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Selfless- t1_j10omr7 wrote

People will live and die in the solar system they are birthed in. Everything else is robots.

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ScrotiusRex t1_j10vpk6 wrote

It took 35 years for Voyager 1 to escape the solar system so passengers on a generation ship would indeed get to leave the system that birthed them but after that they'd only see void for the rest of their lives which is entirely a bleak thought.

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TangoKlass t1_j10ylka wrote

honestly the trip to the edge was mostly 35 of bleakness. So no different.

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ScrotiusRex t1_j119mb0 wrote

True but at least there's the dim light of a nearby sun.

Kind of like that moment before land disappears over the horizon at sea and you realise you're just surrounded by nothing.

Except it's a whole lot more nothing.

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Bipogram t1_j10wfr5 wrote

Voyager 1 was the business end of a terribly large mass-fraction consisting mostly of a Titan Centaur combo.

Thus, it was able to leave cis-lunar space with a stupidly high C3, allowing the Grand Tour.

A generation ship will be orders of orders of magnitude more massive. And probably has to be built at L4/L5 (or similar).

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ScrotiusRex t1_j10yjyk wrote

That's a good point alright, though I would like to think if we did get to that stage we'd have advanced past current gen chemical rockets but would presumably also involve multiple gravity assists to send it on its way.

>And probably has to be built at L4/L5 (or similar).

The bulk of the easily attainable resources would be out in the asteroid belt so would that not be an ideal place to build?

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LoneSnark t1_j11cm4x wrote

We are already past chemical rockets. Ion Thrusters are a thing and can get you going 100 times the propellant velocity of a chemical rocket. I presume the ship would have a nuclear reactor rigged and sized to work for the journey with solar panels to power most of the propulsion. The ship will first thrust deeper into the solar system to get more solar power and set up gravity assists with Venus to reach Jupiter and then a grand alignment with multiple gravity assists on the final way out of the system to get itself going the right direction. As they leave the system and solar power falls off they'll have to throttle down. Maybe they'll have electro-static collectors to collect stray hydrogen on the way that they can feed into the Ion engines using whatever spare nuclear power they have each day. Then reverse the process upon arrival.

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nyg8 t1_j10vdbr wrote

Cryogenics / worm holes are still a possibility!

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CrazyC787 t1_j10x7ok wrote

Hypothetically, light speed might cause time dilation that makes the trip seem far shorter for the passengers than the people on earth.

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nyg8 t1_j10zxtf wrote

While true, time still passes for the person inside the space ship, if we need to travel 80 light years, you will have to survive 80 years

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echaa t1_j1120jj wrote

The people outside your ship will need to live 80 years if they want to meet you again. You'll only need to live for 50 or so

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pbecotte t1_j11fthh wrote

The dilation is exponential. The closer you get to c, the higher the dilation factor. With enough energy, from the perspective of the travler you could practically travel anywhere instantly...so long as you didn't mind the rest of the universe moving along without you.

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Bipogram t1_j10w24q wrote

Cryonics.
Cryogenics is an extant art/science.

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boundegar t1_j112jqj wrote

True, and maybe the galaxy will be settled by Tardigrades.

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sowenga t1_j11bvrr wrote

Extant, but not in a way that doesn’t destroy cells and thus the body during the process of freezing.

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Bipogram t1_j11g64k wrote

You misunderstand me (or I wasn't clear).

Cryogenics is the engineering of low temperatures. I've worked in departments that specialized in cryogenics (we tested foam thermal conductivity at low temperatures for clients).

Here

Cryonics, a different word, is the study of how to cool biota, the cellular preservation mechanisms, and so on.

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sowenga t1_j1365jt wrote

Oh sorry, you are right! I totally misunderstood.

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Lelouch25 t1_j117uyz wrote

in high school I read something about bending atoms near the ship to create a warp tunnel or something. I think we're only just starting to explore that idea 20 years later with dark matter.

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Ryiujin t1_j10ty19 wrote

It would be kinda interesting to have a galactic empire human run but entirely interacted with by robots due to the lack of faster than light travel.

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SparseGhostC2C t1_j10usbd wrote

I feel like I've seen that movie and it ends with a dead human race and a new race of super-intelligent robots.

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Zinkobold t1_j115qpv wrote

You might be right but we don't know the science to come. I know there is unimaginable distance...

