How difficult is interstellar travel?

[Fnord]

1) Design a "Hubble" telescope with an on-board A.I. that has just enough reasoning capability to know what to look for when it gets to the target system.
2) Design a vessel that will protect and sustain the A.I. on the way to the target system. Perhaps it could drop off a radio relay station every light-year or so.
3) Deploy the A.I. in the target system, just outside the "Life Zone" to avoid being constantly on the opposite side of that star from any habitable worlds.
4) Have the A.I. send back images of whatever it finds in the target system.
5) If discovered by the natives, allow the A.I. to present a means of communicating with us Terrestrials, if only to say "Greetings."

Follow up with a manned mission in a hundred years or so ... maybe.

 

[BlackKat]

1) Design a "Hubble" telescope with an on-board A.I. that has just enough reasoning capability to know what to look for when it gets to the target system.
2) Design a vessel that will protect and sustain the A.I. on the way to the target system. Perhaps it could drop off a radio relay station every light-year or so.
3) Deploy the A.I. in the target system, just outside the "Life Zone" to avoid being constantly on the opposite side of that star from any habitable worlds.
4) Have the A.I. send back images of whatever it finds in the target system.
5) If discovered by the natives, allow the A.I. to present a means of communicating with us Terrestrials, if only to say "Greetings."

Follow up with a manned mission in a hundred years or so ... maybe.

Sounds about spot on with all the existing interstellar probe plans. The relays is a good idea.

 

[ponderingturtle]

The problem seems to me to be that you either need a generation ship, or some way of breaking the "light barrier".

Regarding the former, exactly who is going to agree to get involved in this? Not just sacrifice the rest of their lives to the project, but the lives of their children and grandchildren too? I think we'd have to be looking at an imminently uninhabitable Earth for this to be really plausible.

A religious cult sounds like just the thing.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

The problem seems to me to be that you either need a generation ship, or some way of breaking the "light barrier".

Regarding the former, exactly who is going to agree to get involved in this? Not just sacrifice the rest of their lives to the project, but the lives of their children and grandchildren too? I think we'd have to be looking at an imminently uninhabitable Earth for this to be really plausible.

There are plenty of people and cultures who lived very long times on small isolated islands. And some of Gerard O'Neill's concepts for space colonies were fairly large (100K People). And it wouldn't necessarily have to be a single ship.

 

[Steve]

I remember reading somewhere that future advances in genetic engineering could result in "tailoring" humans for specific tasks. One could design humans for space travels; individuals with longer lifespan, better adapted for zero-g during long periods, etc.

Like the Navigators in "Dune"?

 

[Meadmaker]

The problem seems to me to be that you either need a generation ship, or some way of breaking the "light barrier".

Regarding the former, exactly who is going to agree to get involved in this?

In the event that the mission could be made feasible (which is totally out of the question using today's technology, and somewhat doubtful, ever), I think you would have to set very high standards for the crew, because you would have far too many volunteers to take them all.

 

[Meadmaker]

It seems that the biggest problem with interstellar travel is that the stars are so far apart.
The obvious solution would be to move them closer together.

You can thank me latter.

Einstein solved that problem. Just move very fast. You can't pass light speed, but the distance starts getting shorter when you get close.

 

[Meadmaker]

1) Design a "Hubble" telescope with an on-board A.I. that has just enough reasoning capability to know what to look for when it gets to the target system.
2) Design a vessel that will protect and sustain the A.I. on the way to the target system. Perhaps it could drop off a radio relay station every light-year or so.
3) Deploy the A.I. in the target system, just outside the "Life Zone" to avoid being constantly on the opposite side of that star from any habitable worlds.
4) Have the A.I. send back images of whatever it finds in the target system.
5) If discovered by the natives, allow the A.I. to present a means of communicating with us Terrestrials, if only to say "Greetings."

Follow up with a manned mission in a hundred years or so ... maybe.

I think steps 1-6 will eventually be done. The follow up part? Maybe.

 

[MRC_Hans]

The problem seems to me to be that you either need a generation ship, or some way of breaking the "light barrier".

Regarding the former, exactly who is going to agree to get involved in this? Not just sacrifice the rest of their lives to the project, but the lives of their children and grandchildren too?

Or, perhaps more to the point, are those that would do this suitable for the job? I'm sure you could find some starving peasants somewhere who would sign the contract without even being able to read the small print. But we need highly educated, mentally stable and ressourceful people to go.

I think we'd have to be looking at an imminently uninhabitable Earth for this to be really plausible.

And the latter is at the moment science fiction.

Fortunately.

Which rather puts a lot of the UFO stories into perspective.

Rolfe.

Yep.

Hans

 

[Corsair 115]

There was an old science fiction story about this subject. In the story, when they finally arrived after about 150 years, there were people from earth waiting there to welcome them. It seems that technology had advanced so much during that 150 years that modern people were able to get there quicker than they did.

I recall reading a similar story.

Are you perhaps thinking of Robert A. Heinlein's "Time for the Stars" where the first interstellar starship is launched, and for "easy" communication, they use twins with telepathical abilities.
Thanks to the scientific tests done with the telepaths enroute to a star, it is discovered that telepathy is indeed immediate with infinite speed. This helps Earth scientists to develope spaceships unconstrained by lightspeed.
When the first ship finally reaches it's destination, there's a ship waiting to take them all home again in an instant.

