As a species, humans seem to be born with a need to travel and explore. We have used boats, trains, and other means of transportation to scale the earth. Now, we are working intensively to build all kinds of spaceships to extend our horizons to the stars in the sky. Is there a conundrum, you ask? The universe is an even greater landscape. Here's the original form, and now we're uncovering the extraordinary secrets of interstellar travel!
Are you a friend of truth? Do you have a constant curiosity? So why not describe more fragments like this to the original form? Then ring the bell for more engaging content! Interstellar travel refers to the travel between stars or planetary systems in space. Although humans are the smartest creatures on earth, the concept is still a difficult mountain for us to climb. However, this certainly did not stop us from climbing! The question that humanity most desperately wants to answer is whether we are the only beings in the universe. In our search for answers, we have identified many planets outside the solar system that may have life. So our motivation is clear: interstellar travel will allow us to visit these worlds, experience them firsthand, and expand our horizons.
Moreover, in a sense we have been able to successfully leave the solar system — or at least the heliosphere — to follow the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes, which are now navigating interstellar space. It will take a long time before they reach any other noteworthy destination, although the boldest predictions say they are likely already lost in the Ault Cloud!
Our closest star system is the α Centaurus and home to the potentially habitable planet Proxima Centauri (Proxima Centauri). But now, it acts more as a reminder of how far away the rest of the universe is from us! Because if Voyager 2 had clearly indicated its location when it landed (and hadn't actually landed yet), at its rate, it wouldn't have reached Centaurus α in another 75,000 years!
For interstellar travel to become a reality, we need some truly groundbreaking technology to make it happen. For some, their hopes come with ambitious plans, such as Breakthrough Star Shooting: a company with the late Stephen Hawking, former NASA director and multiple Nobel laureates as investors. Breakthrough Starfinder strives to achieve 1/5 of the speed of light and hopes to achieve this by launching spacecraft into planetary orbits. The spacecraft uses thousands of chips to equip and tie them to a light sail, and then aims at it from Earth to launch a laser beam of light to power it.
There's a plan that sounds a bit far-fetched, but if it can be achieved, it means sailing 1,000 times faster than any man-made device.
Even so, the achievable interstellar voyage will have to wait, because even if it flies at a speed that breaks through the stars, it will still take 24 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
Even with a lifetime of research, this is an extremely difficult task, and the probability of success of a project like this is not high.
How can humans log in?
Humans (and all the stuff they use to sustain life) are too heavy... Navigating at any visible speed is difficult. And the Breakthrough Starshot program has also confirmed that the rate of aging of the human body also accelerates during interstellar voyages.
To put it another way, consider the kind of generational spaceship, a huge and ever-extending capsule where generations of people were born, lived and died, and spent their entire lives without being able to set foot on any land.
Imagine that you have spent your whole life in a cabin suspended in the seemingly boundless space, and what is the value of life?
Perhaps, in the foreseeable future, considering how to preserve the human body is the key. That is, cryonics, although the current level is far less than described in the movie. The voyagers aboard starships are frozen for centuries in a protective container, thawed after reaching their destination, and in the process, the human body does not grow any older.
This technique is now applied to medicine and surgery – organ transplants – but it is still quite a step from hibernating an entire living person
In fact, the current consensus of the scientific community is that this is impossible to achieve.
In general, the traditional approach is unrealistic, the generation spaceship requires incredible sacrifices for the people living on it, and the human body preservation technology in the science fiction scene is not yet realized... Don't
The best way to do this is to compromise?
What if one day we really had to abandon Earth forever and go to other planets?
So spaceflight is still a long-term issue that we have to face. Unless we somehow try to build and control a network of wormholes that are completely theoretically physically destroyed, rapid transfers from galaxy to galaxy are almost entirely impossible. But perhaps even less likely is the idea of becoming a human explorer, specifically, that over time, humans will establish bases and spaceports on other stars that are closer to us, as a slow outward expansion method.
The experience of traveling through space with a warp engine will not be a race like the wind, but more like a dull and slow step, moving from level to level. But it will lead us to where we need to get! We won't have to wait long, faster-than-light technology may never happen, and we won't be judged to take a lifetime to complete a space trip.... But those who choose to make this journey will still choose to abandon Earth forever and dedicate their lives to the cause of building humanity's "next Earth outpost," no matter where they are.
In theory, it's simple. But in reality, it's not that easy. We're still struggling with a planned mission to Mars, which proves how tricky any trip outside earth's orbit can be. Moreover, our reluctance to return to the Moon is also a strong argument, because we are impressed by how difficult the Apollo mission encountered in the first place.
But if we're going to look elsewhere, it looks like there's only one option at the moment, and that's a series of one-way trips, from one planet to another, until we finally reach another galaxy entirely. Such a vision itself raises all sorts of concerns – including how reasonably can we place our hopes on protecting the safety of these enthusiastic travelers? How can we realistically release our expectations to geo-transform the new world we encounter? And how do we smoothly monitor the progress of such a task? This question was raised based on the fact that it will go through multiple life cycles and reach unprecedented distances from Earth.
However, all of these problems are still easy to solve compared to the most central problem of interstellar travel, "faster than the speed of light". Even if we somehow get as close to the limits of physics as possible, push past the limits of conventional speed as much as possible (which is a completely hypothetical, unrealistic, hypothetical assumption at some point in the future), and we get a well-staffed spaceship that can fly at 99% of the speed of light, it will still take us 4 years to reach a nearest replaceable galaxy. The journey back will still take almost 10 years. Ten years in everyone's life. As for the millions of other star systems out there, they may still be out of reach, and they will drift farther and farther away as the universe expands again and again.
So, in addition to looking at the laws of physics in a self-deluded way and aiming at the impossibility of physics, we still have to work hard to go a long way, a really long and arduous road. Interstellar travel is possible, but only in very torturous slow mode. The problem, then, is that our "baby pace" in the universe is actually an extremely grand journey relative to itself. Things like that, we still need to start mastering them. We first explore the moon, then maybe Mars, then the rest of the solar system, and finally all the other stars in the universe. The secret is patience, a lot of patience.
by:light，老A，髿懠