Do you think humanity will ever achieve interstellar travel?

A generation ship is a ship designed to host multiple generations of families so that there will still be humans alive by the time they reach a habitable planet. The humans that arrive at the planet would have been born on the ship with nobody from Earth surviving the trip due to age. The problem is the number of resources that the ship would have to carry to sustain life for the journey.

>interstellar travel?
possibly if we don't go extinct. but it will still involve living years on a spaceship

>intergalactic travel
not a fucking chance m8. we're better off waiting for galaxies to crush into ours

we'll just have to spray our cum wildly out into the cosmos and hope our seed shoots true somewhere

This is the part I have a hard time with. We can't even make a self sustained bio dome here on earth that doesn't take some form of outside input eventually.

There's no way a ship could, as a closed system, end up big enough to sustain generations.

1. At most we'll achieve relatively fast (months of travel) manned interplanetary travel. Give or take 500 years.

2. No but I'm hopeful for powerful telescopes that will be able to detail out distant galaxies.

3. Maybe there's a huge multi-dimensional fish swimming around between galaxies, eating planets like they're planktons. Humanoids, not very likely.

The biggest problem I see with the generation ship is something killing off the entire population inside the ship or some malfunction in the system of the ship that can't be repaired from the inside.

All it take would be one nihilist psychopath to get his hands on control panel or something important for the travel and end everyone.

Of course, just give the mankind a couple of centuries.

Literally spin up a hueg asteroid, keep the population very low and throw a few other asteroids with it. Bam, thousands of years of resources.

1. No... The stars are so ridiculously far away... I think our resources will expire on this planet before we're able to travel trillions of miles away.
2. No way, such a mind blowing distance.
3. Yes... It is "possible" and if there was a planet that had neighboring planets with similar climates, resources ect... And was able to acquire the resources and technological capabilities to make it happen...

I think if other 'beings' were able to travel light years through space with ease, they would visit us... We are like a pebble that is 1000 miles away from another pebble... and we're an ant that is trying to walk that distance

Interstellar travel?
5 or 10 percent of cee is feasible, but expensive in terms of resources. People who started out might see the destination. But they'd be old and extremely bored by then. Maybe suspended animation.

Intergalactic travel? No! Not unless all of modern physics is extremely wrong!

Has (or will) anyone done it? Who knows? Too many unknowns to hazard a guess. Also depends on their motivation. Many SF stories in which the Earth is doomed and all humanity unites in an effort to save (at least a few of) our species.

No. Our flaws will prevent that from ever happening.
Same goes for intergalactic travel. That will never be achieved.
As for alien life; perhaps. Humanity will never each that level of advancement, though.

What are the main flaws that prevent us from achieving that, in your opinion?

>Yes
>No
>Maybe

Not the person you're asking. I can only talk about technical problems. Interstellar travel will be expensive.
10% of lightspeed, assuming hydrogen fusion rockets, demands a mass ratio of over 10 for the one-way trip. 90% of the ship is fuel. The remaining 10% is structure, motors, life-support for decades and everything you need to found a colony at the far end.
20% of lightspeed demands a mass-ratio over 100!

Neither calculation mentions shielding against interstellar hydrogen (hitting it releases lethal X-rays) or a pea-size rock (equivalent to a fusion bomb.)

Too expensive, and our entire social structure is based on the acquisition of resources and short term gains. We will die fighting over this rock before we get to other ones.

Clearly the solution is to edit the problematic parts out of ourselves. Or perhaps construct new intelligences without the pesky behavioral constructs useful for keeping fragile meat alive long enough to reproduce on a planet where everything eats each other. I guess you have to define humanity: what percent meat must a human be to be human? I'd bet people would fight each other over the number.

Facebook tier opinion

might as well ask this in this thread.

Im not much into rocket science.

but why do we use rockets to shoot shuttles into space rather than loading them in a fuckheug cannon and shooting them like a bullet into outerspace?

This has been extensively debated over the past few days on another Veeky Forums thread.
Essentially, it comes down to the "Jules Verne" problem. Any cannon with a barrel less than a few thousand miles long (and economically feasible) would squash the passengers into strawberry jam with the acceleration.

couldn't that be solved just by putting people in a gryroscopic passenger space.
Like I imagine a sphere placed inside a bigger sphere with a layer of ball bearings, or water/mineral oil between the two spheres to prevent something like that from happening.

