Do you think we will ever be able to travel the glalaxy within a lifetime?

Question

If you think yes, how long do you think it will take before we will be capable of doing so?

Answer 1

it would take 100,000 years to travel across the galaxy at the speed of light/unless we find a way to by-pass the basic laws of physics and travel faster than light. or find another method (worm holes, black holes, etc) your notion would be unattainable/given the current pace of technological development, it is a way too remote a possibility in the immediate future...in a thousand years perhaps? who's to say what we are capable of several generations in the future

Answer 2

Whose lifetime? The travellers themselves at lightspeed will literally have time stand still. Daunting when one may go on a trip that subjectively takes a few years ... (i.e Alpha Centauri) but may amount to so much more in our 'realtime' environment. We already have the potential to accelerate objects to light speed or just a few hundredths below it, BUT - the object must have no discernable mass, or more properly, the mass won't matter as much if inertia can be dispensed with. How a biological system such as ourselves might survive I do not know. I do know that it is theoretically possible for an object to go beyond the lightspeed barrier. The nature of the object or quantifiable item is still a matter for research. possible, YES. Soon - not for about 50 years. We are only close, knowing where to look does not mean we will understand what we see when we look. Not quite yet, anyway.

Answer 3

Not in my lifetime, but consider these options that make it possible so that we can live to see it happen.

We have the technology to freeze people and make them legally dead (no breathing, pulse or brain activity) for brain surgery. The question is how long can that be extended without the person dying

We could also build an exoskeleton because a heart and lung machine as well as kidney dialysis machines have been in use for quite some time. Even artificial blood and a pseudo eye in development that interfaces with your tongue. Imagine if they were able to identify how to interface to the brain directly. And at last we need a storage tank for your other wise digested food to be pumped to your brain.

The real question to ask is it ethical? Probably not

Answer 4

Obviously, a new form of propulsion must be invented. I'm optimistic that the next 50 years will produce a system capable of traveling that distance within one's lifetime.

Answer 5

I don't believe, according to how we understand science at this point, that we will ever come to travel that long of a distance within our lifetime.

The Milky Way Galaxy is roughly 200 million light-years in diameter, so traveling about it would take even longer than 200 million years even IF we were capable of traveling at lightspeed! It's unfathomable.

Answer 6

yes, we probably would be able to, at the very least soon, just recently scientists have tried a space ship which is propelled by solar wind, the speed that would be possible is hard to imagine, all the ship would have to do is orbit the Earth a couple of thousand times then eject away from the gravitational pull and there you have it... Unfortunately the first time they tried doing this it blew up a couple of seconds after launch, so time, just time, probably another 10-20 years, hopefully less

Answer 7

You can guess all you want to about how you think it can be done,but it isn't going to happen. The fastest thing man has built so far is the voyager Spacecrafts. They sped along at around 8 miles per second. That's pretty fast,but it would take it 30,000 years to reach our next closest star Alphi Proxima at that speed. It is a binary star with Alpha Centari as its double. They are 4 and one half light years from us.Imagine going 8 miles per second,and then see how puny that is compared to light at 186,000 miles per second.

Answer 8

No. To do that would require a time dilation factor of 1000. That requires an energy dilation of 1000, which means that for every gram of mass in the spaceship, there has to be an equivalent of a multi-megaton nuclear to get it to those speeds. At this point, the sheer economics become prohibitive.

Answer 9

Yes! We do it everyday. Earth is in the Milky Way galaxy and we travel around it constantly. If you mean travel to another galaxy, no. Not in our lifetime. The logistics of the time it would take to travel that far make it undoable.

Answer 10

I think it will depend more of what is a lifetime. I think it would be easier to make people live millions of years then to make the speed needed to do it in a short time, if at all posible.