What do you think id the most likely for interstellar transit

[JDLY]

I think a few too many people are immediately disregarding FTL travel.

As for Mass Relays, the whole principle was that, through electrical stimulation, "element zero" created a dark energy field, which rendered all matter in it mass-less to it's surroundings. So they could easily go past the speed of light. So fast, in fact, that they could hop across the galaxy without staying in FTL for very long and therefore negating time-dilation effects.

Obviously there are a few problems, like the fact that element zero does not exist. But if a way can be found to manipulate dark energy that would suffice. Also that, as people have said, getting to the speed of light means the ship reaches infinite mass, requiring infinite energy. And while it seems plausible to think that since the ship has, in effect, zero mass, zero times infinity equals zero, and therefore does not require infinite energy; zero times infinity is not so simple.


Lastly I'd just like to say that, as of right now, the laws of physics says FTL travel is impossible. But the laws of physics are not a concrete thing. They can change, and have changed in the past. There is a difference between how the universe actually works, and our understanding of it. It is quite possible that FTL travel not only works, but is easily feasible.

There are still a lot of things we don't know about the how everything works, every scientist admits that. And we won't be limited in the future by what we know right now. This is not a guarantee that we will someday fly among the stars, but it does instill some hope that it may someday be possible.

 

[Quaxar]

Space elevator to a space station. That means rockets will not need to fuel (Which is a lot of fucking fuel) To actually get off the ground and escape Earth's orbit. Maybe there will be more than one space elevator. An elevator per country or those who can afford it.

I don't see that it is possible to keep sending ships up from Earth as space travel gets more important.

I dunno. :L

There's so many problems with building a space elevator, I don't see it happen in a long, looong time...

Well, not necessarily a structure reminiscent of a present day elevators, i.e a shaft with a box inside that goes up and down via cables, but tests have proven successful on elevators powered by magnets. Magnets solve bloody everything.

It's basically a slim 'tube' with magnets lining it, that can be controlled to push a surface upward or downward.

That's not the point I was going at. Simply speaking, there is no material at the moment that could hold its own weight plus all the external forces acting on it over this length. I don't know what tests you are speaking of but unless these were tested by connecting it to a satelite it's probably not a real material stress test.
Sending something up a 100km line is probably the smallest problem here. First you have to find a material strong enough to hold itself over that distance (possibly carbon nanotubes but I think there hasn't been enough testing yet) then there's the problem of setting the thing up, strong winds, rotational forces and so on...

Not to mention security issues.

 

[JDLY]

Space elevator to a space station. That means rockets will not need to fuel (Which is a lot of fucking fuel) To actually get off the ground and escape Earth's orbit. Maybe there will be more than one space elevator. An elevator per country or those who can afford it.

I don't see that it is possible to keep sending ships up from Earth as space travel gets more important.

I dunno. :L

There's so many problems with building a space elevator, I don't see it happen in a long, looong time...

Well, not necessarily a structure reminiscent of a present day elevators, i.e a shaft with a box inside that goes up and down via cables, but tests have proven successful on elevators powered by magnets. Magnets solve bloody everything.

It's basically a slim 'tube' with magnets lining it, that can be controlled to push a surface upward or downward.

The biggest problem I've heard for it is what material to build it out of. As any cable going to the height of a geosynchronous would be extremely long.

(The following is quoted from someone I know who reads into such things, so I don't know how accurate these numbers are)
If we were to build it out of a material such as steel, the cable would have to be something along the lines of 1km wide to cope with the forces put on it. You can see the obvious problems with that.

However a more recent idea was to build it out of carbon nanotubes. With these, to get the same strength needed, the cable would only have to be little more that a meter wide. This also solves the problems of lifting the cart. Being all carbon and therefore all non-polar bonds, carbon nanotubes shouldn't be magnetic, but for some reason they are. Another mystery we have yet to solve.

 

[SEXTON HALE]

The obvious solution to this is portals.
Keep it nice and simple.

 

[TheVioletBandit]

It's kind of a shitty means of space travel, but a few brave souls traveling on ships with Cryostasis pods of some kind may work. They would never see there family or friends again, and when they get to where their going it may suck balls, but it's a way to go there nevertheless.

I hope we figure out a better way, but this sounds the most realistic as of now to me.

