I was wondering what could be the future of large-distance interstellar travel. It seems a bit disappointing that there's little hope of ever achieving it...of course as we all know we can't go past the speed of light, and even coming close to it is very difficult. So, will we ever see the day when we can visit other parts of the galaxies, or nature is built in a way that prevents it? I suppose if we can accelerate close to the speed of light(can't see how though), then time inside the ship will slow down, so the passengers can cross large distances in their lifetimes, but here on Earth that would be useless, since hundreds of generations would pass until they reach their destination. And then there's the fact that the human body can't stand large acceleration for too long, so we have to accelerate slowly. I don't think there's any way to accelerate the whole ship uniformly, thus not having to deal with the pressure forces on the passengers, is there? All in all, it's a pretty grim situation I think; is the idea of visiting other planets going to stay for ever inside sci-fi? Disappointing, to say the least. What do you think?

Getting there quickly gets ridiculous quickly. To get there as quickly as possible without cheating the universe requires accelerating until halfway there, and then decelerating until you're there. Is it really necessary to get there that quickly?

An alternative, which is definitely not a new idea, is to have a generational space ship, which probably goes at a much more leisurely pace. They would probably utilize external factors to increase their speed as opposed to direct expending of energy. And speaking of energy, they will have to be extremely conservative, and reuse as much as possible. If a truly self-contained spaceship were built, that could sustain generations upon generations of enough people to have enough gene variety, they could very well get to another planet, but after a very long time.

Or we could just upload our consciousness somewhere and make the trip without worrying about our currently extremely fragile meat sacks.

There are probably tons of other options I'm not even thinking of, and if it does happen, I'm reasonably sure it will be through some unexpected way, or at least strikingly different than anything I presented.

I think someday it will happen... Not necessarily how we imagine it today, though...

And I for one don't believe that light speed is unattainable or that traveling at the speed of light or near it would cause that time would get out of synch between the spaceship and earth...

Quote: Original post by Twilight
And I for one don't believe (...) that traveling at the speed of light or near it would cause that time would get out of synch between the spaceship and earth...

That would be awfully convenient given that they already need to compensate for that with things like GPS satellites.

Quote: Original post by Twilight
And I for one don't believe that light speed is unattainable or that traveling at the speed of light or near it would cause that time would get out of synch between the spaceship and earth...

Physics disagrees.
Hard.

Yeah Twilight, special relativity is pretty much proven thousands times over...too bad there's a limit to how fast you can go but, well, there is :)

Let's assume we are able to achieve near-lighspeed some distant day in the future, against all common sense. Now imagine travelling through the Oort Cloud at near light speed. Having to avoid collisions at that speed sounds like not much fun.
Also, nobody really knows what exactly is beyond the heliopause, there might be ridiculously high radiation levels which might rule travelling to that region out.

Unmanned exploration would have to be totally autonomous, seeing that even Proxima Centauri is over 4 light years away, so any kind of remote control would have a ping of 8 1/2 years. So, there would have to be a substantial development in artificial intelligence first, too.

All in all, I don't think this is a very realistic thing to happen. The end of civilisation is more likely :(

Quote: Original post by mikeman
Yeah Twilight, special relativity is pretty much proven thousands times over...too bad there's a limit to how fast you can go but, well, there is :)

Not exactly, we haven't PROVEN it, we have just not disproven it. We cannot 'prove' general relativity or special relativity without being God :)

Quote: Original post by samoth
Let's assume we are able to achieve near-lighspeed some distant day in the future, against all common sense. Now imagine travelling through the Oort Cloud at near light speed. Having to avoid collisions at that speed sounds like not much fun.
Also, nobody really knows what exactly is beyond the heliopause, there might be ridiculously high radiation levels which might rule travelling to that region out.

Unmanned exploration would have to be totally autonomous, seeing that even Proxima Centauri is over 4 light years away, so any kind of remote control would have a ping of 8 1/2 years. So, there would have to be a substantial development in artificial intelligence first, too.

All in all, I don't think this is a very realistic thing to happen. The end of civilisation is more likely :(

Actually, we're more likely to do exploration with 'AI' (as we already do to some degree) than any sort of manned framework. We may, at some distant point in the future, colonize other parts of our solar system, but the dream of star trek is probably either non-existent or going to be sufficiently far in the future as to not matter to us or a near future descendants.

Computerized exploration though is a real possibility, especially with many of the more recent propulsion developments such as ion drives.

Quote: Original post by Washu

Quote: Original post by mikeman
Yeah Twilight, special relativity is pretty much proven thousands times over...too bad there's a limit to how fast you can go but, well, there is :)

Not exactly, we haven't PROVEN it, we have just not disproven it. We cannot 'prove' general relativity or special relativity without being God :)

Well I guess that's true, I should have said maybe that time dilation and other effects of the theory have been observed in real life and they agree with the theory so far.

Quote: Original post by mikeman

Quote: Original post by Washu

Quote: Original post by mikeman
Yeah Twilight, special relativity is pretty much proven thousands times over...too bad there's a limit to how fast you can go but, well, there is :)

Not exactly, we haven't PROVEN it, we have just not disproven it. We cannot 'prove' general relativity or special relativity without being God :)

Well I guess that's true, I should have said maybe that time dilation and other effects of the theory have been observed in real life and they agree with the theory so far.

Yes, that is more correct. Science is not about finding the actual laws (since we cannot actually know said laws, most likely), but about creating theories that explain observable phenomenon in such a manner as to build a simulation that is accurate enough to predict future behavior (which can then be tested and hence disprove said theory).