If I remember correctly, Nouns in German are capitalised.
Not randomly. 
In the US, both SpaceX and Orbital Sciences perform ISS resupply missions, though SpaceX is the only one (of all of these) that can return a significant payload.
It’s not because he’s German, then.
A had a Clerk who Capitalized Words that She Wanted to Emphasise.
She was a lunatic.
Largely agrees with my OP.
Plus, as Lumpy noted, there may actually be more dust than we realize out there.
If I can TL;DR my OP a little bit, you can imagine we are all ants inside an ant farm. Contained within the ant farm are other ants, sand, and provided by an outside source, food. However, there’s nothing inside the ant farm which allows the ants the ability to escape the ant farm, and for the purposes of this thought experiment, the top is also completely sealed. They can’t make any complex machinery out of the dirt inside the ant farm, and they can’t break the glass.
No matter how smart the ants get, they cannot escape. They might be able to imagine a way to break the glass using materials they cannot reproduce inside the ant farm, but it is not useful information to them.
The ants could become way, way smarter than we are, but their genius is theoretical. Using just the dirt in the ant farm, they can’t escape it.
That is the conundrum we face. We do not have access to the kind of energy sources we would need to generate warp drives or wormholes.
We might be able to push the ant farm, using conventional means, very slowly, to the nearest star system, but it will be many generations of being inside the same structure, filled with people who you might encounter on Earth.
That, ultimately, is a proposition I find far more dangerous than slamming into dust, and just as inevitably dooming. Once you start running into the idea of thousands of years contained within a tiny structure, you have to picture this project being started by Julius Caesar and still going on today, with no major hiccups, and the only geography involved being an extremely small structure moving through space, with no help, and no breaks, and no backup plans.
We can’t even agree what language we should speak for a thousand years, and we have the entire planet to roam freely on.
Imagine the kind of fascist laws required to get people to behave on this vessel. Basically it is a prison ship, and the alternative is to be turned into matter that gets recycled. Life as we understand it will be so dreary and hopeless that death will be preferable.
Get nine people to live in a tiny trailer, and also, never step outside the trailer, and make sure that 200 years from now, there are *still *precisely nine people in the trailer, each eminently qualified to keep everyone else alive in that trailer. Put that trailer in orbit, with no access to recrew or resupply.
That’s only 200 years, nine people, and in orbit around Earth, so people could theoretically abort the mission.
There is no aborting interstellar travel except by destroying the ship or all the people on it. It might even be a mercy.
For the purposes of the thought experiment, which I admit is just a hasty metaphor, you’d have to also suggest that they can’t slowly damage the glass over time with a pebble by scraping the glass over and over. The glass is meant to represent the barrier that near-light speed represents, not an actual physical barrier you can scratch away.
To offer a contrary opinion:
I think it would not be so different from what humans experienced for much of their existence.
Humans spent much of their evolution in tribes of perhaps 150 people. This is of course just Dunbar’s number. At this level, explicit laws are superfluous: everyone knows their role in the group, and everyone knows what the others are up to.
There is no more need for a prison as there would be in any other human tribe. Hunter-gatherer groups had exile as an option when peer pressure failed; the ship has the airlock (exile is no less a death sentence, though perhaps slower).
For population control, when other methods have failed, there is infanticide and senicide. Neither are unheard of in pre-modern societies (admittedly, “push grandpa onto the ice floe” is largely mythical).
Obviously, such a group would have to be homogeneous. One would not want the social fabric of the ship splitting due to such differences as skin color or religion. Diversity is not a luxury one could afford here.
All this sounds fairly brutal to modern ears, but people lived and thrived under such conditions for hundreds of thousands of years. Life was not so dreary and miserable that they couldn’t produce art, music, dance, and other cultural artifacts. People living today in similar tribes seem to be reasonably happy (despite not having certain luxuries that our ship-dwellers would have).
I wonder whether it would be wise to supply them with Earth culture or not. Obviously most of us today would want access to modern culture if we were to be trapped in a vessel for the rest of our lives, but it might be too much of a distraction. The Amish, for instance, eschew these things partly because they divert attention from the group. I could see some value in cutting off access.
Old saw: If a respected scientist tells us something is possible, he’s likely to be right. If he tells us something is impossible, take it with a grain of salt. Unless it involves violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics, of course. 
Good news! Time travel isn’t actually forbidden by the laws of physics!* However, regarding your second conjecture, since you’re the only Martian Bigfoot, it’s ruled out by the laws of mathematics, assuming we rule out interspecies sex and masturbation.
- well, except possibly for that pesky second law of thermodynamics.
Sorry, but replicators are really out of the question, thanks to information theory, that pesky 2nd law, and the uncertainty principle. Plus, the energy requirements are truly astronomical, though that’s just a technical limitation.
I don’t think you thought this through. The energy of a collision goes up as the square of speed. Remember mv^2? that’s velocity squared. SQUARED. The difference in energy of a dust particle collision at 6M mph and 600M mpg is a factor of 10,000.
However, going faster doesn’t change the probability, assuming the same length of trip. Actually, it reduces the odds of a collision that’s not head-on.
I realize this is a zombie thread, but cite?
Not according to NASA.
We do this all the time, though. Clearly, you won’t be the one in the hot seat. This is a good argument against your not going, but it’s no argument against it ever happening.
Do you ever get in a car and drive somewhere? You’re taking your life in your hands!
Well put.
Tangent, which some may find interesting. Have you ever wondered why Roman buildings, bridges, and aqueducts are still around? Answer: because they couldn’t do the math. They didn’t know about the parallelogram of forces, or the math of probability, etc. Roman emperors who commissioned big public works had limited budgets, but also couldn’t be seen to fail, so they overbuilt. If they could have done the math, the results of most of those projects probably wouldn’t have lasted more than a few centuries; instead they’d have built more of them.
