How close are we to long distance space travel?

[Alee Enn]

I don't want to say Star Trek, but that is what I am thinking of.
I also don't want to say faster than light travel as there may be other ways.

But the question is how close are we to travelling to other stars, like the exo-planets we keep discovering and getting to them quick enough so that a person can get there and back in time for dinner (as opposed to it taking so long the person dies before they get there, thus defeating the purpose)?

What problems do we have to overcome?
Is travelling to other stars nice and quickly even possible?
How long would it take us to develop the required technology?
Will we see progress in our lifetime?

Are there other questions I haven't thought of?

[felter]

cost?

[Alee Enn]

That is a good point, but let's take into account how much money NASA has spent ever since it's beginnings as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (which still exists afaik) I think it's fair to say we can say that "money is no object" ie we don't worry about how much it would cost as we are not talking about long distance space travel before the decade is out (like JFK's speech that inspired the moon landing in1969).

We should also assume that long distance space travel would be a project involving the whole world and not just the USA.

[A5PECT]

a project involving the whole world and not just the USA.

That's your limiting factor right there.

[Alee Enn]

I disagree, the International Space Station already is a collaboration of several countries, admittedly led by the US, but Russia and China are involved in the project.

Please try not to be pessimistic, the glass is half full.

[A5PECT]

I'm not saying the situation is terrible, but there's still a good deal of work to be done in terms of international unity. A lot of that has to be dealt with in order to make headway with the development of space travel.

[amtct]

Please try not to be pessimistic, the glass is half full.

Pessimistic or not ,with money or without money humans (americans or other type of human ) don't have that tech yet and all the money in the world won't give you new inventions like the tech from Star Trek .

I had a s*** day

[Alee Enn]

Pessimistic or not ,with money or without money humans (americans or other type of human ) don't have that tech yet and all the money in the world won't give you new inventions like the tech from Star Trek .

I had a s*** day

Physicists have made the first (and I mean very first) steps towards a phaser, teleportation and FTL travel.

So, thou formerly known as amtct, Star Trek tech is already coming.

[amtct]

IPads or mobile phones even though are very "trekie" things are not what would put you on the orbit or move you in your life time on a different planet.

Remember that to travel on the Moon and back it takes @6 days...that's a week to get on a thing that you can see on the sky.It would take over a year to go on Mars.I'll go for "spend all the money in the world" when I'll be sure someone can build something that can go to the nearest star and back in a human life (not in 1000 years) or when someone will find a way to build a so called "generation ship" which should be a huge ship though it would be ridiculous to send few thousands people and after 2 years you can still talk with them using radio or see them using a amateur telescope

I'd say the first step is a Moon Base ...hope they will call it Alpha

So, thou formerly known as amtct....

[Chobittsu]

We'll have an extrasolar probe launched by 2050, manned colonization of the inner solar system by 2100. Gas and Ice Giants by 2300. Outer Solar System exploration by 2400. Other stars explored? at this rate, never. If everything goes perfectly? 3000.

[Redvers Ganderpoke]

I'd say the first step is a Moon Base ...hope they will call it Alpha

And how many years is that past it's fictional date?

[RefocusedLight]

Actually i half-expect a race into space v2.0

The Western plutocrats of course are terrified of the possibility of earth ceasing to be a self-contained arena for them to be the top of the food chain - but trouble is, China and India are well on the way of pulling off serious space projects which i freaking bet are in the name of good old expansionistic imperial thinking - so if the trash doesn't want to be left behind they will be forced to do more than Ponzi schemes.

[Usenko]

I'd say Gas and Ice giants will be colonised long before we send an extrasolar probe. The distances we're talking about are immense.

The thing I would note is that few people truly understand how far away another sun is. Let's make that clear.

Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun, is 4.22 light years away. Now, as far as we are aware, it has no planets, so a probe to this star would be of very little value; but since it's so close, let's work out how long it'd take to get there.

We'll assume we're using regular chemical rockets rather than something fancy like an ion drive. Further, we'll assume the probe is going at the speed of New Horizons, which is the fastest object ever flown (currently at 16,260 m/s relative to Earth). Just to make the maths easy, we'll pretend that the star and the Earth were stationary objects rather than orbiting, and that the distance from the Sun to Proxima is the same as that between Earth and proxima (which is actually untrue - remember that some objects within the solar system are 30 years travel away!).

