Will we ever go to the stars?

The answer is yes, Virginia, it is possible to go to the stars, but it depends on the development of new technology. There are three known methods that could get us to the stars. One method involves putting people in hibernation stasis units and using ion drive engines to slowly accelerate a vessel to near light speed. The only drawback to this idea is that it would take a long time to get to any distance location. We’re talking light years here. Once a vessel reaches near light speed, time dilution makes their time slow compared to time on Earth. If they go too far, they’ll be forgotten. This is a result of Einstein’s relativity theory in which time is relative to velocity. The faster you go the slower your time progresses versus a fixed location.

The way to beat this problem is to go faster than light. However, that’s impossible according to Einstein. However there are two tricks to cheat the universe’s speed limit. One of these is the warp drive, made famous by Star Trek. It turns out that this is a workable method of traveling light years much quicker than light travels the same distance. What one has to do is create a warp bubble in the spacetime fabric, compressing space in front of the vessel and expanding it behind. This creates a wave that the vessel can ride on like a surfer at much faster than light. The good news about this idea is that the ship stays inside a warp bubble in normal space. Only space around the bubble is compressed and contracted. The problem with this idea is that it would require a tremendous amount of power. We don’t have that capability yet, but NASA is working on it. In fact a NASA scientist has come up with a way to crate a warp bubble using much less energy than previously thought. Hopefully, a prototype will be tested soon. I’d love to see that happen.

The other method to go faster than light is to create a wormhole. A wormhole is a shortcut through space. It’s a tunnel that links two distant locations by folding space to decrease the distance. That way one can go below light speed but get there as if one were going much faster than light. The problem with this idea is that it also requires a lot of power to maintain the wormhole, which has a tendency to collapse the instant one enters it. I don’t see this idea being tested anytime soon.

Both of these ideas are possible according to known physical laws, but the method of creating the enormous amounts of power to achieve them is not possible at this time. Give it a few decades or so.

I believe that we humans will go out to the stars in the future. It’s our destiny to explore the universe and we might want to locate another Earth just in case ours gets wasted. If nothing more, proving that one could cheat the light speed law would suggest that other species out there could do the same, vindicating the UFO enthusiasts.

Are you out there ET?

Thanks for reading.