200 years. Even though it would be like 25,000 years for anyone who wasn't on the ship. At 99.999% it would only take what would seem like about 115 years on the ship.
I'm not going to say that's flat out impossible that it could happen but we'd have to find one hell of a way to cheat the system.
Alternatively, I think it will come about (if humans don't kill ourselves off) that a person can "live forever" in one form or another. If we get to that point then pesky things like travel time and atmospheres and such will be much less an issue. I then wonder how long a person would want to be around before they decided they'd rather "self terminate".
Not at all. But can we volunteer some people to go up and try it?
I mean Im not even sure we will have planetary much less intergalactic. I mean like one offs sending people to some other planet. Im not sure that counts anymore than voyager would for interstellar. I mean I do think about it. Intergalactic, planetary, planetary, intergalactic.
You'd have to find alternatives. Like another dimension. Another dimension might be the answer.
thats gonna require some big numbers. Like beyond what you can dial.
No. Never.
I think it is more a question of will we make it that far. If so then it should be possible but I don't expect it would be the norm and likely single way. Communication back home would be almost pointless due to the distance.
Perhaps it will be like the Rimworld lore. FTL is never achieved, civilisations are unable to remain stable once communication takes more than a few years or decades between planets as culture drifts over time. This doesn't prevent intergalactic travel but it does make it a one way colonisation mission.
Well I wouldn't say it's completely impossible. A lot of technology exists that would have been seen as impossible in the past. But I think intergalactic travel is extremely unlikely. I can't imagine that we will ever create ways for the human body to withstand long distance travel as portrayed in shows like Star Trek
Has anybody here heard about the Alcubierre drive?
It's SWEET, but still relies on exotic matter that may not exist in our physical reality
Technically yes, but also no.
At least not casually; flying between star systems at will, faster than light between star systems, etc...
I'm sure at some point, if scientists confirm the habitibility of a world orbiting a star relatively nearby, some group or other would probably get a Generation Ship concept going and head out. Musk or some other fucking billionaire looking for a world to conquer. So technically that is interstellar travel, but not really as it's just a one way point to point, not a taxi service.
Interstellar != Intergalactic
Me fail english!? That's unpossible!
We have some huge hurdles to solve before we get there. Earth is on the fast track to developing permanent Kessler syndrome. As for just reaching Mars, whoever arrives, the astronauts might be too weak physically to even stand up. There was alot of talk about asteroid mining, but it turns out these asteroids are literally the junkyards of space. Not to imply all asteroids are useless star system leftovers. Its far too soon to be discussing interstellar travel.
Maybe terraforming Venus or a Jovian moon is a better path.
I actually dont know about that moon. Do you know if getting to Venus would take less time?
Jovian = "from Jupiter".
About Venus, IIRC it's
costcloser than Mars... But that doesn't mean the travel is shorter 🤷♂️My earlier comment regards the effects of space on the body. Going from zero gravity to 1G causes muscle degeneration. The people landing are likely to be overwhelmed after a single space traversal.
If you are talking about the zero G in the travel to Jupiter, it can be partially avoided by sending a wheel spaceship. At least until the spaceships can accelerate half of the travel at 1 G and decelerate at 1 G the other half.
The expanse 🤓
We can't even make radio waves that travel that far. Our best radio telescopes focused on something near that we suspect might have life don't have enough power for us to think they can be received by an arbitrarily advanced civilization on the other end (assuming there is that happens to be listening when the signals arrive). And that is stars in our own subarm of the milky way.
Space is just bigger than you can imagine.
People get really disappointed when they learn that there could be an identical version of earth complete with humans and television orbiting around the nearest stars and we wouldn't be able to detect them with our current monitoring abilities due to the amount of interference in space.
Ain't nobody got time fo dat.
I wouldn't even put money on interstellar travel.
Only if astrophage shows up to ruin/save the day.
Other stars are at least a thousand times as far as distant planets, but other galaxies are only about 4 or so galaxy-widths away on average. So if distant interstellar travel is possible, then intergalactic travel is just a hard trip away. The problem is that statement continges on a very large "if".
Galaxies are closer together relative to their size than stars; but they're still a few orders of magnitude farther apart than this.
The scale I've seen is: If the sun were the size of a ping pong ball, the next nearest star would be hundreds of miles away. But if the Milky Way were the size of a CD, Andromeda would be on the other side of the room.
Yes
Probably not, interstellar travel already would involve incomprehensible distances.
Not by humans.
We could maybe eventually load up multiple asteroids with building materials, frozen embryos, a self-healing nanobot factory, blueprints for building artificial breeding chambers and humanoid robots, controlled by an AGI to serve as educators, and send them off to nearby stars.
Upon arrival on suitable planets, the systems wake up and jump-start colonies.
After several hundred or thousand years of development, those colonies could build their own seeder asteroids, kicking off an exponential progress.
If every colony in turn colonizes 4 new systems within 10,000 years, we could theoretically colonize every suitable star system in the Galaxy after 200,000 years. At a very reasonable ~0.1% of light speed.
But we would have zero control over the colonies, no shared culture, no trade, hardly any meaningful communication. So there would be very little benefit to it, and knowing human nature, a war of total annihilation would be likely as soon as suitable planets get scarce.
