Will intergalactic travel ever be possible?

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by pluto2, Nov 1, 2010.

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  1. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Aside for impacts with cosmic dust I don't think near-lightspeed travel will put much force on the ship, traveling is a vacuum is traveling in a vacuum be it at 1 km per hour or 1 million km per hour.

    Assuming you could go that fast, at 80% the speed of light your time will slow down by ~60%, so a journey to the Andromeda galaxy will take 3,125,000 years in real time and 1,950,000 in your time, that's a lot a fucking time! To avoid catastrophic impacts with cosmic dust perhaps a much slower speed would be better, perhaps a more realistically attainable 5% the speed of light, but then it will take you 50,000,000 years to get there. Your ship would need to have enough fuel to power it self in idle and keep repair bots running for 50 million years!
     
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  3. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    I'm pretty sure the concept of "intergalatic travel" would in fact generate a QED problem. To define the method and practical use would require not just understanding the universe, but developing it to be the way it is to get the full understanding. At which point the universe wouldn't be as much of playpen as you first thought and the notion of intergalatic travel would be swamped by philosophical concerns of "What is actually real?"

    Obviously once you reach that level of illumination, then you could travel to different starsystems in a teacup without fear of any implication that Mass and velocity would suggest it pretty impractical.
     
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  5. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Of course by the time anyone could try this we will probably be far past the singularity and god knows what kind of technology or what forms we will have by then.
     
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  7. dhcracker Registered Senior Member

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    Actually the Orion is a massive craft, and I"m not saying there isn't problems of course there is. HOwever we can actually build this with current technology... why not? Seems more worthwhile than even putting a man on mars we could send probes to other stars with this even at 5% speed of light which is a very conservative figure for this project requiring the least mass and problems most likely.
     
  8. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    I believe a greater science than physics is yet to be discovered- something that will make stuff like this possible. But I believe it's possible.
     
  9. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    Well to start with we have never built even a small prototype and because it has cost us a small fortune to put the ISS in LEO and it's very likely to cost several magnitudes more to build a small Orion type vessel and even if we did, we have nowhere to go with it, nor anyway to keep astronauts healthy in space for that long. We are still crawling as it pertains to living in space and you are suggesting we have the ability to put people in space for far longer than we know how to do it and no idea where to send them if we did build it.

    Arthur
     
  10. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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    Of course, interstellar travel, as opposed to intergalactic is a very different thing.

    The nearest star - Proxima Centauri - could be reached in 55 years assuming a cruising speed of 0.1c and an acceleration and deceleration time of 10 years each. A suitably large space habitat could be constructed for this within 500 to 1000 years (plus or minus a bit).

    In the mean time, interplanetary travel will be enough of a challenge. At this point in time, even getting to Mars is kinda beyond us.
     
  11. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    There are no tremendous pressures or tearing forces. Once you're at near-lightspeed (relative to the launching site) you just coast. 1g acceleration for 1 year will get you up to .98c. The problem is carrying enough reaction mass to accelerate at 1g for that time.
     
  12. chaos1956 Banned Banned

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    True a better power source is most definitely needed to accelerate a vehicle close to light speed. I wonder if the doubt that we will attain this speed only comes from the vast miss-understandings we still have of our surroundings. I am almost sure it is.
     
  13. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    Let's get interstellar travel mastered first(or even interplanetary for that matter regardless of probes). That might not get solved until the successor species takes over. Probably robots, but surely a helluva lot smarter than us. Who knows what crazy shit they will think up.

    We are not all that important anyway, someone has probably got Andromeda wrapped around their little princess finger.
     
  14. Saquist Banned Banned

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    I think we would have to tap into the very energy of the universe itself for even interstellar travel to be possible.

    But I don't believe in the Star Trek style history. It will take hundreds of years to get there. I think the last 200 years were merely a jump but we are now on the tech plateau and we may be here for the next 1,000 years while we figure how to move farther out.

    In that time we'll either survive here on the Earth or we will destroy ourselves and everything else.
     
  15. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Tech plateau? There are a variety of technologies that have stagnated, but there are still many in rapid development. Certainly space travel is underdeveloped and there won't be any major breakthroughs without huge investment. But on a variety of technologies that matter here on earth development has not be plateauing and has been developing exponentially, very well a technological singularity could be reach in the next 50-100 years assuming our civilization does not collapse, after which point the questions of stellar, interstellar and intergalactic travel could be addressed without having to deal with the needs of talking monkeys. Then it will come down to what is physically possible, if faster then light travel can be done reasonably or not, if not the intergalactic travel may never become viable.
     
  16. chaos1956 Banned Banned

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    Even if society crashes we are still going to have to deal with the talking monkeys. Unless you build a space ship that takes you indefinitely far away from them. Even then your stuck without banana's and will most likely starve to death. I guess it still beats talking to monkeys ad infinitum.
     
  17. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    According to one seemingly authoritative source, that's not exactly true:

    http://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html

    Arthur
     
  18. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    That seems not entirely convincing.

    The Relativistic affects at orbital speed are ~1.00000000036 and so one would think that given the ability to accurately measure the rates of reactions on earth one could measure the relativistic effects in orbit.

    No?

    Arthur
     
  19. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not a chemist, so I really don't know, but I wouldn't think the time required for chemical reactions can be measured accurately to 11 decimal places.

    But as I said, I don't know. I am confident that if we can measure it that closely, we would see the same relativistic effects. If relative time dilation effects atoms, it will have the same effect on the molecules.
     
  20. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    I don't know either, but it would be nice to know if this has been verified.
     
  21. Skeptical Registered Senior Member

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    Even without high speeds, there is a hell of a lot of cosmic background radiation, so shielding would be vital. However, I suspect we can forget this business of travel close to light speed. It is unlikely that we will even be able to achieve that. Simple physics shows that acceleration to those speeds, followed by the need to decelerate back to relative rest, cannot be done by carrying and expelling reaction mass, even when that mass is expelled at close to light speed.

    Sure, I know people will quote unknown, yet to be discovered physics. Might as well say it will be done by magic.

    I can see just one way that might be practical to travel to another galaxy.

    Imagine an advanced society with highly advanced electronic 'brains' plus highly advanced robots. If those machines are 'hardened' to enable them to survive millions of years of travel - probably while switched off - then it might be done. The intergalactic traveller accelerates to, say 0.1 c to 0.2 c, then coasts. The controlling electronic brains switch on every few million years to adjust navigation. Otherwise the ship is 'dead'.

    On arrival, the brains wake up and decelerate the ship, and take it in to its chosen target star system. At that stage, the brains build a machine to make humans. This is done from the human genome that is stored in the memory of the electronic brain.

    In this way, no person has to travel intergalactically. The electronics and robots do the travelling, and a new human is built from stored information at site.
     
  22. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    Well it's a lot more than that, one would have to raise and educate the kids.
    A formidable task for any robot.
     
  23. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    I came across this: http://www.springerlink.com/content/q62r2x1gk84j2348/

    I've looked through it, and I'm totally lost after the intro, but it seems to be an experiment designed to detect relativistic effects on chemical reactions.

    Here's the intro

    I also understood this from the conclusion section.


    I think I understand that, but I hate chemistry. That and biology are just too damn complicated. Physics is simple.
     
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