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Tacticool_Hotdog t1_j117cyt wrote

You could "colonize" our galaxy with robots in a measly 50 million or so years (IIRC, could be whatever).

Even if we managed to colonize another world, I don't think it'd be logistically even remotely possible to uphold any sort of galactic civilization. Imagine trying to decide on policy when it would take hundreds of years to broadcast it anywhere else.

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outtyn1nja t1_j10nhfg wrote

If 'people' are going to travel to other worlds, we would be digitized, stored, and activated in a cyber-body at the final destination.

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FogoCanard t1_j10tp46 wrote

any books/movies on this? I feel like this is man's final form. A lot of us have the idea. It's just a matter of execution(might take another couple hundred years). What happens if we get in disputes though? Someone can delete another person's data and they would cease from existence?

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GrabMyCactus t1_j10vchh wrote

That's kind of what happens when someone is murdered. :)

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ElderWandOwner t1_j10vy3o wrote

Altered carbon on netflix is somewhat based on this idea. I don't think they use it much for space travel though.

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LegendaryRed t1_j114o1o wrote

Exception on Netflix "In a distant future where humans are forced to leave Earth, a spacecraft carrying a 3D-printed crew of specialists is sent to terraform a new planet."

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wild_b_cat t1_j11en9k wrote

Great books on this:

Accelerando by Charles Stross Ken MacLeod’s Corporation Wars.

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user_name_unknown t1_j10upn0 wrote

The crew could still control the ship from inside a simulation. In Ian M Banks “The Hydrogen Sonata” the Gzilt warships have a crew that upload their minds into the ship and the simulation is speed up compared to real time. It allows them to operate extremely fast.

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outtyn1nja t1_j10wlbv wrote

I'd imagine a rudimentary general AI could do that job much better than any human, if we're talking about future tech here.

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user_name_unknown t1_j10x92f wrote

I’m the book it allowed them to work at the same speeds as the god like AI Minds. In the book there was a part describing them working like a normal ship, they had fire Control, communication, but they were operating faster than the speed of light.

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mjbat7 t1_j10v0sw wrote

Seems inefficient. Surely easier to transmit instructions for constructing the body and programming it to an existing intelligence. Which is like a mix between the plot of Contact and Species.

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outtyn1nja t1_j10wfv4 wrote

You might be right; why carry something you can just craft on site?

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dreamlike_poo t1_j10vpu2 wrote

Altered Carbon deals with this idea too, it also deals with what the world would be like if you could constantly download your brain into a new designer body forever (if you can afford it) and how the ultra rich become stratospherically rich.

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12edDawn t1_j10m7hm wrote

Speak for yourself, I can yell, "Hyperspeed, Chewie!" and get wherever I want in no time.

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Em_Adespoton t1_j10mcww wrote

Cryogenics and wormholes are the two best future options, but neither is understood well enough at this point to be presently feasible.

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RipCityGGG t1_j10r4fn wrote

you could freeze fertilised embryos for a long time, then have AI robots raise them or holograms or something.

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houseman1131 t1_j10s5j7 wrote

The issue with that is you're literally making slaves for your mission. They didn't choose to be born we would be forcing them into existence and into maintaining a ship.

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tropicsun t1_j10tqiz wrote

"They didn't choose to be born we would be forcing them into existence and into maintaining a ship."

so like humans on earth?

Earth is just a vessel...

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CommentToBeDeleted t1_j10uf6q wrote

Not to be argumentative here, but what are babies, if not unwilling participants in our society?

I mean we choose to have kids, they do not choose to be born, they just are, fully against their will.

Generally, society creates pressure that forces them into school and work, abiding by rules, customs, and laws, for virtually their entire lives. In fact, failure to do so could mean incarceration or death.

And that's just among many of the developed nations, where most of would respond with a resounding "yes" for whether or not we would want to have been born.

Suppose you were a child who was born during the holocaust, who lived and died in a concentration camp. Would you still have wanted to be born? What about a baby born with cancer or a child into poverty, who lives hungry and cold and dies no different?

Babies are absolutely unwilling participants in their creation and are more ore less stuck into whatever situation, place, economic class and time period they are born into.

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RipCityGGG t1_j10sk9j wrote

Sounds like a movie plot, were they grow up realise, slingshot the ship around and try to make it to see home

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Orpheus75 t1_j10tx2c wrote

The point is to raise them the last few years of the journey so they are educated functioning adults when they arrive. The robots do all of the maintenance.

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redruben234 t1_j10u9wl wrote

While an interesting philosophical problem not one with a good solution at all.

If it's our only way to colonize planets outside our solar system I think it's worth doing

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SiskoandDax t1_j10udik wrote

Two sets of slaves. The AI arguably could be one, especially left to their own devices to evolve for several decades.

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Bipogram t1_j10wupy wrote

<pedant mode: on>
Cryogenics is known - it's been studied since we liquefied air in the last millenium.

Cryonics is a field (but not entirely full) of woo and hope.

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Em_Adespoton t1_j11hnsf wrote

Point taken. I was trying to keep it as broad as possible, since there are more solutions than just freezing and re-animating humans that could be used.

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codefyre t1_j117k5h wrote

> Cryogenics and wormholes are the two best future options

I'd argue that there's a third option that's far better understood and has already been mentioned a few times. Biological immortality. If we can find solutions to problems like aging and disease, problems we're currently researching and resolving, it raises the real possibility that human lifespans could be extended on a near-perpetual basis. Yes, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome, but there's no reason why human lifespans couldn't reach 100,000+ years at some point in the distant future. Fix the problems that kill us, and figure out how to replace the parts that wear out.

Spending 2,500 years transiting to another star system isn't such a big deal if you've got a projected lifespan of 80,000 years.

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JebusHCrust t1_j10ut10 wrote

We don't know.

But 150 years ago we didn't know how to fly, either.

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IndyJacksonTT t1_j111g2s wrote

One problem is that for meaningful interstellar travel on traditional human lifetimes you need FTL. And FTL would require nearly a complete rework of the way we understand the universe

A lot has changed in the past 150 years but I doubt at this point we’ll rework the whole thing

I’m happy to be proven wrong tho

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LaoWai01 t1_j112qlu wrote

Considering that “dark matter” is a thing there’s still something fundamental about the universe that we don’t understand.

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NotAHamsterAtAll t1_j1142n7 wrote

95% is "Dark Fudge" with current understanding. So needless to say, our understanding is severely lacking. Crossing fingers for warp-drives or wormholes is possible in those 95%, but I'm not holding my breath.

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Storyteller-Hero t1_j116lqr wrote

If the current wild theory about magnetic fields being able to produce potential warp bubbles turns out to be true, FTL might not really require a complete rework of physics.

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IndyJacksonTT t1_j11ags6 wrote

Also the simple discovery and creation of negative energy would do this

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arcosapphire t1_j11xq7a wrote

This word, "simple"...I do not believe you know what it means.

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mc_trigger t1_j10qcsm wrote

Actually at exactly the speed of light, you’d arrive at Alpha Centauri (actually anywhere in the universe) instantly, yes instantly.

It’s somewhere at about 71% of the speed of light where it’d take 4 years due to time dilation.

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Ryiujin t1_j10u8k5 wrote

So we would travel instantly according to our own perceptions but 4 years to everyone elses?

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guynamedjames t1_j115q2y wrote

This creates an interesting problem for accounting in the future. Future money is considered less valuable than present money so accountants will have to account for relativistic effects.

Mostly a joke but it creates an issue for funding long distance trips. If the passengers fund it, no problem. But if the funders stay behind they're unlikely to ever recoup their investments.

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Alucard661 t1_j119xfo wrote

In hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, there is a five star restaurant at the end of the the universe where diners eat the most expensive dinners and watch the end of the universe and matter from outside the universe. How do you pay you ask? Simple deposit a penny in your own time by the time you show up to eat compound interest pays for the dinner!

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SgtSmackdaddy t1_j10vv8e wrote

>Actually at exactly the speed of light, you’d arrive at Alpha Centauri (actually anywhere in the universe) instantly, yes instantly.

Actually... if you went the speed of light (and presumably you have mass) your mass would go to infinity and you would delete the universe with a divide by zero error.

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simcoder t1_j10ns3k wrote

Need wormhole tech most likely. Otherwise, doing it remotely is probably your best bet.

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Fastfaxr t1_j110ivv wrote

You wouldnt, though. A ship that could accelerate constantly at 1g could cross the galaxy in a single human lifetime

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Johnny_Oats t1_j10tzqb wrote

wormholes are still hypothetical, it is not known if they are actually possible to exist and create within our universe. It's not simply a matter of engineering.

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ReaperofFish t1_j10s0q2 wrote

Define efficient.

Generational ships are the obvious answer. Big city or nation sized ships that contain a very large population of people and animals and plants. Rotate the ship, and slowly cruise out to your destination. The people that board will never see the destination, but maybe their many great-grandchildren will. Hollow out a large asteroid or build an O'Neill cylinder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship

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Bipogram t1_j10x0or wrote

And drive it with several world's supplies of fission devices - the Rocket Equation takes no prisoners.

:\

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comcain2 t1_j1168zu wrote

Yup, I was just thinking of Project Orion.

Cheers

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QuiGonChuck t1_j10qmu2 wrote

Saying something is not possible simply because your knowledge is limited is pretty ignorant

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Johnny_Oats t1_j10tjpr wrote

It's not a limit of knowledge that lets us know that instantaneous travel is not possible - in fact it's quite the opposite.

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zach_dominguez t1_j10sjfe wrote

You might also get there to find other people already there that left after you did because they created faster travel a few years after you left.

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Driekan t1_j10xk2h wrote

The key is implicit in your question: "if we spread to our whole solar system".

If we expand onto the whole solar system to a fair proportion of its total potential, meaning as a species we are a decent fraction of a Kardashev-2 civilization, essentially a loose Dyson Sphere... Yeah, we absolutely can reach other stars.

Using only technology we have today, a set of laser stations powered by the sun (and possibly using it as a lasing medium, if you wanna get fancy) firing a laser at a multi-kilometer laser sail will absolutely accelerate the ship that sail is attached to up to a meaningful fraction of lightspeed.

For arrival, the best design we have is the Orion Drive. A ship with a big Orion Drive to decelerate on arrival, and sped up by a solar-powered laser sail can do 20% of lightspeed. This means 20 years to Proxima, some 40 years to a great many nearby targets. Is that a long trip? Absolutely. But if the ship has good medicine onboard (and it should!) you'd expect most of the original crew to still be alive on arrival.

Importantly, powering one such colonization vessel would take a very laughably tiny fraction of the energy budget available, so it is fully viable to launch such ships by the hundreds, to every star within 10 light-years. That is, i think, 7 star systems.

All of this uses no new science. If scientific progress ends tomorrow, we can still do this! If it doesn't, we'll do better than this.

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DNathanHilliard t1_j10oee6 wrote

At some point technology is going to have to reach the point of addressing the weakest link or it will never happen. That weakest link is the human lifespan and the inability to put humans in "cold storage." If we're ever able to lengthen one while doing the other, and achieve even half the speed of light, then the nearby stars become within our reach.

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heavy_metal t1_j10wmtl wrote

it would take only 30 years to get to the Andromeda galaxy with a 1g ship, that includes stopping. just need an engine capable of 1g acceleration for that long lol. and advanced shielding since hitting even a proton at that speed would be like a nuke going off.

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IndyJacksonTT t1_j11102u wrote

Dyson sphere highways, Antimatter, black holes that are tiny. Plenty of options to approach 99% light speed

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Rescue-a-memory t1_j10rcmc wrote

This right here. Unless sentient AI ever becomes a thing and decides to figure out a solution or we become cyborgs.

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exodus3252 t1_j10s5x9 wrote

IMO, we'd need robotic/AI companions to oversee the mission, and fertilize embryos/raise us once we get there. Either that, or we develop some form of stasis technology.

Can't really see any other way to make a journey that takes hundreds or thousands of years.

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cl4yf4c3 t1_j10pi87 wrote

That's easy af... just launch your frozen corpse toward an advanced civilization. Upon arrival, just have them defrost you (by keeping a note in your pocket). It's kind of like a Sylvester Stallone demolition man mixed with The Police's Message in a bottle sorta thing...

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iFormus t1_j11006j wrote

Traveling through deep space is not possible -as we understand it now-. But who says that physics and physical laws as we understand em now are the final stage?

2 thousand years ago the peak of traveling was a horse-drawn carriage.