And while a gun shooting from earths surface to space might require more energy.
but what about loading a capsule into a gun from a geosynchronus orbit then shooting it further into space.

I mean surely theres got to be some sort of device, material, or mechanic/technique that can help dampen the effects of acceleration, velocity or g forces on its passengers.

I doubt humans themselves will ever reach another star, it would be very hard to pull off. If there are any interstellar beings in the universe they are probably some kind of robots rather than biological life, conscious or not. Maybe we'll create something similar before dying out

I think you guys aren't optimistic enough, I mean, we have existed for a few hundred thousand years and look at where we are, in an extremely, extremely short span of time we have advanced technology by orders of magnitude. We have technology today that a human from one thousand years ago could never possible imagine. A simple device in our everyday lives like a microwave is far beyond the comprehension of you great-grandfathers from a few centuries ago. If you could travel back in time and tell Newton that we would launch ourselves into space and walk the moon in just a few centuries would he even believe you or think you're insane?

Dinosaurs have walked the Earth for millions of years, we haven't been here for a fraction of that time and look at all the advancements we have made as a species. Groundbreaking discoveries and advancements have been made faster and faster since the wheel seven thousand years ago, in the last century only there were constant advancements in all fields of knowledge. Just imagine 500.000 years from now, 1.000.000 years from now!

Don't doubt it guys, the h. sapiens, or whatever species we will have evolved into, WILL achieve interstellar travel and colonization, and from that it won't be long until we achieve intergalactic travel, then INTER-SUPERCLUSTER TRAVEL and the universe will belong to us!

It sounds more like we need to be more patient than optimistic.

just believe in urself guise *tips fedora*

There is no way of shielding acceleration.
No more than there's a way of shielding gravity. (Which, actually, is the same thing.)
Imagine being sealed in a rigid sphere and being thrown out of an airplane from 10 miles up. The deceleration when you hit ground will kill you.
Now imagine being in an inner sphere which whirls rapidly. The deceleration when you hit ground will kill you. The only difference is that, before hitting, you'll have upchucked from nausea.

There are schemes (mass drivers, rotating tethers) for starting above the atmosphere and casting someone further out. That gets rid of air resistance but does nothing about acceleration. To survive any significantly useful velocity change you need a great deal of distance; i.e. a long and expensive device.

The only idea, SFAIK, for making humans more acceleration-tolerant is to immerse them in liquid. INSIDE as well as out. That means filling your lungs with an oxygenated fluorocarbon solution (this has been done with mice, at least for short periods). It's not practical to fill ALL body cavities, including your skull.

We need to shit on Einstein's grave.
Without capability of creating speed of light we won't be able to do it.

Newton would believe. No new physics involved.

I am certainly not going to argue we know everything. But some things we DO know.
Some things really and truly are impossible. Another 100,000 or 1,000,000 years of tinkering is not going to produce a perpetual motion machine.
Optimism is commendable -- but at some point you start believing in comic-book "science". Learning genuine science is the best way to be able to tell the difference.

Sure, blame the messenger!

I am not shitting on him. I've just said we need to prove he is wrong. He put together some theory. Dunno, if he was first.

>We can't even make a self sustained bio dome here on earth

We have hardly even tried. There was biosphere which was a pretty lame attempt and not much else.

>What? Do you believe that one day people will be able to communicate with each other and see what is happening instantly from anywhere in Greece? You are nuts. Look, optimism is commendable -- but at some point you start believing in parchment-mythology "science".

Not that user but, facebook tier opinion with the entirety of recorded human history to support it. Short of leto style god emperor or a magical psychological paradigm shift we are going to kill ourselves off long before we could explore the cosmos en masse.

Aristotle might (or might not) have believed in perpetual motion. He got a lot of things wrong because he didn't believe in experimenting. Greek gentlemen didn't do that. (He wrote that women had fewer teeth then men. Despite several marriages he never asked one of his wives to open up so he could count.)

I said we didn't know everything. Maybe it's possible to build a chest-plate "arc reactor" like Tony Stark's. But perpetual motion is out.

