No, I genuinely don’t believe it will. I don’t think the human race will ever reach another star, though I do believe it could be possible if we avoided going extinct for a few thousand years.
Another galaxy? No chance, not unless we figure out FTL, which I don’t believe is likely. The only FTL I’ve heard of that might be possible is the Alcubierre drive, but it relies on things that are so exotic, it’s likely impossible to create one.
Greg Egan’s Diaspora sets out how humanity could explore the galaxy and even the multiverse, which if you can’t be bothered reading consists of:
- Upload conciousness into computers, leave physical bodies.
- Miniaturise computers until we have spaceships in the grams/nano grams
- As we’re no longer connected to time we can build massive solar system sized technologies, built by nanotech, that sure could take hundreds of years to build but in our virtual realms we could easily sleep.
- Use Lasers to propel our nanogram spaceships to 90% light speed. Even then for the astronauts, time is almost nothing (time goes slower the faster you go). A trip across the galaxy would feel like mere weeks to you. We could explore the universe as immortals.
- At this point we should have a pretty good understanding of dark matter/energy and how to move between universes (the multiverse, depending if you accept it as a base for explaining non locality)
- Which would allow us become eternal.
In the here and now the only way to travel to another system with our current tech is via nuclear pulse engines.
Basically you build a large spaceship. Stick it on massive shock absorbers which are in turn connected to a metre plus thick steel plate.
Cut small hole in the middle. Have a door that opens closes.
Eject 1kt explosive device out door. Repeat 500x till you get to orbit.
Basically you could get a spaceship up to very high speed with nuclear pulse engines to turn a multi hundred year journey into less then 100 years.
That said the biggest problem with interstellar journeys is that our material science and manufacturing tolerances are pretty shit. Essentially all of the air will leak out through the metal skin of the spaceship.
I still think carving put an asteroid, sticking engine on it (see nuclear pulse engines) , covering it in ice and water will solve the problems radiation shielding, losing critical gases and provide ample fuel and water for a very long journey.
Totally.
The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda, so we are already on our way!
I know enough physics to say no Even inter-Stellar is out of our reach (without generation ship).
We have zero reason to believe in an effective way to build wormhole, jump gates or anything similar. Even high energy cosmic rays have a limited range (due to collision with photons) which is a strong clue that there is no shortcut in space
This is the correct answer.
I think the closest we will come is detecting radio signals from another species. But like obviously 2 way communication would be almost impossible due to sheer distance.
Sadly the universe is filled with enough random radio radiation that its unlikely any coherent signal is going to travel more than a few light years. With our current technology there could be an identical version of earth around the nearest star and we probably couldn’t detect it.
The signal isn’t destroyed though. So one could argue that isolating it in the noise is doable with enough math.
Obviously the real limit is still distance since we’d need a radio dish like the size of earths orbit or something to pick up a signal weakened from many lightyears away.
Probably with virtual telescopes, smaller receivers arrayed throughout the entire solar system, like EHT but biiiiiiiigger
Of course, astronomers find the Oort cloud and want to turn it into a telescope! Figures.
Why do you say wormholes are impossible? We don’t need a reason to believe it, because what we do or don’t believe doesn’t change whether or not something is possible.
Humans didn’t have a reason to believe in electricity until they did. Humans didn’t have a reason to believe in computers until they did. Humans didn’t have a reason to believe in gravity, nuclear energy, relativity, or quantum mechanics until they did. Same deal for germs, internet, cell phones, the list goes on.
Point is, until someone solves Unified Field Theory and unless it definitively proves that wormholes, alternate dimensions, and parallel universes are fundamentally impossible, we can’t claim to know what isn’t possible a hundred or a thousand years from now.
We might not have a particular reason to believe, but we don’t have any reason to disbelieve, either.
Humans didn’t have a reason to believe in electricity until they did
Lightning. Humans have been observing the effects of electricity since they first evolved. They didn’t have a reason not to believe in it.
Bright flashes and jagged bolts of light doesn’t necessarily lead one to intuitively believe “Oh, look, there’s a source of energy in the sky which can somehow be generated and harnessed to power machines and light bulbs.”
We think that way because we have the scientific knowledge of what it is and how it works, but that’s all retrospective. Prior to the discovery of electricity as a concept, lightning simply appeared to be some divine weapon wielded by angry gods. Even atheists of the early-Enlightenment era wouldn’t have understood it.
