It's depressing to think that we may never be able to physicallty travel farther than Mars

[VivaRevolution]

Yeah. Just finished watching a 3 hours documentary about the size of the universe and space travel and now i feel sort of depressed and overwhelmed. The universe is sooooooooo fucking huge with so fucking many crazy shits and yet we're probably we'll never be able to explore a fraction of it due to the mind boggling distances to cover and other factors. I mean reaching the nearest star system Alpha Centauri would take 80 000 fucking years and that's assuming you travel at the speed of light. this is batshit insane stuff

I mean only reaching Mars pose quite a few problems but that i think we'll be able to overcome soon enough. Farther than Mars however...i am quite skeptical. With probes like the Voyagers , yeah sure but physically ? Call me pessimist but it's gonna be tough. I don't think going to Alpha Centauri and beyond is feasible with energy based spaceships. I think if we actually do it at some point it will be via star trek like teleportation or some stargate portal stuff.

It pisses me off. I sooo want to know what it out there my curiosity is killing me but deep inside i know that there is a very good chance that we'll probably never know. Fuck this lol

What's you take on the whole size of the universe and space travel stuff ?

Takes worm hole travel, or faster than light speeds. Many theories on how to do both.

We basically just lack sources of energy sufficient to test those theories.

We need a moon shot for fussion energy.

 

[CutStryker]

Yeah. Just finished watching a 3 hours documentary about the size of the universe and space travel and now i feel sort of depressed and overwhelmed. The universe is sooooooooo fucking huge with so fucking many crazy shits and yet we're probably we'll never be able to explore a fraction of it due to the mind boggling distances to cover and other factors. I mean reaching the nearest star system Alpha Centauri would take 80 000 fucking years and that's assuming you travel at the speed of light. this is batshit insane stuff

I mean only reaching Mars pose quite a few problems but that i think we'll be able to overcome soon enough. Farther than Mars however...i am quite skeptical. With probes like the Voyagers , yeah sure but physically ? Call me pessimist but it's gonna be tough. I don't think going to Alpha Centauri and beyond is feasible with energy based spaceships. I think if we actually do it at some point it will be via star trek like teleportation or some stargate portal stuff.

It pisses me off. I sooo want to know what it out there my curiosity is killing me but deep inside i know that there is a very good chance that we'll probably never know. Fuck this lol

What's you take on the whole size of the universe and space travel stuff ?

I was thinking how if we drilled into Mars and found some type of natural resource and it turned out to be a fuel of some sort which allowed us to travel faster than what we have on Earth. That would be something

 

[moreorless87]

America needs something the general population can get behind again...

 

[90 50]

 

[Organic Damage]

Far from depressing, if you love your life on planet earth there is no need to worry about what's going on out there.

Eh, I'd say it's depressing in the same way it's depressing there will never be universal peace on earth because humans have free will. You can still live a full life in spite of that fact, but if you are a certain kind of person, it might bother you. I'm one of those types unfortunately.

I don't believe it'll *never* happen though. Maybe not FTL but humanity will eventually will develop cryogenics and good enough propulsion and shielding to make long term voyages (assuming we don't go extinct in a cataclysm or due to idiocy). It's just that nobody here will be alive to see it.

 

[Takes_Two_To_Tango]

Great pictures to put it in perspective.

The universe is ridiculously massive. Just try to imagine all the galaxies, stars, solar systems in this universe. For this planet to only have life in this universe is hard to believe considering the incomprensible amount of galaxies, solar systems that are out there.

 

[ralphc1]

You're still off by quite a bit, not 79,996 years off anymore, but still 96.

It would take a little over 4 years from the perspective of people on Earth to get to Alpha Centauri going the speed of light, or rather a significant fraction thereof since as you said nothing with mass can be accelerated to the speed of light. For the people on the ship, however, it would be significantly shorter due to time dilation. How much less depends on exactly how close to the speed of light they get and how quickly they accelerate, at .90c it would take about 2 years, at .99c it would take about 7 months, keep adding 9's and the trip gets shorter and shorter.

