“All around us are tiny doors that lead to the rest of the Universe. Predicted by Einstein’s equations, these quantum wormholes offer a faster-than-light short cut to the rest of the cosmos - at least in principle. Now physicists believe they could open these doors wide enough to allow someone to travel through.”
There is much we have to learn about the Universe.
My prediction is that we would not use a “space ship” to travel due to the objections raised by other posters. Instead, someone will figure out something very different. (I know, that prediction is about as concrete as my astrological forecast, but you get the idea!)
“Nah, we’ll never sail around the world. We’ll never achieve transoceanic travel and we’ll never have technology advanced enough to build a ship that can acutually travel several thousand leagues without being dashed by storms or eaten by sea monsters.”
“Nah, we’ll never fly around the world. We’ll never achieve intercontinental travel and we’ll never have technology advanced enough to fly from New York to Paris without an engine failure.”
“Nah, we’ll never fly to the moon. We’ll never achieve space travel and we’ll never have technology advanced enough to go across several hundred thousand kilometers of vacuum without critical failure.”
See a pattern here?
There’s no saying whether or when we’ll develop some kind of superluminal propulsion. Certainly, even the most grounded proposals lack a substantial chunk of technology to give actualization to their concepts. There’s certainly no pressing need, resource-wise, to attempt to do so, and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future. But never say never.
In any case, exploration need not be done by bodies. We didn’t insist on sending bodies to Jupiter or Saturn; it would have been far to prohibitive in cost. We sent very crude information-gathering machines, that worked suprisingly well, far beyond expectation. We, or at least the scientific community and the general population who supports and celebrates a greater understanding of the natural world, have a passion for knowing more about the universe.
As opposed to all those non-western countries that are just zooming all over space? What does this have to do with CEO’s of American Corporations? The job of corporations is to generate wealth, make profits and pay taxes that fund programs such as NASA. When there is a good possibilty for a profit to be made from space travel, I can guarantee you that corporations be fighting each other to be the first to do it directly. Until then, their existence lets us have agencies like NASA.
Yes, I see a pattern, and that’s exactly the problem; I see patterns when I stare at the clouds too - it’s what humans do; see patterns and connections where there are in fact none present. None of your examples are even more than tenuously dependent on each other, let alone related to the problems of interstellar transport.
FTL travel isn’t a problem of technology, it’s a problem of physics - it isn’t like the olden day guys who thought that your breath would be sucked away if you travelled at more than 20mph - they pulled that idea fully formed out of their collective asses - the speed of light as an absolute maximum is not comparable; it’s part of the physics that underpins vast swathes of our scientific understanding of the universe; if that turns out of be wrong, pretty much all of physics for the last half century would need to be rewritten (and replaced with something that explains it all equally well). Suddenly discovering that FTL travel is possible would be like discovering you’d been living with a herd of elephants all your life, but never happened to notice them.
You’re assuming that something is going to happen to earth but this is not necessarily the case. In 5000 million years the sun will expand and swallow the earth so what we need to do is stop the sun expanding. This sounds like a tall order but, in principle, we already know what to do.
The reason the sun expands is because it continually creates new material and eventually it will burn itself out so all we need to do is remove stuff from the sun and cast it off into space. We can then regulate the size of the sun and make it as big or as small as we want. The sun is hot but we’ve already landed machines on Mercury that can withstand the heat of a Mercury day.
So we know what to do and we’ve got 5 billion years to figure out how to do it.
But we are outgrowing earth. Even if it exists for a million billion years the fact is it’s getting too small for us. And it’s supposedly mans ultimate dream to collonise the universe. So even if we can make the earth last for a couple of billion years. we will still put every effort into figuring out how to collonise the galaxy a-la asimov’s foundation universe.
You seem to think that this sentence somehow invalidates my reasoning, but I’m not clear how it does so. Please clarify.
They’re the ones who are deciding whether American corporations will invest in space travel and colonization efforts. Since American corporations control the lion’s share of the wealth that’s available for investment into ambitious projects, that means the executives of those corporations decide whether there will be expensive space exploration projects or not.
As I’ve already mentioned, corporations will only do it if there’s short-term profit in it, and there won’t ever be a short-term profit in projects such as exploring and colonizing Mars, much less in getting out of the Solar System. Corporations do not invest in things that take a generation to pay off. The size of an executive’s bonus depends on how much money they made in a given year, not on whether they set the company up to be profitable fifteen years down the road.
Yes, and in almost fifty years NASA has yet to break out of Earth orbit, for reasons I explained in my first post.
Ulysses. Cassini. Mariner [n]. Pioneer 10 & 11. Deep Space 1. Viking 1 & 2. Mars Global Surveyer. Magellan. Voyager 1 & 2.
All have broken Earth orbit, and a few have gone on to escape the grasp of Sol, as well. And that’s just counting NASA’s probes. Other nations have launched equally ambitious missions. They’re just baby steps, of course, but then, we’re just infants. We’ve barely just come down from the trees and stopped picking lice off of each other and we’re an eye’s blink away from rubbing sticks together to start a fire.
Don’t restrict your thinking to Star Trek-esque space opera. Before we send human beings into space for long periods, we have to figure out how to better protect them…or build better beings. At any rate, the resouces available are enormous. The first entity, be it a competative government or a far-looking corporation, who gets a toe-hold will break the dam. The investment is nothing short of colossal, but the rewards are, uh, astronomical.
And as for exploring interstellar space…time will tell.