That’s like saying “Humans have observed fire since prehistoric times, so they must have understood chemical bonds and exothermic reactions.” It simply doesn’t apply.
The fact that it took eons to figure out how it worked and harness it is irrelevant. They knew it existed based on observable evidence.
They didn’t know what it was, so my point stands.
Humans have known the sun exists for as long as humans have been around. That doesn’t mean cro-magnan man believed in nuclear fusion.
You are nitpicking. Get lost.
You’re the one nitpicking. You didn’t have to reply to my comment, so it seems you’re the one who can get lost.
But doesn’t the generation ship / cryogenic technology / nuclear technology make intergalactic travel possible (albeit very slow)?
In theory yes… but the oldest frozen specimen of humans we’ve found is only a few thousand years old. We don’t even know if long term cryogenic reanimation is possible.
Assuming the ship travels at 10x our current capabilities we’re still looking at ~8,000 years to reach our closest stellar neighbour at only 5 lightyears away.
Then don’t do it that way, put a human consciousness into a machine and wait. They said ever, we can get as sci-fi as we want here
We’ll still run into the same assumption/problem; shelf life.
Consider how memories work. Every time you remember something, your brain alters that memory slightly. Even looking at how the brain parses the data through several cortex (visual etc) implies that consciousness is potentially inseparable from the components of the brain. In this video about Cockatoo intelligence they speculate that birds brain anatomy causes them to think in ways that seem limited to us.
Basically we don’t even know if its possible to preserve human consciousness for that long. Similar to cryogenics we have to question if reanimation is even fundamentally possible after centuries.
Then take the solar system with us. Strap a solar thruster to the sun, and off EVERYTHING goes. It’s a byproduct of figuring out starlifting, and that buys us all the time in the universe, at least till we run out of Hydrogen and Helium to shove into the sun as fuel, but there’s literally entire solar systems worth of that stuff hanging around in deep space. Like 72 solar masses per cubic light year of “empty” space.
Strap a solar thruster to the sun
So like if you visualize how the sun/planets actually move around the milky way. It seems plausible to focus solar flares to alter our trajectory. We’d still be stuck in the whirlpool but we could change lanes.
I think that you might think that the flares are a whole lot bigger than they actually are, or that the sun is far less massive than it actually is. You’d need a LOT more energy than those puny flares to move the sun.
Not for humanity, not as we currently understand ourselves as humans anyway.
I’d argue that it may not happen for individuals. But our DNA? Our culture? Or knowledge? I’m pretty sure these things will travel the stars one day.
Stars yes, voyager is carrying a lot of that info already! But the delta between stars and galaxies is monumental. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. The time scales aren’t even something we can grasp.
No, not unless we have made some serious mistakes in our understanding of physics.
I would say it’s pretty likely that we have made some serious mistakes but also probably not possible.
i think we’ll destroy ourselves before we get that far
Me, trying not to write a political comment on a non-political question.
I’d guess we’re either going to reach futuristic Star Trek communism or a dystopian world-wide techno-feudalism.
Just need to convince the billionaires that there are underage kids to rape on the other side of the galaxy
I was about to pedantically attack the term “underage kids,” but then I realized how many juvenile adults there are out there and decided it was valid.
With our current understanding of physics it is impossible. Sucks, I love sci fi but they all rely on inventing some magic machine to make it possible.
And to be clear, when you occasionally read about someone saying it’s not impossible……. That’s late night bs sessions on illicit substances. Usually the article is really “from our understanding of physics we have this math equation where we can actually enter values and the equation still gives a result, given a list of impossible prerequisites.
Humans? Nope. Some kind of actual AGI that doesn’t care about long time scales and can be lashed to a metal rich asteroid and flung out of the solar system? Still probably not, but it could maybe make it to some interesting intra-galactic destinations.
This is basically the foundation for Stanislaw Lem’s book The Cyberiad. What if robots built robots that write poetry and fight robotic dragons and travel the stars.
Also the Bobiverse books. Human brain uploaded to a machine and strapped to an engine to sail the stars where stuff happens
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I hold that the physics this world’s establishment holds-to is obviously flatland “physics”, as it doesn’t include mind/will, and you CAN’T have real physics, if you’re handwaving & saying “oh, but those phenomena aren’t really real”. The fact that … Jacob? ( see Curt Jaimungal’s videos, on yt ) discovered that the difference between statistical-probability theory vs quantum-probability theory, is that quantum-probability includes knowing. Knowing, aka “information”, as physicists call it, is physics-real. Pretending that information is real, but knowing isn’t, is … defective. Pretending that knowing is real but mind isn’t real, is absolutely shameless. Ideological-prejudice is what’s really going on. Look for the “Non-Markovian” probability video, & you’ll see it spelt out plain as day: knowing is physics-required.