I think you’re underestimating ants!
Elsewhere (I thought I’d clicked it), you commented on the fact that transmitting information over long distances couldn’t be done reliably. In fact, this is a simple problem solved long ago, and since improved dramatically (from a practical standpoint, not theoretical) with digital technology. The bottom line is that, given the bandwidth (in bits per second), message length (in bits), and required probability of success (say, 99.9999%), it’s just a matter of well-known engineering to choose the ideal error-correcting encoding scheme and calculate how long it’d take to send the message. (Simply repeating the message would be the ignorant way, wasting enormous amounts of bandwidth. We have far better error correction techniques, including those that do not rely on bidirectional communication. For example, the information on a CD is encoded in such a way that surprisingly large amounts of it can be corrupted before we hear audio dropouts.)
IMHO, it’s foolish to feel certain in matters like this. However, I suspect that humans aren’t ever likely to step foot on a planet of another solar system, and if they do, we probably wouldn’t recognize them as human. But I wouldn’t go any further than stating it as a suspicion. I’ve been very wrong about far simpler questions.
I will go out on a limb, though, in saying I’m pretty confident it won’t happen in my lifetime (I’m 57 and healthy, so say, the next 30 years with average luck). I’d take a pretty long bet on that. So, I’ll never know whether you’re right or wrong. But I also bet that we learn quite a few things in my lifetime that will sway the odds in one direction or the other.
Only fools are certain. Of that, I’m certain.
I say we wait for the next rogue star to pass by our Oort Cloud, build some colonies around it and ride it wherever it’s going. That would count, wouldn’t it?
A generation ship to Tau Ceti would actually be faster.
Yeah, but I think a cluster of large colonies around a star would be safer and more stable than a gen-ship that is Lord of the Flies just waiting to happen.
Sure–but for the purposes of your thought experiment, the pebble represents the way that future ants figure out to get past the barrier that near-light-speed represents.
I go back to what I said last time this thread was up. Ask Archimedes the greatest distance over which a human voice can be heard, and he’s likely to imagine a massive megaphone. He might be able to build something that amplifies a voice to be heard, I dunno, let’s spitball it, ten miles away. Shit, let’s make it 50 miles, Archimedes was a goddamned genius.
Ask him if it’s possible to create a device that allows a speaker in Athens to speak and be heard by an audience in Gaul, and he’ll pull out immensely intricate math to prove to you why that’s physically impossible.
What he won’t do is posit the telephone.
You’re looking at today’s Archimedes in order to show why tomorrow’s inventors won’t solve problems. I say that’s unjustified.
You can forget about warp drive or Alcubierre drive!!
The Alcubierre warp drive is only one of the theoretical propulsion systems NASA is speculating about ( http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/ideachev_prt.htm ), and it has many problems. It would require negative mass (not the same thing as antimatter), which we have no reason to suppose exists, and it’s thought that, although the Alcubierre metric is a Lorentzian manifold (allowed by General Relativity), it would not be allowed by a quantum theory of gravity. Another objection is that it would need to be powered by a ridiculous amount of negative energy (which may not be something which can exist), equivalent (-E = -mc^2) to more negative mass than the equivalent positive mass of the entire Universe.
But, supposing there was a way round the various problems, what effect would the AWD have on the space around it? The warp bubble boundary would generate enormous tidal forces which would be catastrophic for any nearby body, and it’s also thought that it would create a shockwave of highly energetic particles in front of it which would destroy whatever was at its destination.
But there are problems with warp drive so don’t think by the year 2050 or 2090 we will have warp drive.
An Alcubierre Drive or warp drive is potentially quite dangerous, and could even blow up planets and star systems like the Death Star could
If you activate a ‘warp’ drive in space, you may think you’re not bringing along any hitch-hikers, but in reality a lot high energy particles are whizzing past your spacecraft. When you activate the drive it expands the space behind you and contracts space in front, and the spacecraft is in a stable position in a kind of ‘bubble’, this bubble is the problem. It traps the high-energy particles mentioned earlier, and on a long trip the particles can build up enough energy that when the Alcubierre Drive is disengaged the particles will shoot out in front of the ship, easily capable of obliterating planets and even stars! Thankfully the high-energy particles won’t interfere with space travel, only when it stops traveling.
For more info look at this website
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140635-the-downside-of-warp-drives-annihilating-whole-star-systems-when-you-arrive
Also, it’s probably dangerous to use an alcubierre drive in close proximity to large amounts of matter because, much like the particles, can get trapped in the bubble and cause damage to the ship.
I thought virtual particle pairs with negative mass/energy had something to do with Hawking radiation. All you need is a spinning event horizon or something, right? 
I’ll throw my 2 cubic zircons into this zombie thread: assuming we figure a way to propel ourselves across the vast distances (using robots, harvesting comets, or anti-matter whatever)… I think I read something about using water to shield/diffuse radiation.
My “big” contribution to this thread: we grow ships. We are on the threshold of growing skin, organs etc. A ship that can regrow its skin could have a mile deep skin that continuously regrows itself as teeny sand-like bits of matter wear them down. Throw in non-skin layers. Bigger holes would be first closed over with a “scab” and then filled in over time.
We just have to figure out a way to convert common asteroid/comets/space debris into a layer between the “skin”.
Maybe we shouldn’t do that, then.
I thought the “enormous mass” objection had been refuted by later formulations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Mass.E2.80.93energy_requirement
Once we get the dilithium crystals, we can have a warp drive.