chvvkumar
Well-Known Member
Gizmodo got a really good article! For once I have read something on there that truly made me think
I am quoting the starting 2-3 paragraphs here read the rest on the site...
http://gizmodo.com/5247705/why-we-need-to-reach-the-stars-and-we-will
I am quoting the starting 2-3 paragraphs here read the rest on the site...
http://gizmodo.com/5247705/why-we-need-to-reach-the-stars-and-we-will
We reached the Moon in a tin can, built a humble space station, and have a plan to reach Mars in a bigger tin can. But we need to reach the stars. And we will.
Yes, I know what you are thinking: "It's impossible."
And right now, you are right. Our current propulsion engines are, simply put, pathetic. We are still in the Stone Age of space travel. As cool as they are, rocket engines?which eject gas at high speeds through a nozzle on the back of a spacecraft?are extremely inefficient, requiring huge volumes of fuel that runs out faster than you can say "Beam me up, Scotty."
We have cleared the tower
Solid boosters, hybrid, monopropellant, bipropellant rockets... all these would be impossible to use in interstellar travel, with maximum speeds going up to a maximum of 9 kilometers per second. Rockets won't work even using the effect of planetary gravity to gain impulse. Voyager?the fastest man-made spacecraft out there racing at 17 kilometers per second?would need 74,000 years in deep space to reach Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf star located at 4.22 light-years in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest to our Sun.
But even if we were able to build a massive spacecraft with today's experimental?but feasible?propulsion technology, it will still take thousand of years to reach Alpha Centauri. Using nuclear explosions?like the ones proposed in the Orion project?would be more efficient than rockets, achieving a maximum of 60 kilometers per second. That's still a whopping 21,849 years and a couple months.
Using ion thrusters?which use electrostatic or electromagnetic force to accelerate ions that in turn push the spacecraft forward?would only reduce that amount marginally. Even theoretical technology?like nuclear pulse propulsion, with speeds up to 15,000 kilometers per second?won't cut it. And that's assuming we can find a way for these engines to last all that time. And let's not even get into the resources and engineering needed to create a vessel capable of sustaining life for such a long period of time.
All to reach a stupid red dwarf with no planets to explore. We may as well not go, really. You know, let's just save Earth from our own destruction and colonize Mars or Titan or Europa (if the aliens let us do that.)
Our ignorance is our only hope
It gets even worse. Our current understanding of physics?which says that nothing can travel faster than light?basically establishes that we will never be able to achieve space travel in a way that is meaningful to Humanity. In other words, even if we are able to discover a propulsion method that could get a spacecraft close to the speed of light, it will still take hundred of years to reach an star system with planets similar to Earth. By the time the news get back to us, we all will be dead.
And that's precisely the key to our only hope to reach the stars: Our ignorance. As much as we have advanced, we are still clueless about many things. Physicists are still struggling to understand the Universe, discovering new stellar events that we can't explain, and trying to make sense of it all, looking for that perfect theory that will make everything fit together.
That fact is that, since we don't know how everything works, there still may be something that opens the way to faster-than-light space travel. Discovering the unknown?like physicists have been doing since the Greeks?and harnessing new math and theories into new technology is our only way to spread through the Universe in a way that makes sense to Humanity as a whole. You know, like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars.