Is Interstellar Travel Impossible?

[Lemur]

I found this an incredibly depressing read. Charles Stross sketches out the practicalities of interstellar travel, and outlines why it's impossible without breaking known laws of physics.

The long and the short of what I'm trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic — magic tech that, furthermore, does things that from today's perspective appear to play fast and loose with the laws of physics — interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter. And while I won't rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil.

If you've got some time to kill, I strongly suggest you give the full essay a read. It's well-written, and translates a lot of potentially jargon-filled concepts into good, plain English.

So what do the Orgahs think? If we discovered a rocky planet in the Goldilocks zone a few light-years away, could we even get to it? Will we be able to eye it as real estate?

Is Stross's contention valid, or is he like Sir William Thomson, who proved mathematically that a steamboat could never cross the Atlantic?

[GeneralHankerchief]

Obviously, I haven't read the entire article yet, but from your post I get the gist of what he's saying.

Unfortunately, he's right.

So far (unless you count hypothetical tachyon particles), it's been pretty much proven that light is the galactic speed limit. The nearest star is something like 4.3 light years away, so even if we somehow manage to load up a massive rocket with enough people to make colonization worthwhile and enough provisions to make the trip and life self-sustaining (damn near impossible in itself) travel at the speed of light, those people will be on their own.

Now, that's just the closest star. Imagine if there are no habitable planets orbiting it. That means we have to go even further out, but we can't go too much further. Remember, the people colonizing further planets have to be able to live there, so the trip can't take too long. Problem is, the Milky Way has a radius of approximately 50,000 light years. We are in a fairly uncrowded sector of the galaxy, meaning there are less stars to pick and choose from. And some of those stars won't work at all, regardless of whether or not there are planets. The giant stars and above, the ones that go "boom" when they die, emit so much deadly radiation that planets would be uninhabitable. Also, despite their sizes, their life cycles are only one to two million years, so we'd just have to pack up and move again.

If we're going to colonize, it's going to be in our solar system, namely Mars. The Mars Society does a pretty good job of explaining how we can terraform the planet. It's not just science-fiction. Here's their promotional video on Youtube.

[Shahed]

The problem is that the author is living in the present and projecting current norms onto the future.

UTTER NONSENSE.

[Marshal Murat]

I don't know. I'm waiting for wormholes.

[Mikeus Caesar]

General - the problem with Mars is that it's atmosphere is only 2% of the density of Earth, so even if we could terraform it, nothing above a simple moss would be able to live there.

Venus on the other hand, while being more of a challenge, does have a higher chance. It's got a good (if rather overheated atmosphere) and is the same size as Earth! And how is it more of a challenge? Because it has no hydrogen!

Face it - unless we wear suits while outside and live in pressurised bubble cities, the colonisation of other planets is impossible. Unless we do somehow come up with interstellar travel and find another planet similar to Earth, we're doomed. Doomed i tells ya.

[GeneralHankerchief]

General - the problem with Mars is that it's atmosphere is only 2% of the density of Earth, so even if we could terraform it, nothing above a simple moss would be able to live there.

I forget the exact specifics, but Robert Zubrin, the founder of the Mars Society, proposed some machine that could send gas over or even make it on-site. A quick skim of the Wiki page says something about shuttling gas over from Earth.

Not exactly efficient, but it'll get the job done.

[Shahed]

Right now, we cannot achieve this. Now talk about 10,000 years from now. How about 30,000 years. The universe is infinite, therefore time is infinite. If we survive long enough, we will have the means to travel light years, taking our preferred habitat (McDonald's & Britney Spears) with us !

What are the laws of physics ? Have they changed in the past 1000 years ? Yes our understanding of the laws has changed dramatically, even though the laws have not, BUT we never understood the laws in the first place. And we still don't. Today's Einstein is tomorrow's Charlie Chaplin. Keep in mind our whole entire current scientific conciousness barely spans 200 years. What is this conciousness compared to the conciousness of the universe; nothing at all. Barely even a grain of sand.

Whether we can develop our technologies fast enough to escape the inevitable destruction of the Earth, is another question.

Meet you at the gate to New Eden !

[TevashSzat]

Through normal sublight travel? Impossible. Its near impossible to even travel at light speed because as your speed approaches light speed, the amount of energy needed to go faster increases infinitely.

There a few theoretical ways to do so, one of which is wormholes, but the problem is that it takes an inmense amount of energy to create one and the ones that are created are like on the subatomic scale and collapse in life a second(possibly due to dark matter?0

[Ramses II CP]

Almost everyone misses the obvious here, how much longer do you expect humanity to be tied to biology? Prepare yourselves for the post-body world. It's rushing down the pipe so fast it'll hit like a meteor. Tell your children, it's information they'll need.

All these problems of how to get human beings to other worlds are a joke. If we want bodies at Beta Lyrae we'll send the information necessary to build them, speed of transfer being irrelevant due to the absurdity of the idea of interstellar simultaneity. Which is to say, there's no point in trying to coordinate actions between 'here' and 'there' over such distances, there's just preparing a package which can self sustain when it arrives and letting it go.

Human bodies will never make it even so far as Mars, and so much the better. Evolution was an excellent designer for the medium within which it operates, but we're just about done with that place and it's time for intelligence, which grinds less fine but far, far faster, to take over the role.

'We' will make it as far as it's purposeful to go, it's just a matter of what 'we' look like when we get there.

[Viking]

Better still, if hydrogen sulphide-induced hibernation turns out to be a practical technique in human beings, we may be able to sleep through the trip. But even so, when you get down to it, there's not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all, there's no there there — just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of exposure.

One thing though, is that it is a bit risky to put all your eggs in one basket. If some giant "comet" is heading for us, we'll have big problems trying to deflect it. I am not sure what sizes we are talking about, but according to wikipedia it is estimated to be at least 70,000 objects with diameters greater than 100 km in the Kuiper belt; objects at such sizes becomes tricky to deflect.

We are in a fairly uncrowded sector of the galaxy, meaning there are less stars to pick and choose from.

Remember that we cannot live on stars. The more stars in near vicinity, the less planets can accrete due to stars passing nearby.

Through normal sublight travel? Impossible. Its near impossible to even travel at light speed because as your speed approaches light speed, the amount of energy needed to go faster increases infinitely.

Have you seen any calculations on how much energy we'd need in order to travel at 1/2 the speed of light, or just 1/3. though?

Right now, we cannot achieve this. Now talk about 10,000 years from now. How about 30,000 years. The universe is infinite, therefore time is infinite.

Slightly off topic, but some astronomers propose that the universe will suffer from the heat death.

[Mouzafphaerre]

.
Never ask such things to a Trekkie & BS Galactica fanboy you silly primate!
.

[Vladimir]

If God intended for man to fly He would have given him wings!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Good thing that we can sit in a machine that flies. Stupid Luddite!

[Good Ship Chuckle]

There's something called suspended animation where you are put into a deep sleep and all your body functions halt, almost to the point of death. That way you wouldn't need an sort of an ecosystem.