No, that's not the one I read. The one I recall had the astronaut in suspended animation, and when he is awakened close to his destination that's when he finds out the planet he was heading to had already been colonized by humans.

I can't recall who wrote the story... maybe A.E. van Vogt?

 

[jimbob]

The problem seems to me to be that you either need a generation ship, or some way of breaking the "light barrier".

Regarding the former, exactly who is going to agree to get involved in this? Not just sacrifice the rest of their lives to the project, but the lives of their children and grandchildren too? I think we'd have to be looking at an imminently uninhabitable Earth for this to be really plausible.

And the latter is at the moment science fiction.

Which rather puts a lot of the UFO stories into perspective.

Rolfe.

A religious cult sounds like just the thing.

like in Harry Harrison's Captive Universe

But the question is why?

To make crop circles, obviously. That is whay aliens have been visiting Zummerzet. (I do have an observation about crop circles, the more cider that is drunk in an area, the more frequent the circles, now does this enable me to build a plausible theory?)

 

[Hellbound]

1) 3) Deploy the A.I. in the target system, just outside the "Life Zone" to avoid being constantly on the opposite side of that star from any habitable worlds.

A minor quibble: Set up perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, so you can see the entire orbital plane of planets.

To points raised by others:
As to the time frame, that depends (to a degree). I think we're more limited by the maximum possible lenght of a political reign than by lifespan. Few Presidents would go for anything that won't even begin to show results until long after they're out of office. I'd imagine that holds true, to a greater or lesser extent, for other countries as well.

Not to mention that the resources of a single government would be stretched.

On the other hand, if we could develop a powerful, efficinet engine, we could get a ship close enough to the speed of light that stars within a 12 to 20 light year radius might be reachable within a lifetime (with even a modest, constant accel/decel, times might be as little as 30 years for 20 light-years). That gives dozens of stars to look at (I believe on of the first extra-solar planets was at about 17 light years?). Of course, that doesn't include the time to build the ship; but shorter flights might allow for ship-building time as well as travel within a life. That also doesn't allow for signal time, either, though. You'd have to add 12 to 20 years for a return signal, so maybe I need to revise my estimate. We could reach maybe 8 to 12 lights out in a lifetime (and get some sort of return).

Of course, automated probes do make more sense. And, they could be used to look for "promising" areas. Of course, they'd add to the times above (at least doubling them, assuming you built your peopled-ship right after the probe launch and had it waiting for the "looks good" signal from a probe).

 

[DRBUZZ0]

Because it is there.

You miss my point. If we could check out a bunch of stars across the galaxy, some of the more interesting nebula, swing by a few neutron stars to take some remote measurements, and check out some other planetary systems, then it might be worth it.

But is it worth several generations of people living on a spacecraft, an enormous amount of resources and so on just to get to one of the (very) local stars, such as alpha centauri, only to find a rather uninteresting star with no habitable planets or major resources? then what? Spend another century heading back to earth because the place you've arrived is not suitable for living there?

or keep going? Spend another several generations on your ship (presumably with near-unlimited resources) going to another (very) local star system?

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

I'm sure we'll have the Rigil system mapped before we embark.

 

[Correa Neto]

Like the Navigators in "Dune"?

Almost but, not exactly. "Dune" allows FTL voyages, and the way the Navigators handle the travels seem (at least to me) that some physical "laws" -as we understand them nowadays- have to be changed or broken. Unless we think of them as ultra powerful organic computers, processing data gathered by ship's sensors.

The article (can’t remember who wrote it and where I read it, it was a long time ago, in the pre-www days) clearly proposed modifications aimed to improve our adaptation to non-FTL space travels and were not as radical as those seen in the Navigators.

On a slightly similar line, at William Tedfords’ Silent Galaxy (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/t/william-tedford/silent-galaxy.htm http://www.kentaurus.com/bkrevfict.htm#tedford_silent) speciation starts among human colonies scattered across the solar system. The most radical changes happen at a colony aboard a space station beyond Saturn (IIRC). Humans become something like four-limbed spiders, fully adapted to 3D environments with no gravity. How much of this came from genetic engineering, if I’m not mistaken, remains unclear on the book, but the time that was available for natural speciation was too small, thus manipulation seems likely.

 

[gnome]

I think that it will be useful once we have developed terraforming abilities enough to make use of a less than ideal planet--or to create self-sufficient colonies that can be powered by a sun. Escalating energy needs will bring us to other suns, I suspect.

 

[Jimbo07]

I think that it will be useful once we have developed terraforming abilities enough to make use of a less than ideal planet--or to create self-sufficient colonies that can be powered by a sun. Escalating energy needs will bring us to other suns, I suspect.

How 'bout Mars?

 

[gnome]

Sure!

 

[Jimbo07]

Then why interstellar travel?

Don't have a solution, especially one so improbable, looking for a problem...

 

[Soapy Sam]

The technology to reach other solar systems isn't rocket science,(sorry)-but it is likely to be just staggeringly expensive and rather slow.

So, not really suited to transporting bags of guts that die after 100 years of requiring very complex life support.

So why send them?

The only generation required by a generation ship is the one that arrives.
What's required is an automated birth lab / construction facility that boots up on arrival and starts having babies. So it takes 2000 years to get there and another 40 to produce, hatch, raise and train the human crew. Who cares?

Mind you, if robots are good enough to do that, why send people at all, even in vitro?