The Final Frontier.

I think one of the problems at the moment is that everything related to space exploration has improved - except the cost of putting things up into space. This really needs to improve, the shuttles replacement will be more efficient at lifting matter of the earth but is still painfully costly.

Unless something like a space elevator can be made (which is doubtful in itself, as even woven carbon nanotubes would be vulnerable) then i don't think the launch cost will ever be improved. The only way i can see it being feasible to make large vessels is to have manufacturing capacity in space, this would have to involve capturing an iron ore rich asteroid, and lifting heavy processing equipment onto it. I can't see something like that happening in the foreseeable future, or at least my lifetime. This kind of rules out a large cryostat style spacecraft.

If wormholes are a possibility it would solve a lot of problems, ie crossing large distances without everyone back home aging really quickly in relation to the travelers and getting equipment out of the mavity wells of planets. I doubt wormholes are possible tho. Anyway i'll stop waffling now.
 
IMO we probably have the "critical understanding" now. Not in NASA but other, erm, "agencies" in the USA.

The world economy needs to reach a threshold before it can happen too. And I think "world economy" is perhaps a little small scale. We probably need to colonise a couple more planets, such as the Moon and Mars, in order to get their mineral resources to be used, at first, to advance the civilisation and economies on Earth - but longer term to help build interstellar spacecraft.

Sustained nuclear fusion has, probably, already been solved by the USA. It's only the public sector and "higher level" government agencies like NASA which are still trying to get it working.

Life is good but, damn, wouldn't it have been awesome to have been born perhaps 200-300 years later? :p
 
NathanE said:
Life is good but, damn, wouldn't it have been awesome to have been born perhaps 200-300 years later? :p
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I catch myself thinking this a lot of the time. We are a generation that is perhaps looking further into the future and predicting what life will be like perhaps more than any generation before about 200 hundred years ago. I hate the fact that Ill be dead before we see any sort of long range forays into space :(
 
I think eventually we could in theory, we have the potential, but there will probably be some huge war that kills everyone before we advance that far.
 
We've pushed back so many boundaries, I really don't see why we wouldn't achieve interstellar travel. It won't happen in our life time, but makes cryogenics an interesting proposition.
 
Von Smallhausen said:
Will humanity ever achieve interstellar travel ?

Whether you believe it or not, please give your reasoning.
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A random question if you think about it.....how does such a feat of interstellar travel become a 'belief' ....its just reasoning and logic, I think one day we will, just as in the past we dreamed of flying, and now its a daily thing for millions, its a challenge for humanity which we will crack, just as every other challenge that has been put before humanity has been sorted out, and the ones that we havent sorted yet were all working on.
 
Combat squirrel said:
A random question if you think about it.....how does such a feat of interstellar travel become a 'belief' ....its just reasoning and logic, I think one day we will, just as in the past we dreamed of flying, and now its a daily thing for millions, its a challenge for humanity which we will crack, just as every other challenge that has been put before humanity has been sorted out, and the ones that we havent sorted yet were all working on.
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Nature has inspired us to fly like the birds , i believe it will take us a little longer to figure out how to make interstellar travel possible because we have no idea whatsoever how to make it happen. :)
 
ChrisJSY said:
As many have pointed out, even if we could travel at the speed of light, it would still take too long to get anywhere.
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It wouldn't because of special relativity. For someone on the spaceship no time would have passed at all. If you travel close to speed of light for even a few seconds, thousands of years could have passed on earth. You can see it as a way of time travel if you like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
 
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In a perfect world, then yes I believe humans could eventually (maybe another 1-2 thousand years) create the technology for interstellar travel.

However we live in a far from perfect world and problems such as waste management, global warming, rising population, political turmoil, environmental degredation, limited resources (not just fossil fuels but also the rare precious metals that are needed as catalysts for many hitech devices) etc. etc. need to be solved before humankind can even begin to think about reaching for the stars.
 
Special relativity does say things cannot travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum but that does not mean that a new theory will supersede it which says otherwise. Also it does not say anywhere that wormholes are not allowed, i.e. if our universe is curved in a higher dimensional space we could travel through that extra dimension to reach places in a fraction of the time travelling solely in our dimensions would.

To answer the original question I think we will be able to eventually but it will be a long time before it happens. Using today's science to impose limits on future achievements is a flawed premise.
 
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