Okay, so the stars are 4.22 light years away. Light travels 300,000,000 m/s. And there are 31,556,926 seconds in a year. So the distance we have to cover is (300,000,000 x 31,556,926) x 4.22 - this is (let me get my calculator out) 39,951,068,316,000,000 metres.

New Horizons is travelling 16,260 m/s, so let's calculate its distance in a year. It's 513,115,616,760 metres per year. That's a big distance, of course. So now we can see that it will take 77,859.778 years for our probe to reach Proxima.

Perspective time - the Bible was written about 5000 years ago. That's a trivial time frame compared to this number. Entire cultures have risen and fallen in that time, and it's still peanuts compared to how long our probe will have to travel (plus its signals will have to travel 4.22 years to reach us!).

Now, the aforementioned ion drive and other projected power systems might be able to shave some time off that journey, but they'll need to get probes orders of magnitude faster before they'll be any use in interstellar distances.

[Rive]

Well, within 20-25 years it can be possible to launch a nuclear powered long range probe with 30-50 years length of acceleration (with some kind of ion drive).

Within 30-40 years, maybe we can launch some more of them, with some kind of direct fusion drive.

But that's the top we can predict based on the actual science.

[blazer1121]

Well with the way laws sit at the moment that prevents private businesses exploiting space by sending ships out and gathering resources, Nations not being allowed to claim extra terrestrial objects as their own.....
Not a lot is gonna happen for a really long time.
Without the understanding of quantum mechanics to bend space time so that us at point A are right next to destination point B, it's impossible to get from one star to another in a realistic amount of time.
Even at the speed of light it takes too long to travel that sort of distance and the amount of energy required to propel a ship to that sort of speed is well beyond what humanity is capable of yet.

But who knows, maybe the CERN guys will bring some good results in terms of their neutrino research
Already got particles faster than light.... Who knows what they might stumble on

[amtct]

But who knows, maybe the CERN guys will bring some good results in terms of their neutrino research

And those will help because....?

Already got particles faster than light.... Who knows what they might stumble on

Which particles?
Are you talking about CERN the one in Europe or SciFi CERN the one in Hollywood?

And how many years is that past it's fictional date?

I don't know what you mean by that.

[blazer1121]

But who knows, maybe the CERN guys will bring some good results in terms of their neutrino research

And those will help because....?

Already got particles faster than light.... Who knows what they might stumble on

Which particles?
Are you talking about CERN the one in Europe or SciFi CERN the one in Hollywood?

It will help because being able to understand how the universe works helps us to manipulate it. In this case, knowing that there are particles faster than light means further research can be done to discover how, maybe one day a method that allows us to do it will be possible?

A neutrino is a sub atomic particle faster than light.
In an experiment that CERN conducted they were measured moving faster than light. The experiment was refined and they got the same results.

I'm talking about CERN the European Organization of Nuclear Research. The people who have the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.

[amtct]

It will help because being able to understand how the universe works helps us to manipulate it. In this case, knowing that there are particles faster than light means further research can be done to discover how, maybe one day a method that allows us to do it will be possible?

A neutrino is a sub atomic particle faster than light.
In an experiment that CERN conducted they were measured moving faster than light. The experiment was refined and they got the same results.

I'm talking about CERN the European Organization of Nuclear Research. The people who have the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.

I don't want to stop your research but neutrinos don't travel faster than light

[brucewarren]

It's precisely because of the staggeringly huge distances that all sci-fi
is stuffed with FTL travel, jump gates, witch space, warp drive etc.
Complete fantasy but a plot device designed to get around the problem
of lightspeed being a hard limit.

Unless (if ever) someone finds a way to do what is currently believed
impossible, we going nowhere.

Generation ships sound cool in fiction , but a ship that takes so long to get
to it's destination that it's gone Nova before it arrives is worthless, even
assuming that there isn't a civil war on board due to the staggeringly
dull journey.

Personally I don't believe in the light speed limit, but that's because I'm
pig-headed and just plain wrong
Everyone else says it's not possible to even get close and that being so
we are stuck.

[pjknibbs]

I think the major issue here is not cost, it's the minor detail that it's physically impossible to travel faster than light according to our current understanding of physics--an understanding that has withstood every test thrown at it for the best part of a century now. If there was a loophole in relativity I'm sure it would have been noticed by now!