At constant 1g acceleration, which is nice because you get Earth-like gravity as a byproduct, the trip would take about 5 years from Earth's POV and a little over a year for the people on the ship. You accelerate halfway there, then flip the ship around and decelerate for the second half of the trip. Without getting into worm holes and warp drives, constant acceleration if likely the most practical method for long distance space travel. That's not to say there aren't gigantic problems to overcome, if they even can be. When you get up to significant percentages of the speed of light, things get dangerous. At those speeds, the afterglow of the big bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background, would kill you due to radiation and would probably vaporize the ship, as would the light coming from stars and the random atoms and quantum particles floating in space. Not to mention the catastrophic effects of hitting something big enough to actually see like, I don't know, a grain of sand or a fucking planet.

Using the designs from Project Longshot, a very large nuclear pulse rocket, it would take about a 100 years with an average speed of 4.5% the speed of light. Project Longshot is at the very least feasible and maybe even outright doable in the coming decades. Figure out how to put people in cryostasis and we've got a way off this rock.

Yes, the science fiction fantasy compared to the hard reality. Many people don't consider the acceleration and deceleration in these cases. It would take nearly a year to reach light speed at one g and the ship would only travel about 2.8 billion miles during that time. Anything encountered in space could completely destroy the vehicle. There would be no way to tell what's in front of the vehicle and no way to avoid it if you did know.

 

[rj144]

Yeah. Just finished watching a 3 hours documentary about the size of the universe and space travel and now i feel sort of depressed and overwhelmed. The universe is sooooooooo fucking huge with so fucking many crazy shits and yet we're probably we'll never be able to explore a fraction of it due to the mind boggling distances to cover and other factors. I mean reaching the nearest star system Alpha Centauri would take 80 000 fucking years and that's assuming you travel at the speed of light. this is batshit insane stuff

I mean only reaching Mars pose quite a few problems but that i think we'll be able to overcome soon enough. Farther than Mars however...i am quite skeptical. With probes like the Voyagers , yeah sure but physically ? Call me pessimist but it's gonna be tough. I don't think going to Alpha Centauri and beyond is feasible with energy based spaceships. I think if we actually do it at some point it will be via star trek like teleportation or some stargate portal stuff.

It pisses me off. I sooo want to know what it out there my curiosity is killing me but deep inside i know that there is a very good chance that we'll probably never know. Fuck this lol

What's you take on the whole size of the universe and space travel stuff ?

Alpha Centauri is 4.2 ly away. What are you talking about with 80,000 years at the speed of light?

 

[LHWBelt]

Yeah. Just finished watching a 3 hours documentary about the size of the universe and space travel and now i feel sort of depressed and overwhelmed. The universe is sooooooooo fucking huge with so fucking many crazy shits and yet we're probably we'll never be able to explore a fraction of it due to the mind boggling distances to cover and other factors. I mean reaching the nearest star system Alpha Centauri would take 80 000 fucking years and that's assuming you travel at the speed of light. this is batshit insane stuff

I mean only reaching Mars pose quite a few problems but that i think we'll be able to overcome soon enough. Farther than Mars however...i am quite skeptical. With probes like the Voyagers , yeah sure but physically ? Call me pessimist but it's gonna be tough. I don't think going to Alpha Centauri and beyond is feasible with energy based spaceships. I think if we actually do it at some point it will be via star trek like teleportation or some stargate portal stuff.

It pisses me off. I sooo want to know what it out there my curiosity is killing me but deep inside i know that there is a very good chance that we'll probably never know. Fuck this lol

What's you take on the whole size of the universe and space travel stuff ?

They'll probably figure out how to go farther mate. You'll be long dead though. PS I like your av.

 

[bad seed]

Great pictures to put it in perspective.

The universe is ridiculously massive. Just try to imagine all the galaxies, stars, solar systems in this universe. For this planet to only have life in this universe is hard to believe considering the incomprensible amount of galaxies, solar systems that are out there.

what's truly humbling is the fact that the universe is expanding and the galaxies are moving further apart. The further they are, the faster they appear to be moving away. To the point that it's moving away FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. That means the galaxies on the horizon are for all intents and purposes dead to us because we will never receive information from them. And vice versa. No technology will ever overcome this fundamental law. There could be superintelligent beings who have colonized their galaxy and we will never know.

With enough time, even our nearest galactic neighbors will be too distant to perceive with any telescope. Floating in our lonely galaxy forever alone for eternity when our last star has spent its fuel.