Now we have all that incredible stuff like airplanes, levitating trains and rockets which can carry human crew at 40 000km/h through outer space.

And 2000 years is nothing in the big scheme of (universe) things.

The possibilities of space travel may exist, we are just not capable of thinking on such level. Yet.

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Dogisyum69 t1_j111zv7 wrote

Someone from 300 years ago would be absolutely dumbfounded if they saw the world today and its advancements. I would be foolish to say that in 300 years someone from today's world wouldn't be equally dumbfounded if not more so.

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VE3VVS t1_j115342 wrote

We are basing our understanding of space travel on things we know, (current rocket technology), or things we hypothesize, (wormholes, etc), but these things are fairly recent in the existence of modern human technology.

There is also the things that have not yet been thought of, an idea that is yet to be born, or for that matter a person yet to be born that will have a "new" idea that will change everything. How many times has that happened already?

There is also the possibility that we may indeed meet another intelligent race, however unlikely that maybe, but I just pose these things that are things that have not happened, look at the cellphone, the James Webb telescope, even nuclear fusion that only the other day came one small step closer to being reality.

Will this happen in my life time, not a hope in hell, will it happen in your or your children, who knows. I do believe that one day, we will be able to answer the OP question, let alone demonstrate it.

In my humble opinion, don't down vote me for my opinion, just food for thought.

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Rescue-a-memory t1_j10rp2q wrote

We would need to invest more into cybernetics and become cyborgs to do this. It would be impossible for a mere human to travel this distance for that long.

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0ldPainless t1_j10ru79 wrote

Just continue doing what we're doing on spaceship earth. Eventually, we'll reach a jumping off point.

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thalassicus t1_j10rwve wrote

Just like the movie Contact.… don’t send mass. Send digital instructions for a machine that can assemble a human or robot body from local matter and then send the recipe to make us digitally. Even at the speed of light/causation, these are mostly one way trips and no meaningful dialogues at distance are likely.

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Terror_from_the_deep t1_j10st5c wrote

You can't freeze/unfreeze people, but you can freeze/unfreeze our gametes.

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ravedoyer t1_j10t6l6 wrote

We're already in the realm of deep science fiction when it comes to manned interstellar travel. Why not just fold the universe in half and travel instantly from A to B?

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DemSkilzDudes t1_j10ub8q wrote

The thing is, from the crafts POV travelling at light speed, thanks to special relativity it takes 0 time at all

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voidgazing t1_j10uf7p wrote

Cryogenic preservation of reproductive material is well developed technology. Add an artificial womb and android minders/teachers, and send em off into the void!

Once they get to planet X and things look viable, a scout unit gets defrosted and raised, and if things go OK on the planet, turn your eggscicles into colonists who never asked to explore space.

These people will be real weird, because of course we're doing a huge amount of harm that will manifest epigenetically and mentally, what with having no mother carry or care for them, only robots to emulate... A trial run would be in order, (not extrasolar), because their psychology is a major weak point.

A great big lead-or-equivalent shielded American football shaped thing would be the ship design, with an exhaust port for whatever propulsion it has. Also, its own magnetic field to help shed incoming radiation. Crew would exist in a relatively tiny space in the middle, the better to protect them from incoming micro-or-macro meteorites and all that gross radiation. Massive and hard to push? Yes. But fancy might not make it.

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ComfortableTipTap t1_j10ufdb wrote

Traveling through deep space requires advanced propulsion systems, such as ion and plasma drives, nuclear propulsion systems, and solar sails. These propulsion systems are typically powered by nuclear or solar energy, and can be used to generate thrust to propel a spacecraft through the vacuum of space. Additionally, spacecraft can be sent to deep space destinations by taking advantage of gravitational slingshots, which use the gravity of other planets to change the spacecraft's trajectory.

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collin-h t1_j10ulcb wrote

If we could upload our consciousness to the cloud - it'd be a lot cheaper/easier to send a harddrive through space, than a human body with all the necessary life support mechanisms. But then again, if we could do that, there'd be no point in really leaving earth.

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69420trashpanda69420 t1_j10umlc wrote

If we can utilize create and control wormholes we can go anywhere we want in as little time as we like honestly

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waremi t1_j10vpj4 wrote

Interestingly due to time dilation with relativistic travel you could travel almost anywhere in the galaxy in your lifetime. This is assuming you can maintain a 1-g thrust for the entire journey bringing you right up to the speed of light.