 

[Pain Is Inevitable]

Any expansion into space outside the solar system might very well end up being a pretty slow and gradual endeavor with no physics-defying magical warp-gates or FTL-speed engines involved. If we don't mind spending a few hundred thousand years, achieve immortality and find a way to get enough energy out to the far reaches outside our sun we might even be able to get to our closest neighboring star by leap-frogging to it with successive bases established further and further out in the vast asteroid fields that (hopefully) extends as far as several light-years out from our star (and with any luck Proxima Centauri has such a field of asteroids as well). Easy peasy fa-breezy.

 

[Robert Ewing]

Space elevator to a space station. That means rockets will not need to fuel (Which is a lot of fucking fuel) To actually get off the ground and escape Earth's orbit. Maybe there will be more than one space elevator. An elevator per country or those who can afford it.

I don't see that it is possible to keep sending ships up from Earth as space travel gets more important.

I dunno. :L

There's so many problems with building a space elevator, I don't see it happen in a long, looong time...

Well, not necessarily a structure reminiscent of a present day elevators, i.e a shaft with a box inside that goes up and down via cables, but tests have proven successful on elevators powered by magnets. Magnets solve bloody everything.

It's basically a slim 'tube' with magnets lining it, that can be controlled to push a surface upward or downward.

That's not the point I was going at. Simply speaking, there is no material at the moment that could hold its own weight plus all the external forces acting on it over this length. I don't know what tests you are speaking of but unless these were tested by connecting it to a satelite it's probably not a real material stress test.
Sending something up a 100km line is probably the smallest problem here. First you have to find a material strong enough to hold itself over that distance (possibly carbon nanotubes but I think there hasn't been enough testing yet) then there's the problem of setting the thing up, strong winds, rotational forces and so on...

Not to mention security issues.

Well, we are talking about interstellar transit. So that's not mentioning what we have made to get to that stage in the first place. Also, Graphene. Strongest material known to man, and only an atom thick. Suitable I think.

And security is a problem for every mode of transport, I doubt interstellar will be any different. So you're right :L

 

[Heronblade]

Like mass rellay, stargates, wormhole ect. Also it has to be able to move at FTL speeds

Mass relay is unlikely, as neat as the concept is, it fails to adequately bypass the acceleration issue.

Wormholes (and stargates, they're the same concept) are iffy affairs. It is not inconceivable that we might find a way to bend or even puncture the fabric of space time, but connecting such a puncture from one location to another is unlikely. Inter-dimensional travel might actually be easier and/or the key to doing this.

At this point, ironically enough, the warp engines from Star Trek and a few other media sources seem to be our best bet. They succeed in bypassing the acceleration issue by not actually moving the ship at all, but by effectively warping the shape of the universe around it.

 

[Heronblade]

That's not the point I was going at. Simply speaking, there is no material at the moment that could hold its own weight plus all the external forces acting on it over this length. I don't know what tests you are speaking of but unless these were tested by connecting it to a satelite it's probably not a real material stress test.
Sending something up a 100km line is probably the smallest problem here. First you have to find a material strong enough to hold itself over that distance (possibly carbon nanotubes but I think there hasn't been enough testing yet) then there's the problem of setting the thing up, strong winds, rotational forces and so on...

Not to mention security issues.

Carbon nanotubes have well more than enough tensile strength to manage in the form of a thick cable or ribbon that tapers towards the ends. Also, more than enough material exists to make such a cable at the thickness needed, since it is simply made from pure Carbon.

The problem lies with actual means of production, bucky tubes must be assembled on a molecular level. Since doing so by "hand" is just a wee bit difficult, producing enough for such a cable would take millions of years at the present rate. If our friends over in the micro-robotics research department would actually deliver on the nano-assemblers promised almost thirty years ago, production wouldn't be an issue either, and if we had the assemblers do their thing in orbit, spooling out cable both above and below their orbital path as they went, setup would be fairly simple. (Bonus fuel conservation points for hauling a carbon rich asteroid into orbit for the job)

 

[CrystalShadow]

The only concept that's been confirmed as a mathematical possibility and not in violation of special relativity is the Alcubierre Drive concept, in which exotic matter particles (negative mass, negative energy) are used to warp space around an object. Hence, FTL distance and travel time while not actually having velocity greater than c (3.0*10^8 m/s).

That's definitely a good starting point. Something that is at least mathematically possible, and consistent with known theory.

It basically demonstrates mathematically, that while nothing can technically travel faster than the speed of light, you can apparently distort space sufficiently to have the same effect in practice.