 

[Rygu]

Great pictures to put it in perspective.

The universe is ridiculously massive. Just try to imagine all the galaxies, stars, solar systems in this universe. For this planet to only have life in this universe is hard to believe considering the incomprensible amount of galaxies, solar systems that are out there.

I see those who think we're the only life form in the universe the same as I see creationists.

As morons.

 

[ralphc1]

Making the claim that "We'll never travel very far in the universe" is a very bold statement. Technology has made incredible advancements just in the last couple centuries, and continues to advance exponentially. I'm sure people in the 1800's didn't think we'd ever get to the moon. People in the early AD era probably didn't even think people would leave their own county (To the extent that they even knew how big the planet was).

Knowing about things like wormholes, blackholes, and spacetime manipulation is the first step in eventually being able to travel far distances. Things like fuel cost/type aren't worth being concerned about.

There's no reason to worry.

People have fantasized about traveling to the moon since man started thinking. Wan Hu is said to have built a rocket chair about 2000BC. Mankind didn't know about the dangers of high altitude let alone outer space so the task seemed much easier. The more man learned, the more difficult it appeared. The same with deep space travel. The more we learn, the more difficult it becomes.

 

[Orgasmo]

Earth is our cradle, but it will not be our final resting place. Eventually resources will run out on this planet, or we get struck by a large asteroid. It's a matter of time before extinction. We must race against the clock to colonize space for the survival of our species.

I think the most likely form is by downloading our concisouness into computers. Biological beings cannot survive the hardships of interstellar space travel without significant life support systems. That makes the ships extremely inefficient.

 

[boingyman]

#spaceworldproblems

 

[Tabarnakos]

Alpha Centauri is 4.2 ly away. What are you talking about with 80,000 years at the speed of light?

I made a mistake and have been corrected since then.

 

[ralphc1]

This is so incredibly short sighted. So in 1000 years you can't fathom humans creating technology that lets us reach distant stars? Cryo, near light speed travel, teleporation, etc?

I don't see the advances that you apparently do. People tend to cite advances of the past century but all of those were not new things but miniaturization of things that have been around for a long time. Rockets have been used for thousands of years. Children have been playing with gliders since the ancient Egyptians. Computers have been used since the Abacus by Sumerians in 2000BC. Wireless communication has been around since Marconi. Inventions are improved over time as materials and power sources are improved or become less costly but the basic invention is older. Computer processing speeds advanced at a fast pace for many years but plateaued years ago as they got to a point where they were as fast as most people needed. Airplanes got bigger and bigger but now airlines are using smaller planes as the larger planes are not cost effective on many routes.

 

[HockeyBjj]

On the flip side, I find it crazy we can look out and see things with telescopes so far away light takes thousands or millions of years to travel the distance

I don't get how it's done actually, telescopes essentially look back in time

 

[90 50]

I don't see the advances that you apparently do. People tend to cite advances of the past century but all of those were not new things but miniaturization of things that have been around for a long time. Rockets have been used for thousands of years. Children have been playing with gliders since the ancient Egyptians. Computers have been used since the Abacus by Sumerians in 2000BC. Wireless communication has been around since Marconi. Inventions are improved over time as materials and power sources are improved or become less costly but the basic invention is older. Computer processing speeds advanced at a fast pace for many years but plateaued years ago as they got to a point where they were as fast as most people needed. Airplanes got bigger and bigger but now airlines are using smaller planes as the larger planes are not cost effective on many routes.

Um no, processor speeds have not plateaued by any stretch of the imagination “years ago”

 

[para1]

ever heard of Von Neumann machines? It's an idea theorized by John von Neumann to create self replicating robots that expand outward and explore/colonize space. It could theoretically harness the abundant raw materials available and catalog/exploit/study every inch of the galaxy.

No we shouldn't build replicators those shits took out the Ancients and the Asgard.

 

[Tabarnakos]

Um no, processor speeds have not plateaued by any stretch of the imagination “years ago”

We're about the make a HUGE jump soon as quantum computing eventually become more common and mainstream

Going from the current processor based computers to quantum computers will be like going from horseback to a figher jet. Quantum age is upon uis