In reality there is no meaningful way to do this given the amount of energy required, and the radiation impact at those speeds. From Earth's frame of reference a ship like this travelling to VEGA will take 27 years to get there, but from the ship's frame of reference it would only take about 7 years.

Reference: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html

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vapordaveremix t1_j10vz15 wrote

Okay so hear me out. We build a cannon, one that bends spacetime like the alcubiarre drive. We fire something in a bubble of warped spacetime. Maybe it'll work. I'll need a bajillion dollars to find out. Also a team because I'm not a physicist.

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the_fungible_man t1_j10we6q wrote

>Even at the speed of light, it would still take 4 years to travel to the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri). You can’t just yell “Hyperspeed, Chewie!” and travel through large distances instantaneously, because it’s just not possible.

Are you concerned with the lifespan of the travelers?

Because IF you could travel at nearly the speed of light (assume instantaneous acceleration), you would not experience the same passage of time while covering vast distances that an outside observer of your travels would.

For example, if you travelled a distance of 4 light years at 0.99999c, 4 years would pass for an outside observer, while you would experience about 3 weeks. At 0.999999c, the trip would take you 2 days. At 0.9999999c, 16 hours. At this last speed, you could travel from the Sun to the center of the Milky Way in under 12 years, during which 1000 generations would pass on Earth.

A fundamental problem of ludicrous speed travel is that the travellers can't stay "synchronized" with the civilization they are a part of.

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ligerboy12 t1_j10yt66 wrote

Without learning to warp space we arnt making it through empty space is a very unlikely possibility and you we would never know what would even be found when we got there. If you could create worm holes then maybe but we can’t exactly understand a 4th dimension properly so it’s very unlikely we could ever bend our own 3 dimensions

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amitym t1_j10z0re wrote

>how on Earth (or in space, rather) would we be able to efficiently travel through space?

Efficiently? Or rapidly? They are not always the same thing.

For example, an efficient mode of transport might prove to be quite slow. But if it's efficient enough that means we could send out large numbers of colonists relatively soon in our history -- we would just have to wait a while to see the colonies actually be established.

Whereas a fast travel method might be attractive because of speed but beyond us technologically for another 500 years. Would you rather wait? Or spend those 500 years colonizing existing star systems at the slower more efficient pace?

Anyway ultimately when you think about it, a few centuries isn't very long. Humans spread out across Eurasia at a slower pace than that. It took thousands of years. But we still did it!

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ResettisReplicas t1_j111ubw wrote

I would wait until a few Titanic level tragedies happen. I only trust boats because they’ve had so long to improve since the Titanic.

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shynips t1_j112ekt wrote

I believe that we will eventually figure it out, but I don't think we are even close to that scientifically. I think the first part would be to build the craft in orbit instead of on the ground. A lofty proposition, but if we can avoid escaping the atmosphere the ship can be built for space, instead of built for space AND for escaping an atmosphere.

The idea does offer problems of its own don't get me wrong, but I think it would make the most sense. And then of course we need a better propulsion system, I just don't think liquid fuel will do. Hopefully some nuclear engine or maybe we'll have learned how to manipulate gravity or move through a different dimension or something even more insane than we could have ever thought. I don't think it'll be this generation or the next, I think it'll be hundreds or even a thousand or who knows how long. We could go extinct and the next dominant lifeform could figure out a way. Who knows though. I sure don't lol

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kernal42 t1_j112sil wrote

>Even at the speed of light, it would still take 4 years to travel to the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri). You can’t just yell “Hyperspeed, Chewie!” and travel through large distances instantaneously, because it’s just not possible.

That's not true. It would appear to take 4 years from Earth's perspective to reach Alpha Centauri while traveling at the speed of light....however in your reference frame (as the traveler, at the speed of light) it would be instantaneous! This is the weirdness of special relativity.

Source: PhD in astrophysics.

Of course, it will probably always be impractical to travel fast enough for this sort of time dilation to be significant, so do refer to the other responses in the thread for the practical answers.

