What theories do you have about space flight and exploration hundreds of years from now?

Question

I think we'll be looking back many years from now thinking about how fragile our spacestation, technology and dreams of space exploration were. We'll have several spacestation located throughout the galaxy, and small research colonies on the moon and possibly mars. Beyond that it's an endless quest for answers! Any thoughts?

Answer 1

I think space flight and space travel will be entering a whole new era soon. With the development of more sophisticated robotics, the miniturization of computers, and unmanned flight the obvious answer is that robots will be our ambassadors to the stars. Even in the earliest years this was the case for space travel. It is the most logical way to navigate the stars while keeping a lower cost than sending people, no risk to people, and a robot can be designed to go many places that humans cannot get near and can probably be desgined to outlive humans giving them a potentially eternal mission through the heavens. With robots becoming more human in characterisitcs, they will be our our first dignitaries to visit the worlds that we discover outside of our solar system. We can develop this technology without having to worry about where to keep food, air, water, beds, toilets, and waste this is the most efficiant way for us to explore the galaxy and beyond...

Answer 2

No theories because a theory is a large body of experimentally verified scientific knowledge. A typical theory fills complete shelves in the library.

What you are asking for is, for the most part, a speculation on the technological AND economic state of the world two hundred years from now.

In short I can only answer that we pretty much have the technology it would take to go to space big time. What we don't have and probably won't have for the better part of those two centuries is the money to burn to actually do it.

The kinds of investments you are talking about will cost approx. 100 times as much as we are spending on space flight right now. So we have to ask ourselves, how long will it take the world to increase its budget for spaceflight by a thousand fold?

Well, the answer is pretty simple... the world's GDP will never increase one thousand fold because we have already reached the ecological limits of this planet. Most economic gains we can make from here on have to be made by becoming more efficient, unless we are deciding to have a party, burn the candle at both ends and then to go out with a boom some 50-100 years from now. I believe most people on earth have already decided that that's not what they want.

So I would guess that including all the efficiency gains we can get roughly 10-25 times the current world GDP. Which is enough to let 10 billion people live a good life.

Now... as you can see, I am still missing a factor of 4-10... So how are we going to get that? Well, simply by demilitarizing. Our military budgets greatly exceeds our space budgets and if we decide to cut back on the military of this world by e.g. a factor of two, we can easily pay for a space program which lets humans visit all solar system bodies worth mentioning and even have small outposts on Mars, on half a dozen moons, around Venus and probably on Mercury over the course of the next 200-300 years.

:-)

Answer 3

I think that in one hundred years there will be a spacestation in geosyncronous orbit, a moon base, and a small mars outpost. Hopefully by then, we will have found faster means of travel, and maybe placing finishing touches on a space ship to a neighboring solar system.

Answer 4

I think years from now we will have friends living on other planets, that we can go and visit, or just take a vacation to another galaxy, that would be cool.

Answer 5

Except for you misuse of the word "galaxy" (you probably meant "solar system"), I agree with you.