http://www.astronomyinfo.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/FasterthanLight.htm
here’s the site were I got the numbers.
I’d like to go there quickly, because from my selfish viewpoint I want to know what’s out there! It doesn’t do any of us currently alive much good to send a starship that takes 1000 years to get where it’s going.
And practically speaking, unless the Earth was under some immediate grave threat I don’t think you’ll see the political will to spend huge resources on a highly risky flight into the unknown that we won’t even know succeeded for a thousand years. It’ll never happen.
And then there’s that other equation I mentioned - no one’s going to launch a 1000 year mission, because there will be assumption that as technology advances we’ll keep passing the ships already in flight.
Wouldn’t you feel silly to build a huge generation starship, only to find a way to go ten times as fast in 100 years? There was a Heinlein novel called “Time for the Stars” that touched on this - they sent a number of ships out at once on very dangerous trips to explore the nearest stars. The ships travelled close to the speed of light, so 10 or 20 or 30 years would pass on earth between each stop at a star, although subjective time on the ship was only a few months. As they came close to ‘C’, they’d be unable to communicate with Earth because of the extreme time dilation, so they’d drop out of touch for a decade or two.
Anyway, after they’d been gone for about 60 years, they came out of a blackout period to find that there were hundreds of starships, and all the planets they were supposed to be mapping were already mapped. Basically, they were just picked up en-route and shipped home.
I honestly don’t see how you people cannot see the implications that warping space has…
Sure, it may be off the wall for quite some time, but when we go to other stars, it will be the preferred method of travel…
Why travel at .5c or even 1.0c when you can skip half of the distance involved. Travelling straight through space is for losers… Jump distances = way to go… let’s see…
I don’t have the slightest clue what the numbers would be for this, (Physicists please help me out.) Even at 1.0c a star 12 light years away would take 12 years to reach. If you warp space, depending on the degree of warp, you could reach that place in 1 year, maybe a few months, because you aren’t going through linear space. You are bending space, and then jumping where you bent the space…
I can’t believe you people haven’t read A Wrinkle in Time…
For example:
An Ant can travel through space in the linear fashion and take 12 years to get to planet A
Ant-------------------------------------------------------------------Planet A
By warping space, you bend the space in half, and just jump the distance. Sure it’s not possible today, but sleeper ships etc. will be pointless once this technology is developed.
Ant----- Planet A
|
| Extra Linear Space compressed and warped, thereby
| reducing the amount of time necessary to travel to
| Planet A
|
|
|
We should stay in the solar system until something that allows for interstellar travel in a reasonable amount of time is developed… Otherwise, it’s pretty pointless to even try. I mean seriously… who would want to wake up 10,000 years from now, not even be able to know if there was a native civilization there. Would have no clue what happened on Earth, if the rest of humanity was still there. I know I wouldn’t…
I think we all understand the concept of warping space. What we don’t agree on is whether or not there is any point in talking about it today. We don’t know if it’s ever going to be possible. And if it is, it’ll be with a technology we don’t even know about today. So talking about it might be fun, but it’s just a distraction from the real issues.
Everything you’ve always wanted to know about the Alpha Centauri system* (*but were too afraid to ask):
http://www.stellar-database.com/Scripts/search_star.exe?Name=Alpha+Centauri
Sign me up. I don’t care if I get to go as a popsicle or if I die of old age. Just send me.
Nobody would deny that there would be profound implications. The problem is that most people don’t believe it’s possible at all. I mean, it’s possible to warp space but it’s extremely likely that a “shortcut” or “tunnel” can exist at all, let alone be created artificially. When scientists say “it might be possible,” we usually mean “we can’t prove that it’s impossible, and in the meantime it’s fun to dream about this possibility.”
And I suppose Columbus should have stayed in Europe till the invention of the jet airliner? (Sorry for the cliche’.)
Sorry, I meant “it’s extremely unlikely that … can exist at all”.
Alien2022 (How many of you are there?), again I applaud your optimism. I also understand the principle of warp space.
Are you aware how little the sun warps space, on a “useful” scale? Localised warping would require a colossal amount of energy.
Again I ask: “What would a ship which could travel through the sun be made of?”
I don’t think it would be possible to construct a through-sun ship of matter alone; whatever smart materials we developed, the temperature and pressure at the sun’s core would destroy them; you’d need some sort of ‘shield’, which of course the technology of the future will manage to produce just fine (Don’t ask how they’ll manage; that’s their problem, not mine :rolleyes: ).
Wouldn’t it also be reasonable to assume that any method of warping space involves folding parts of the universe (albeit not in our resident three spatial dimensions) - wouldn’t the force required to bend space in such a way involve the expenditure of energy equivalent to moving all the stuff contained in the universe?
By way of explanation; you have a ten-metre strip of walpaper lying flat on the ground - this will represent a two-dimensional universe)- to end A of the strip is attached a weight (representing the mass of the part of the universe where we live), to end B is attached another weight (representing the mass of the part of the universe where we want to go). In order to bend the universe (fold the strip in half), we have to apply work to the atttached weights.
IMHO, The best we could hope for is that the universe is already folded up in some sort of meta-concertina fashion then we ‘only’ need to find out how to break across the folds (they’ll find a way in the future, I’m sure of it, but don’t ask how…)
You know, this kind of eager beaver optimism makes it unusually hard to get too riled up. I’m more of the jaded optimistic with broad moments of cynisism. 