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MysteryMystery305 OP t1_j1160z3 wrote

When I say 4 years, I mean 4 years to an outside viewer. Say that you had to travel to Alpha Centauri in less than a week because a friend of yours who lives on Alpha Centauri needs lifesaving medication. Sure, for you it would be instantaneous, but your friend has been dead for over 4 years. It makes things like communication nearly impossible.

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kernal42 t1_j11gnm8 wrote

Your original question had comments about food and survival during the long trip.

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bodden3113 t1_j1130kn wrote

Hear me out... We upload our consciousness into a space craft. And in the virtual world we warp time so 1 day in vr is 100 LYs in real time.

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MysteryMystery305 OP t1_j115fa5 wrote

Yes, but say your buddy Dave, also aboard the starship, decided not to do that. Whoops, looks like your buddy Dave died sixty-seven years ago. Oh, also, your home world was destroyed by some wizard with a bad case of asthma. Point being, a lot can change in a hundred years.

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saltyhasp t1_j1131i8 wrote

The most practical is probably frozen fertilized eggs raise by robots. Another would be a big slow generation ship.

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corgis_are_awesome t1_j1168cl wrote

The answer is regenerative medicine, allowing humans to be put in stasis and pulled back out in good health, thousands of years later

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pete_68 t1_j117f1j wrote

You don't send people. Nobody wants to spend their entire life on a spaceship. They'd blow their brains out or hop out of the airlock.

You send robots with a life construction kit. When they arrive at their destination, assuming no terraforming required (not a good assumption, but you'd do terraforming first, obviously, if needed), the ship would start building human DNA and fertilizing artificial embryos with it. The embryos would be grown in artificial wombs.

While this is going on, the robots would be building shelters and stuff. When the babies are born, the robots would raise the first generation. Voila: Interstellar expansion of the human race.

None of this is very sci-fi. We can do all of this, to a certain degree. We're probably only decades away from being able to do it all.

Speed wouldn't be a big concern in this case.

Obviously, if terraforming is required, that's a different level of technology required and we're definitely not nearly as close, technologically, on that. But the rest is totally feasible in the next several decades.

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TheUmgawa t1_j117my2 wrote

To be fair, if you could actually get up to lightspeed, you would instantaneously arrive at wherever you were going. Or, at least, that would be your perception. A photon, from the moment it is emitted to the moment it is absorbed, experiences no time at all. If you want real world examples of time dilation, you need look no further than particle accelerators, where a particle that exists for, say, half a second before decaying into other particles can be accelerated to a significant percentage of the speed of light and its lifespan, to us, will be significantly longer, in seconds or perhaps even minutes. But, from the standpoint of the particle in the accelerator, it will still decay in half a second.

Thankfully, you can never actually travel at the speed of light, because to achieve that goal would cause you to attain infinite mass, and that would be bad for the rest of us.

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comcain2 t1_j117oq3 wrote

I've got a question.

I've heard a great deal about the radiation that reaches Mars. I recall one Astronaut with a very long stay on the ISS that received a dose of 10 Rads total. (Please, don't get on me about units, you know what I'm trying to say).

  1. What is the dose rate on Mars? If you go outside the shelter to take in the gorgeous vistas, how much radiation do you get per hour?

  2. Would it be possible to deflect the radiation with a strong magnetic field? Build a superconducting loop on the surface, set it conducting or oscillating or whatever, and deflect the radiation from the colony?

I look forward to your answers.

Thanks!

Cheers

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Colon t1_j117qs4 wrote

why is every sub 'Fisher-Price My First AskReddit' now?

mods everywhere, wtf?? why's it feel like every sub is sleeping on culling this low effort stuff

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O-MegaMale t1_j117zvx wrote

Torch ships!

We need to start the testing now!

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Alucard661 t1_j118xl6 wrote

Isn’t loght speed travel instantaneous? Like if you got a ship to go the speed of light getting there would take no time at all to the traveler obviously to an outisde observer it might take thousands of years but if no funny business (warping) light speed is instantaneous

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PanicNearDetroit t1_j1196qv wrote

>You can’t just yell “Hyperspeed, Chewie!” and travel through large distances instantaneously, because it’s just not possible.

Says who? I know, I know, Einstein. But do keep in mind that we're a long way from completely understanding the universe. Relativity came about because there were edge cases that Newtonian mechanics couldn't explain. Einstein has held up very well over the years, but quantum mechanics is now explaining edge cases that relativity can't...including phenomena that appear to propagate WAY faster than light. So maybe the "cosmic speed limit" is one of those edge cases that QM or some as-yet-undiscovered theory will show to be incorrect. Or, if Einstein can't be defied, maybe he can be evaded (see: hyperspace.)

