Thursday, October 18, 2007

Interstellar travel

Anyone with a slightly geeky or nerdy side has at least watched Star Trek or Star Wars once or twice. For about 50 years or so people have been fantasizing about space travel. Science fiction novels has us hurtling at light speed through the universe in the far off future. 2001: A Space Odyssey had us traveling to Jupiter by the year 2001.

Interplanetary travel might no be too far off but what is the possibility of Interstellar or intergalactic travel?

Using propulsion methods of our current methods would result in extremely long voyages, it would take hundreds or thousands of years to reach a destination. It would take several generations of crew members to complete the mission. We would need a ship that would be self-sustaining and would hold hundreds of people, a sort of biosphere. Another possibility would be suspended animation, assuming that have perfected it by this time.

Using nuclear, fusion or light sail powered space craft we could reach on the average a speed of 10% of light speed. It would take about 40 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. There is also the possibility of antimatter rockets which could theoretically reach a speed near that of light.

Light-speed travel is the most appealing form of travel for obvious reasons. One theory is interstellar travel through transmission, in other words teleportation. If you could transmit matter as information and the reconstruct it at its destination, light-speed would be possible.
According to Einstein's General Relativity, spacetime is curved. One could use the warpdrive concept, as seen in Star Trek, to use curvature in space to take a shortcut from point A to point B. The use of worm holes to move from a point to another has been speculated but it is not know whether possible in practice or not. Generally as far as physically traveling faster than light has been considered impossible according to physics.


One can only hope that humanity will once reach the point of interstellar travel. If we would told people 200 years ago that one day we would were going to walk on the moon they would have laughed us out of the room.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel

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