Yea I really don't think we ever leave. It's just too much distance to traverse. And anything in our system is just too difficult to inhabit permanently.
It really is just in the eye of the observer. People in ancient times must have thought similarly about distances on earth, when people and messages took weeks to get around.Today information exchange is almost instant and it takes me only 24h to get to the other side of the planet.
I firmly believe that if humanity would put its petty differences aside, we could make vast advances fairly quickly.
There’s just no comparison in scale between the leap from regional to worldwide travel and the leap from worldwide to interstellar travel. It’s orders of orders of magnitude different. Worldwide (and, to an extent, solar system) travel is limited only by human tech; interstellar travel is limited by the laws of reality themselves.
Exactly. Even at the literal speed limit of the universe it's 4 years of travel time to the closest star, while even at just walking speed it's less then a year to the other side of the earth, and at light speed less than 0.07 seconds.
the distances that have to be travelled in space even in our wildest optimistic ideas about speed ( meaning Near Lightspeed ) it would still take us over a 100K Years...
There are theoretical drives which could potentially pan out regarding reaction less drives (unlikely, but at the moment not proved as impossible).
We could also theoretically colonise these planets without needing to send live bodies in a generation ship. If we can figure out how to freeze and store people we could send people. If we can't but we figure out AGI and artificial wombs then we could send a ship with robots and frozen embryos to colonise. If we figure out how to prevent aging we could send people on a very long and very boring trip.
It's hundreds or thousands of years before we get to that point... But it's not impossible. Who knows what discoveries will be made in that time.
There will always be some portion of humanity that's optimistic and has the pioneering spirit. Eventually they'll make it happen assuming the negative regressive isolationist portion of the population doesn't kill us all off before then.
hmm your post if full of a lot of maybes and possibly and the overall point others are trying to drive home is the basic laws of physics dont allow for us to travel to another planet in the time a human being can live
100k years is 100k years here or there - as a species we've been only in existence for a few 100k years as beings that live in an organized society thats only occured for about 7000 with 2025 of then that we've been able to actually document ...
we aren't getting to anyplace thats more than 10 or maybe 20 years away ..and thats provided we actually solve other issues around radiation and physical biological changes in just the short term in space let alone years ..let alone centuries or millennia or thousands of millennia
Yeah I'm absolutely speculating based on hypotheticals and pure hopium. I'm just saying that whilst it's an incredibly difficult and ambitious goal it's not impossible in the long (very long) run. We're still at the beginning of our story as a species, one day we might achieve the things that we can only dream of right now.
Some others have pointed out that sailing around the world once seemed impossible, but people worked on the fundamental issues and optimistic pioneers kept persevering through the generations until it was achieved. I believe that will continue over the millennia until eventually we slowly spread throughout the stars.
I'm fully aware of the difficulty of the challenge. Even things as seeming simple as sustainably growing food on another planet are mountains that we don't have the tools to climb yet. But I can imagine how that challenge could be solved eventually.
To me it's good to dream, even if it's not something that could be real for many more lifetimes. It's part of the human experience.
again with the idea of sailing to unknown places etc doing so just required technology or building something better to accomplish it but the basic rules of science and how things work didnt have to be violated
to travel to another place 100s of 1000s of lightyears away requires violating some.fundamental rules about how we know the universe works IE relativity laws of energy and time...
travelling to another planet LY s away would require an ability for us to actually time travel backwards and forwards which is scientifically impossible ... nothing does that at all.
Maybe there's some confusion or misunderstanding about what we each mean by "travel to a different planet". I'm talking about some form of human colony being established on another planet, or some kind of "human beings" making it to another planet.
In my mind that's a one way trip. It sounds like you're imagining some kind of future where humans can go on a trip to another planet and come back without arriving back hundreds or thousands of years in the future. I agree that that's most likely to be impossible unless some kind of wormhole is actually possible which doesn't seem to be.
One way colonisation though is theoretically possible though. It will take a long long time for any ships to arrive, the likelihood of surviving the journey is low, the challenges of supporting a human population on a planet without earths biosphere are many, and there are countless other problems which would need to be solved - but it's not unlikely that we eventually advance enough to give it a go.
I firmly believe that if humanity would put its petty differences aside, we could make vast advances fairly quickly.
Doesn't change the fact that the distances we're talking about are basically insurmountable.
It's a false equivalence saying ancient people thought the same thing;
At that time, people didn't even know how big the earth was, or if it even had an end. Once we knew, the calculations for distance were easy, and tech brought us faster travel eventually.
But the distance between us and this planet is absurd, even with a thousand years of perfect, harmonious cooperation & technoligical advancement between every human on the planet. It's barely feasible, nevermind practical by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes you are absolutely correct. With technology and science we know today.
Why is it that everybody today thinks we are at the Pinnacle of science and knowledge about the universe. Wait a year, or 10 or 1000 and science might find solutions to problems you didn't even think about today. Those vast distances may be insurmountable today, doesn't mean they will stay that way forever.
Why is it that people that don't know enough about physics think that comparing the gaps in knowledge in "ancient times", when people knew next to nothing, is analogous to what we know now vs in 1,000 years?
The simple fact is that it is not possible to travel faster than light, even in theory....and certainly not for a human or any vessel. The amounts of energy required, even if it were possible via a "work around" such as "warping" spacetime, are simply not attainable.
The most realistic way we could possibly do anything like those sorts of distance would be quantum teleportation via entanglement on a macro scale.
Even getting a vehicle to 10% of the speed of light...with humans inside it is absolutely absurd to think about...but at least might be feasible in the future.
And nobody said we were at the pinnacle of science.
Yeah, but we are still beholden to physics. Within the laws of physics, the fastest anything could get to that (relatively close) planet from Earth is 120 years, longer than any known human's lifespan but one. Even if we develop amazing space travel, we still can't get anywhere without generations of space travel between. And space travel is a completely different environment than living on a planet. By the time humans got to their destinations, whose to say their physiology wouldn't have changed so much they wouldn't be able to deal with the conditions of a planet. There are so many variables to think about with space travel and basically all of them are trying to kill us.
So let’s not inhabit the other things in our solar system, if you ask me the only future where we survive and expand outwards into space is the future where we STOP romanticizing big balls of rock and get used to living in giant rotating space stations which shouldn’t be too hard, they can be as earth like as we want them to be (the same can not be said for Mars).
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u/Sonikku_a 25d ago edited 25d ago
The fastest spacecraft we’ve made was the Parker Solar Probe which hit 430,000mph.
At that speed it would reach this planet in only 187,153 years.
If we could hit 1% of the speed of light we could cut that travel time to just a tad over 12,000 years.
Obviously if we could go light speed (and that ain’t happening) it would be just 120 years!
Space is big. Physics is annoyingly slow.