TL;DR: "It's just not possible"...according to what we know, but we don't know everything. Yet.

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GreyChad2022 t1_j119srl wrote

Our efforts in space travel thus far have been absolutely feeble, we aren't even trying at this stuff. What we can achieve in space will blow our minds just as surely as a modern mobile phone would have blown Einstein's mind if he could see it.

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TreegNesas t1_j11ahxm wrote

Compared to the age of the universe and our galaxy, the timespan of our civilization is ridiculously small. Provided our civilization does not destroy itself, we have little clue to how the future will look in one thousand years from.now and absolutely not the vaguest concept of the capabilities of a civilization which is a million years older than ours. Once we are ready to travel interstellar distances I suspect our technology will look totally different from.anything we have now.

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KingBurakkuurufu t1_j10p9cw wrote

You build a super one directional pin point gravitational device that pulls space time in making the distance shorter. Would probably rip space apart I’ve such a long distance but oh well

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Weidr t1_j10sva4 wrote

Out best bet atm would be the Alcubierre Drive.

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[deleted] t1_j10sxel wrote

Wormholes. Mathematically and theoretically possible. You will be able to get to any location in the universe instantly

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heavy_metal t1_j10ul43 wrote

>Even at the speed of light, it would still take 4 years to travel to the nearest star system

false. at the speed of light, the trip would be instantaneous for a traveler. at 1g acceleration (plus deceleration halfway): 3.6 years to proxima system. traveling the entire diameter of the milky way could be done in 12 years. double that if you want to decelerate to a stop lol.

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MysteryMystery305 OP t1_j1151vw wrote

Alpha Centauri is 4 light-years away, right? And a light year is how long it takes light to travel one year. So traveling at the speed of light, it would take 4 years.

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heavy_metal t1_j11857l wrote

from the perspective of a photon, it is instantaneous. from a observer's "planetary" frame, it takes 4 years. when you are in a ship going fast, time it takes to get where you going shrinks. special relativity :)

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Zmemestonk t1_j119dld wrote

For the person traveling wouldn’t their time move much slower if we could get to 90% the speed of light? Exploration might be possible but it’s a one way mission where you’ll never see earth again

Even then you probably can’t get out of the Milky Way

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the_fungible_man t1_j11ojfv wrote

90% wouldn't help much. It'd still take you almost 2 years to travel to Alpha Centauri. 99.999% would get you there in 3 weeks.

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R31nz t1_j119e0c wrote

There’s some interesting possibilities that hold some traction. The best shot I think we have is a laser pointed at a black hole, binary star pair, pulsar, or other fast rotating celestial body. In essence, we shot the laser in an orbit around said body and the laser loops back around to us with slightly more energy than it left with. Essentially an energy scoop if you will. That solves propulsion and potentially energy issues.

As far as the human resource goes, we most likely would need to construct generational ships. You’re right space is VAST and even with light-speed still takes large amounts of time to traverse. A generation ship helps alleviate this. Just basically a subset of our brightest and most talented minds living their life floating through space with the children being the pioneers of new frontiers. We also could potentially use cryogenics, although that leaves a lot more room for error and entire missions could potentially be lost over one glitch in the system.

I think our biggest hurdle at the moment is any one of these missions is going to require a vast amount of resources and are going to take the cooperation of all nations, something that unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.

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SCCock t1_j18mdt8 wrote

>As far as the human resource goes, we most likely would need to construct generational ships.

&#x200B;

You are absolutely correct,

The challenges, both practically and morally/ethically kind of boggle my mind though.

From a practical stand point how can we be sure that those born on board actually will stay the course? Will there be a mutiny? How will a baby born in space develop, physically and mentally?

What are the ethics of planning on having children born on a spaceship with the idea that they will have no agency, their who purpose is to live out their time driving a spaceship to another world.

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incubusboy t1_j10uk2m wrote

We won’t. And unless Mars and Europa suddenly grow magnetic fields of the kind that protects us on earth from various cosmic radiations, we won’t live there either. Earth is it. No Mulligans.

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