Problem is, FTL travel, if possible at all will likely depend on some as of yet unknown area of physics.

Even the Alcubierre drive depends on somehow creating matter with properties which no known matter has. (negative mass & energy).

But... With these kind of things you take whatever loopholes you can get.

I suspect the Alcubierre drive is more plausible than a wormhole, because mathematically you need the same kind of exotic matter to traverse a wormhole without collapsing it as you would to create an Alcubierre drive.

And you'd then have the added complication of needing to either artificially create a wormhole too, or find a naturally occurring one somewhere first...

Again, at this point its just confirmed as a pure exercise in mathematics that's also consistent with the theory of special realtivity. It's important to keep in mind that Einstein's paper on general relatively and the subsequent evidence supporting it confirmed that space-time is a malleable thing, that can be altered based on circumstance. The problem is, that circumstance is virtually always a massive gravity source, like a sun or black hole. The trick is doing the task in a very precise way in a small area, which only works mathematically with the inclusion of a negative mass/negative energy component.

Very true. You've got to wonder what inspired it to begin with though...

The way it functions, (as well as it generally being referred to as Alcubierre warp drive) kind of suggests Star Trek was involved, since, aside from the constant reference to 'subspace' (which realistically is probably a result of the writers at the time leaving themselves a bit of a loophole to avoid contradicting known science outright too easily), it is pretty close to all known attempts to define how the entirely fictional 'warp drive' works.

Since the Alcubierre drive is a much more recent (but obviously more scientifically valid) description of a similar idea, and Star Trek is widely known around the world, it stands to reason that it resulted from someone looking at the way Warp drive was being described, and seeing if real-world physics allowed anything even remotely similar to exist theoretically.

On the other hand, the resemblance could be a complete coincidence...

 

[Private Custard]

At the moment, I really can't understand why people talk about black holes and wormholes as if they could be the same thing.

Do you know what happens if you go into a black hole? You're torn apart before you even reach it due to the gravitational forces that are too big for most people to comprehend. The eviscerated mess that's left would then be crushed down to something so small that even the best microscopes would struggle to see. Any matter that can't be taken in at that time is ejected back into space.

You lot can try it first!

Me, I honestly think that humans will kill themselves off long before we ever get to that stage. At the very best, we'll have a huge war (probably over resources) that will leave the human race in such a mess that space travel is but a distant dream.

If, by some amazing freak occurrence, humans manage to stop being such fucking arseholes, there'll be massive city-sized spacecraft housing many generations, travelling at pretty much the speed that we can achieve right now. Food will be grown in huge atriums, animals will be kept, but not for meat, but for eggs, milk, butter etc... Eating them would be too wasteful. People will be born in space, live out their entire lives and then die without ever setting foot on another planet.

It's a pretty grim thought!

 

[Doitpow]

deep sleep and highish speeds.
Breaking the speed of light is something that will take thousands of years, it requires an entirely new concept of physics.

 

[Zantos]

FTL does infact break the #1 fundamental rule in physics. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Nothing at all. Even when they thought that they discovered a particle that did, it turned out to be equipment miscalibration.

First postulate of special relativity is that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Small but very important distinction.

OT: Erkh, you're not likely to get anything faster than light any time soon. But wormhole is probably your best bet. Unfortunately since I didn't get a pHd place in topological quantum physics we might have to put the mental new physical phenomena back a few years.

 

[banthro]

Well, according to the theory of relativity. We could, if going at 99.99999% of the speed of light, reach the Andromeda Galaxy which is 3 million light years away in 50 years. The downside is that this will only be for the people on the ship... For the people on Earth it will take 3 million years. But then again, that means you can now travel to the future.

 

[silver wolf009]

We'd probably end up consuming the asteroid belt and build massive, and I mean MASSIVE, nation sized ships.

What they're powered by is anybodies guess.

Space whales.

OT: Most likely explanation would be generational voyages. Albeit, that's going to be tough. The use of indoctrination to keep the mission on track after several generations might be needed, and the ethical issue of trapping future generations a ship to keep the mission moving have to be brought up. And then, what will you do when they get there? Chances are, they'll probably form their own nation and renounce any intention that the people who so long ago launched them towards the stars had. And we wouldn't be able to do anything, because they're so far away, and we can't get to them without launching another generational voyage, and then we have the same exact problems.

It could work, but we'd all have to go at once, and I do mean all of us.