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The fundamental-technology should be possible, but the durations might be absurd.
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the way it works is this:
Speed-of-light-limitation is WITHIN a given SPACE.
So, if you’ve got time & multiple different 3D-spaces ( think leaves on a branch: each leaf being a 3D-space ), then the speed-of-light-limitation in EACH is limited-to limiting speeds in THAT space:
There isn’t any speed-limit BETWEEN spaces, see?
So, “rotating” from another space into OUR space, then moving 100km within our space, then “rotating” back into their space, means you’ve now moved 3 parsecs…
Simply because our 3D-space & their 3D-space don’t happen to be at the same “angle” to the universe’s underlying-structure…
then travel which is simultaneously slower ( from the perspective of the traveler ) & faster ( from the perspective of they got from point A to point B faster than light within this space could have done ) becomes doable.
So, it’d be required to 1. know the underlying-structure of the universe, 2. be able to engage a “rotation” from our 3D-space to another one, intentionally, & make it be one that is travel-useful ( that may not be possible ), & then 3. do that rotation, move within that other space, & then “rotate” back into our space, at a drastically-different location.
All that’d be required is for the “rotation” to remove our having inertia/mass within this 3D-space for it to be useful, but more-complete “rotation” may be required for accomplishing real interstellar travel.
IF you go look for Susskind’s “Time as a Fractal Flow” video, on yt, watch it to the end, as the lightbulb goes on at the end, mentally…
but consider the implications of that:
IF time is fractal, THEN space must also be, since they’re part of the same 4D thing.
NOBODY in physics is dealing with it that way, ttbomk.
& if space is fractal, then it simultaneously is, & isn’t, there, & that may be usable.
( it’s there from within it, but it can be not-there from the perspective of other 3D-spaces which simply don’t “see” it: because each is only fractionally-dimensional, they can all be crammed into some kind of superspace, without colliding with each-other )
Anyways, this is just how the shape of it feels, & as I figure-out more, this understanding gets revised, but that’s the fundamental sense of it.
There are … thousands? of 3D-spaces in this universe, & we’re in 1 of them.
Electromagnetism is limited to within a 3D-space, but gravity isn’t: it diffuses throughout them all.
“Dark Matter” is just conventional matter in other 3D-spaces which are … how to say that … “coincident” with our 3D-space, but the falsifying-quotes are important: their 3D-space & ours are not-colliding, they are each fractional-dimension/fractals.
So, we’ve got “Dark Matter” galaxies simply because there isn’t any matter in OUR 3D-space, but in other 3D-spaces which are coinciding with ours, without colliding, there ARE actual-matter galaxies, & their gravity is present, weakly, in our 3D-space ( I’m presuming that gravity is weaker between-3D-spaces, that may not be true, or if it is true, it may be … anywhere from slightly-weaker to orders-of-magnitude weaker )
We’ve got a couple diffuse galaxies with NO “Dark Matter”, simply because there’s matter in OUR 3D-space, but not in the other, underlying-us 3D-spaces…
etc.
It also affects the smoothness of the Cosmic Microwave Background, too: instead of requiring that space inflated at zillions-of-times-the-speed-of-light, you can instead have thousands, or zillions, of dimensions expanding, all of the 3D-spaces expanding, but none of them going translight…
& you get the same degree of smoothness, because it’s happening in more dimensions, simultaneously, instead of happening in only 1x 3D-space, at translight speed…
The fact that gravity is nonlinear & QM is linear ( another of Curt Jaimungal’s videos, some utterly-hyper balding scrawney guy explaining this ), so if you put mass somewhere, the mass’s gravitational-field ITSELF has gravity/gravitational-field: it’s self-amplifying, whereas all quantum-mechanics stuff is linear… proves that the 2 theories are fundamentally incompatible: they’re different KINDS of mechanics.
I’m saying that all the QM stuff is within-a-3D-space, & that gravity isn’t within-a-single-3D-space: it’s affecting ALL of them, simultaneously.
& that we need to discover the underlying-structure which gets both perspectives into the correct relationship.
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