It would be great to be able to reach the stars in reasonable amounts of time using warp drives like in sci-fi such as Star Trek and Star Wars, but unfortunately they don't exist. However, incredibly, they're not prohibited by the known laws of physics and we're now into the very early stages of researching them, see second link. Note that not much progress has been made in the last 30 years due to currently insurmountable technical problems, so don't hold your breath.
In the meantime, it would be impossible to send a spaceship to the stars and have the crew arrive there alive as sub light journey times would be around 250 years at a minimum, hence so-called generational ships would have to be invented and people willing to go on them. The linked article describes several interesting potential approaches to the problem from a design competition held recently. I'll get to the point immediately: I think they're a terrible idea and here's why.
The trip is one way for the initial crew, basically going into the middle of nowhere, where they'll die of old age, so what's in it for them? It's like a lifetime prison sentence for no reason. Then, the next generation of crew take over, ones born on the ship, who have had no say in the matter and who will have known nothing else. Multiple generations of them, in fact. What are they to make of it? This is completely unknown and talk about a violation of human rights! What do the people left behind on earth get out of it? Yeah, a big fancy launch with lots of fanfare and publicity and then... nothing, nothing but the monotony of a ship hurtling through space that we'll soon lose contact with due to distance and the ever increasing communication time lag, even with light traveling at well, the speed of light which will soon make realtime comms impossible. Remember, the moon is just 380000 miles away and there's already a round trip lag time of 2.6 seconds right there, making realtime comms difficult. That will increase to days, weeks, months and years as the ship gets really far away, if the signal is even strong enough to go that distance.
Then, there's these huge engineering challenges to overcome:
So, what's the point of doing it? I guess to enable the human race to survive the inevitable destruction of earth as the sun ages, becoming a red giant and burns it to a crisp. However, that won't happen for 5 billion years or so, a mind boggling amount of time, hence why worry about it? The human race may well not exist by then anyway, likely having finally run out of resources long, long before then, or other apocalyptic calamity like nuclear war or large asteroid strike.
www.theguardian.com
More on warp drives, here:
nerdzone.uk
In the meantime, it would be impossible to send a spaceship to the stars and have the crew arrive there alive as sub light journey times would be around 250 years at a minimum, hence so-called generational ships would have to be invented and people willing to go on them. The linked article describes several interesting potential approaches to the problem from a design competition held recently. I'll get to the point immediately: I think they're a terrible idea and here's why.
The trip is one way for the initial crew, basically going into the middle of nowhere, where they'll die of old age, so what's in it for them? It's like a lifetime prison sentence for no reason. Then, the next generation of crew take over, ones born on the ship, who have had no say in the matter and who will have known nothing else. Multiple generations of them, in fact. What are they to make of it? This is completely unknown and talk about a violation of human rights! What do the people left behind on earth get out of it? Yeah, a big fancy launch with lots of fanfare and publicity and then... nothing, nothing but the monotony of a ship hurtling through space that we'll soon lose contact with due to distance and the ever increasing communication time lag, even with light traveling at well, the speed of light which will soon make realtime comms impossible. Remember, the moon is just 380000 miles away and there's already a round trip lag time of 2.6 seconds right there, making realtime comms difficult. That will increase to days, weeks, months and years as the ship gets really far away, if the signal is even strong enough to go that distance.
Then, there's these huge engineering challenges to overcome:
- Where does such a ship get its power from? It's in deep space far away from any stars so solar power won't cut it. It would have to be nuclear, but even though it lasts a long time, 250+ years is a really tall order, even for an efficient fusion drive. Perhaps an antimatter drive could do it, but that would require a frightening amount of it, likely several kilos or more, which would require holding it in perfect stasis with no failures ever, or you get a supernova and the mission is toast. At least the end would be really quick and the crew not even know it's happened before they're incinerated. Lovely.
- How would all that antimatter even be created? We can only make minute amounts of it in nuclear reactors at the moment, but production would have to be scaled up by orders of magnitude for this mission.
- How would a food source be created that never runs out? Sounds like the myth of perpetual motion, doesn't it?
- There's radiation to deal with as space is full of lethal amounts of it, so how would one shield people from that over a lifetime? Magnetic fields would do it, but they would have to be enormously powerful and work 24/7 with perfect reliability for millennia while consuming high power continuously. Yeah, right.
- There's long term general reliability of thousands of systems and the ability of repair crews to actually fix problems due to lack of spare parts and / or skills and tools. Imagine the constant training and retraining required, especially for new generations.
- A catastrophic collision with an asteroid, or even a tiny primordial black hole with no accretion disc that can't be detected until it hits would spell doom. Sounds like a real long shot, but the odds increase significantly for a journey this long. What about a hull breach due to simple failure, let alone possible sabotage or other reasons?
So, what's the point of doing it? I guess to enable the human race to survive the inevitable destruction of earth as the sun ages, becoming a red giant and burns it to a crisp. However, that won't happen for 5 billion years or so, a mind boggling amount of time, hence why worry about it? The human race may well not exist by then anyway, likely having finally run out of resources long, long before then, or other apocalyptic calamity like nuclear war or large asteroid strike.
Beam me up, jellyfish: experts unveil spaceships to take us to the stars
Winner of Project Hyperion design contest envisions polyamorous people thriving onboard cigar-shaped craft
More on warp drives, here:
Can we go faster than light after all?
The arguments against faster than light travel are on shaky ground according to established physicist and YouTuber, Sabine Hossenfelder. Or put another way, we may someday be able to finally do it and Star Trek will become reality. I think she makes a good argument. Check it out and see what...
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