Flash
Diamond Member
- Dec 8, 2014
- 71,172
- 62,059
[Q
Just getting to the nearest star will involve a herculean effort and a large chunk of our GDP, if it's even possible.
True.
I don't think that most people really understand the enormous distances involved in space. Science fiction has distorted our perception of reality.
If our star was the size of a grain of sand the nearest star would be a bout 35 miles away. On that scale our galaxy would be about the size of the Continental US.
It took us three days to get to the moon. It will take us us months just to get to Mars.
The only method of space travel propulsion we have now is chemical energy and that is hardly going to get us very far and it is very slow. It is also very expensive.
There may be other viable technologies for spaceship propulsion but we haven't invented them yet and it just may not be possible to go faster than a fraction of the speed of light. Even if we did come up with a feasible technology to go as fast as light it would take years to go just to the nearest star.
It would probably be more technological feasible and faster to travel across the Pacific Ocean in a canoe than it would for us to go to the nearest star with the space travel technology we have now.
I suspect that the most humans will ever achieve is going to Mars. We will die out as a species before we get out of the inner solar system.
Science Fiction is entertaining and we love to speculate on "what if" but reality is a harsh mistress. It is good entertainment for us to watch a show where Captain Kirk tells Scotty to go "warp factor seven" but it just ain't gonna happen in real life.