Will we eventually be able to travel between the stars by manipulating cosmic strings?

Question

If so, how soon will such a feat be possible? Within our lifetimes?

Answer 1

Nope. The only way to travel between stars will be with hydrogen fusion engines that collect the hydrogen fuel from intersellar space. The bussard ram jet concept. These craft will only be able to attain a top speed of 5% lightspeed or risk being destroyed by the interstellar medium. A trip to the nearest star will take hundreds of years. You may live long enough to see the first steps in the development of the technology needed but you are trapped here on Earth for your lifetime.

Answer 2

Good question.
It will obviously be necessary to find some method of traveling through enormous distances in reasonable amounts of time if we are to ever realistically explore the outer regions of space.
I seriously doubt, however, if this will occur in our lifetime.
As a good example of the distances we are talking about, consider if we scale down our Sun to the size of a period on the end of a printed sentence - the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) would be 8 miles away!
It's 4.2 light years away. That simply means that at 186,000 miles per second, it would take over four earth years just to reach it - and we haven't even begun to approach even a significant percentage of the speed of light as yet.
We often hear talk of worm holes and warped space short-cuts and cosmic strings - but to date, these are just good topics for SciFi novels and theoretical physicists.
It's fascinating, to be sure, to try and imagine what developments and new discoveries will be made in the future concerning our universe.