Interstellar space travel. Fantasy of every five-year-old kid within us. Staple of science fiction serials. Boldly going where nobody has gone before in a really fantastic way. As we grow ever more advanced with our rockets and space probes, the question arises: could we ever hope to colonize the stars? Or, barring that far-flung dream, can we at least send space probes to alien planets, letting them tell us what they see?
The truth is that interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible. There’s no law of physics that outright forbids it. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’ll achieve it in our lifetimes, let alone this century. Interstellar space travel is a real pain in the neck.
Voyage outward
If you’re sufficiently patient, then we’ve already achieved interstellar exploration status. We have several spacecraft on escape trajectories, meaning they’re leaving the solar system and they are never coming back. NASA’s Pioneer missions, the Voyager missions, and most recently New Horizons have all started their long outward journeys. The Voyagers especially are now considered outside the solar system, as defined as the region where the solar wind emanating from the sun gives way to general galactic background particles and dust.
So, great; we have interstellar space probes currently in operation. Except the problem is that they’re going nowhere really fast. Each one of these intrepid interstellar explorers is traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, which sounds pretty fast. They’re not headed in the direction of any particular star, because their missions were designed to explore planets inside the solar system. But if any of these spacecraft were headed to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, just barely 4 light-years away, they would reach it in about 80,000 years.
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See Also:
(1) Strange life forms found deep in a mine point to vast ‘underground Galapagos’
(2) Radical Experiment Reveals How The Chemistry of Life Could Have Begun in Deep Space
(3) Astronomers can’t agree on galaxies without dark matter
(4) Are black holes made of dark energy?
(5) NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures a massive avalanche on the red planet
(6) First cement mixed in space paves the way for otherworldly buildings
(7) Mysterious object from interstellar space ‘approaching our solar system’
(8) A Distant Black Hole Brightens Every 9 Hours, and No One Knows Why
(9) Scientists discover giant balloon-like structures at the center of the Milky Way
(10) The universe might be 2 BILLION years younger than scientists have thought, new study suggests