But for the love of god STOP ASSUMING WE HAVE NO CLUE what we’re talking about. Basing a discussion on future human interstellar exploration on OMNI and a wrinkle in time lacks…perspective? the ability to see that just because it’s not ruled out doesn’t make it ruled in? We all agree that WOW! That would be cool! WOW! That would help. WOW! We haven’t the foggiest idea how/if we could do it.
I’ll stop now.
Back to the topic at hand this travel is going to be more of a seeding than a founding of a great planet spanning confederation. The time to ship materials from star to star is too great. Even communications are bogged down by years of delay. It’ll be lonely. Exciting as all hell, but lonely.
Indeed, in fact it may be the case that the only viable “seeds” are mere stable amino acid chains, peptide links and DNA strands.
(theremin with reverb)
Ok, so, hoswabout this: We detonate one of those Weapons of Mass Destruction I keep hearing about near our spacecraft. Mass problem solved. Accelerate spacecraft, now sans Mass, to superluminal speeds. No muss, no fuss. 
You GUYS!–
It’s not like the “time slowdown effect” is some wild theory. This stuff is standard physics!
Accelerate to some approximation of C at the rate of 1 G–the universe is ours.
And I wasn’t spinning my dental plates when talked about Them. I find it hard to understand those who neglect the very great probability that all these secrets have been solved billions of years ago. We’re just waiting for the other side to accept the long-distance call.
I do not regard the preceding paragraph as incautious optimism, but something fairly close to logical certainty.
Is interstellar travel possible? Maybe, but it will be in the distant future, past our lifetime.
Lets plan a trip to Pluto. Pluto is about 3 Billion miles from Earth. Light travels at 86,000 miles per second. It takes 34883 seconds or about 9 1/2 hours for LIGHT to travel to Pluto. In relation to the galaxy, going from Earth to Pluto is a walk across the street.
Humanity can only really travel to Mars anyway. We cannot go to the “big” planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune because they are gas giants, and the toxins and the extreme heat from the atmosphere would destroy any ship or people that came into contact with it.
Humanity can land on the various moons of these gas giants, but what would they find? Rock? Probobly nothing. Also without a handy website as a guide, the trip from saturn to Earth is still about 4 light hours long.
Not to mention that between Mars and Jupiter is a nasty asteroid belt that would have to be navigated.
I have seen pictures of Mars. It looks like Arizona without people. “Terraforming” (a Star Trek word) is beyond humanities grasp.
By the time humanity figures out how to travel these complex distances, we will either die out, or Jesus will return and give us a lesson in love and quantum mechanics.
Terraforming would be an enormously complex endeavor, and we don’t know enough about how planets as integrated chemo-meteoro-oceano-geo-hydro-humo-thermodynamo-vulcano-logical systems work to be certain of the results. But we can be reasonably certain that we can “improve” the present conditions on Mars, in terms of human liveability, by some relatively simple if major-effort steps.
As for the moons, aside from the tiny stuff like Phobos, Ananke, and Nereid, “just rocks” probably comes best to describing Luna as opposed to anything else. The active geo/meteorologies of Io and Titan and the whatchamacallafrozenoceanology of Europa are fascinating from a scientific standpoint and will probably produce some objectively economically valuable results in time.
And from what I’ve seen of the available data, the danger of flying a ship through the asteroid belt at achievable speed is about that of flying an airplane cross-country – there are possible dangers, but they’re few and far between, and avoidable.
The problem with a landing on a gas giant, presuming the possibility of doing so, would be more its gravitational field than anything you suggest (what toxins? what heat?), but there are any number of interesting things that can be accomplished short of a landing (how about a one-way probe to hang in Jupiter’s atmosphere beneath an ultratough balloon, transmitting its findings to a ship in Joviostationary orbit?).
I don’t know. If there are civilizations out there who have solved the riddle of interstellar travel, why would they share there knowledget with us? Any contact we make will almost certainly be with cultures millions of years ahead of us. That means we’ll be as interesting to them as a piece of cardboard is to us.
Just out of curiosity, what numbers would you people assign to the coeficients in Drake’s equation?, remember, the one that estimates the number of civilizations who’re transmitting or have transmitted signals through space?.
N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L
Where,
N = The number of civilizations in The Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
R* =The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems. more info
ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life. more info
fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges. For more information, please visit Dr. William Calvin’s “The Drake Equation’s fi”
fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
the Drake equation details I cut and pasted from this site:
The problem is that with current levels of technology, interstellar colonization would be astoundingly expensive. Plus, at this moment, we have no idea of where to go. All the current exo-solar planets we’ve discovered at this point are inhospitable Jovian-type worlds. When we discover an Earthlike planet around some other star, I think you’ll see a more serious push for such things. Hopefully by that time, we’ll have a more feasible form of propulsion than chemical rockets.
Um I thought that the reason they only found Jovian type worlds was because thats the only kind they can detect. (they look for the orbit ripple to find planets, right?)
I don’t think Colonizing other star systems would be very hard at all once we improve Nano Technology. They could then send out self replicating probes that Terraform and build structures on any planet it finds that can be. They could send out those probes, wait a hundred years or so for better tech and then send out a colonisation ship. By the time they get there, the planet should be ready.