Intergalactic travel will never be possible for humans.
The nearest galaxy is 2.537.000 light years away. By the time we get there, we wouldn't be humans anymore.
You almost described "raised by wolves".
With current physics, nope. But who knows, shit is weird. We might just be completely wrong about how the universe really works.
I hope everyone holding power now will be long dead and forgotten before humanity reaches that level of diaspora
Yes.
I hold that the physics this world's establishment holds-to is obviously flatland "physics", as it doesn't include mind/will, and you CAN'T have real physics, if you're handwaving & saying "oh, but those phenomena aren't really real". The fact that .. Jacob? ( see Curt Jaimungal's videos, on yt ) discovered that the difference between statistical-probability theory vs quantum-probability theory, is that quantum-probability includes knowing. Knowing, aka "information", as physicists call it, is physics-real. Pretending that information is real, but knowing isn't, is .. defective. Pretending that knowing is real but mind isn't real, is absolutely shameless. Ideological-prejudice is what's really going on. Look for the "Non-Markovian" probability video, & you'll see it spelt out plain as day: knowing is physics-required.
The fundamental-technology should be possible, but the durations might be absurd.
the way it works is this:
Speed-of-light-limitation is WITHIN a given SPACE.
So, if you've got time & multiple different 3D-spaces ( think leaves on a branch: each leaf being a 3D-space ), then the speed-of-light-limitation in EACH is limited-to limiting speeds in THAT space:
There isn't any speed-limit BETWEEN spaces, see?
So, "rotating" from another space into OUR space, then moving 100km within our space, then "rotating" back into their space, means you've now moved 3 parsecs..
Simply because our 3D-space & their 3D-space don't happen to be at the same "angle" to the universe's underlying-structure..
then travel which is simultaneously slower ( from the perspective of the traveler ) & faster ( from the perspective of they got from point A to point B faster than light within this space could have done ) becomes doable.
So, it'd be required to 1. know the underlying-structure of the universe, 2. be able to engage a "rotation" from our 3D-space to another one, intentionally, & make it be one that is travel-useful ( that may not be possible ), & then 3. do that rotation, move within that other space, & then "rotate" back into our space, at a drastically-different location.
All that'd be required is for the "rotation" to remove our having inertia/mass within this 3D-space for it to be useful, but more-complete "rotation" may be required for accomplishing real interstellar travel.
IF you go look for Susskind's "Time as a Fractal Flow" video, on yt, watch it to the end, as the lightbulb goes on at the end, mentally..
but consider the implications of that:
IF time is fractal, THEN space must also be, since they're part of the same 4D thing.
NOBODY in physics is dealing with it that way, ttbomk.
& if space is fractal, then it simultaneously is, & isn't, there, & that may be usable.
( it's there from within it, but it can be not-there from the perspective of other 3D-spaces which simply don't "see" it: because each is only fractionally-dimensional, they can all be crammed into some kind of superspace, without colliding with each-other )
Anyways, this is just how the shape of it feels, & as I figure-out more, this understanding gets revised, but that's the fundamental sense of it.
There are .. thousands? of 3D-spaces in this universe, & we're in 1 of them.
Electromagnetism is limited to within a 3D-space, but gravity isn't: it diffuses throughout them all.
"Dark Matter" is just conventional matter in other 3D-spaces which are .. how to say that .. "coincident" with our 3D-space, but the falsifying-quotes are important: their 3D-space & ours are not-colliding, they are each fractional-dimension/fractals.
So, we've got "Dark Matter" galaxies simply because there isn't any matter in OUR 3D-space, but in other 3D-spaces which are coinciding with ours, without colliding, there ARE actual-matter galaxies, & their gravity is present, weakly, in our 3D-space ( I'm presuming that gravity is weaker between-3D-spaces, that may not be true, or if it is true, it may be .. anywhere from slightly-weaker to orders-of-magnitude weaker )
We've got a couple diffuse galaxies with NO "Dark Matter", simply because there's matter in OUR 3D-space, but not in the other, underlying-us 3D-spaces..
etc.
It also affects the smoothness of the Cosmic Microwave Background, too: instead of requiring that space inflated at zillions-of-times-the-speed-of-light, you can instead have thousands, or zillions, of dimensions expanding, all of the 3D-spaces expanding, but none of them going translight..
& you get the same degree of smoothness, because it's happening in more dimensions, simultaneously, instead of happening in only 1x 3D-space, at translight speed..
The fact that gravity is nonlinear & QM is linear ( another of Curt Jaimungal's videos, some utterly-hyper balding scrawney guy explaining this ), so if you put mass somewhere, the mass's gravitational-field ITSELF has gravity/gravitational-field: it's self-amplifying, whereas all quantum-mechanics stuff is linear.. proves that the 2 theories are fundamentally incompatible: they're different KINDS of mechanics.
I'm saying that all the QM stuff is within-a-3D-space, & that gravity isn't within-a-single-3D-space: it's affecting ALL of them, simultaneously.
& that we need to discover the underlying-structure which gets both perspectives into the correct relationship.
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No