The more you know, the more you can differentiate between the possible and the impossible. It's quite rare that well-tested physical laws get overthrown. Einstein didn't mean Newton was junk-science. It just meant that Newton was only valid under certain conditions. Within those limitations, Newton continues to work very well. Some better theory may replace Einstein. But within the region where Einstein has been tested and proven correct, he'll still apply.
The reason Einstein hasn't been replaced yet (even though we know circumstances under which his laws break down) is that it's VERY hard to come up with something superior which doesn't violate the experiments we've already done.

You definitely dont possess and formal physics education. It's impossible to think your way out of observable laws, at best you can discover new physics which lets you side step them in some capacity. The problem with placing a lot of optimism in the discovery NP is that modern physics has been at an experimental energy boundry for the last 50 years where we need to construct ever larger experiments to test our theories. Most recently culminating in the LHC, now consider that the LHC if it doesnt discover something useful in the next run, must undergo a massive upgrade in order to probe new energy levels. Eventually we will need to replace the LHC with something even bigger, and so the problem becomes cost ; political and financial. All that resource just discover NP let alone engineer it into something useful.

Those hurdles alone are truly giant and yet interstellar travel crosses into many fields each of which need to solve a problem around the same magnitude. Optimism is good, its part of what drives the urge to explore in human beings and by extension scientific inquiry but it is a product of our rapid advancement that people think erroneously and dangerously that current or future technology will solve all our problems.

>lmao people in the past couldn't predict certain things that means technology has no limits

Yes, I see this trains pulled by ropes and horses...

Ah, now I understand. You guys are trying to tell me that manned travel to extremely far places is impossible because, unlike aircraft, which was impossible in the past due to technological limitations but still perfectly possible within the laws of physics, intergalactic travel is impossible both due to technological limitations AND to the universal laws of physics.

But do you guys think that there is absolutely NO WAY (within the currently established laws of physics), for us to eventually be able to travel galaxies no matter how much technology advances?

First off flight is a terrible example because they were walking around watching birds fly and therefore knew it was possible even if they didnt know how they would do it. It's definitely not impossible to have interstellar travel, just incredibly impractical for anything other than a one way, one time trip. Travelling to other galaxies is 100% impossible right now because many of them are moving away from us faster than the speed of light and many more moving away from us faster than we could accelerate to. Once again these problems need to be solved before you address the equally absurd engineering problems like how do you build a ship that doesnt get vaporized the moment it hits some dust or shield against the vast array of EM radiation it would encounter.

Every even vaguely (and im using this with an extreme degree of flex) reasonable FTL idea presents magic tier engineering problems and the ever present breaking of causality. Human being will definitely travel the stars, but it will be relatively divorced from everyone on earth barring some paradigm shifting discovery here or in space.

> intergalactic travel is impossible
Upload some consciousness and AIs in a computer, make a relatively large and extremely reliable spaceship that has enough materials to rebuild a civilization, accelerate the whole things with light sails + lasers to 10-20% of c, aim it at andromeda, wait 10 million years, slow down with an onboard fusion engine/ busard ramjet (although you soule have to enter a nebula to do it)/ a huge light sail

You just spread mankind and it’s culture to another galaxy, all of that is likely doable in the next millennias

We won't even into interplanetary travel.

Future generations won't even believe we even made it to the moon.

Cant we get some biology brainlet to actually try again?

Interstellar is within our reach. But not making use of sci-fi nonsense, will mean that travels could only be on near stars and will be decades long. Intergalactic travel will be of course impossible.

>Do you think there will ever be a life form, in the entire existence of the universe capable of pulling it off?
If there is a sufficiently nearby galaxy to them and a hundred thousand years is to them a day, then they could go and return in a span that can be considered a travel.

If we can attain 10% of cee we can reach Andromeda in "just" 25 million years. All it requires is extreme reliability in the face of intense radiation, dust erosion, and the possibility of exploding from the impact of a pebble.

So you see, it's QUITE possible. Just takes some engineering and I will leave such minor details to the interested student.
No doubt, after we've had interstellar flight for a few millennia, some group will begin theorizing about The Big Jump.

>So you see, it's QUITE possible
Then it's just a matter of time until it happens.

why go to andromeda when andromeda is coming to us