How feasible is it to travel to other solar systems?

Question

If we could travel at the speed of light, it would be possible to escape time thereby negating the concepts of hours, minutes ~ years. Thus we could move from anywhere to anywhere in an quantified instant, making the most distant parts of this universe just a hop, skip and a jump away (minus the skip and the jump). Am I looking at all that correctly?

And how far are we from achieving that, short of a monumental breakthrough Quantum Physics?

Answer 1

not feasible.

traveling to the nearest star (alpha proximia) with the fastest ship we have now would take approximately
34,000 years.

Traveling the speed of light (if it is possible) would still take 4 years 4 month. still not a very good plan..... especially if you want to go further, like say 20 light years away.

we are closer to the quantum breakthrough than traveling the speed of light (it takes WAY too much energy)

quantum tunneling should lead us much closer and quicker.
plus bypassing the speed of light and just teleporting would make these "trips" MUCH MUCH more feasible.

time travel.......... interesting concept. I think we could not move if we "stopped" time for us (the traveler)

and if we stopped time in the universe (all except us) we'd still have a long trip.

now time and space are supposed to be linked. if we can manipulate time, we could manipulate space.

so building a worm hole by manipulating space would be more feasible,

who knows?
Dr Mallett might know
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHC8z6ULs18

Answer 2

Nope. You are wrong.

Even if we could travel NEAR the speed of light, the actual journey in Earth time would still take as long as the time light takes to go to the point of interest and back.

At a couple of g's of ship acceleration it is theoretically possibly to reach galaxies 10 billion light years away in a lifetime. But including the expansion of the universe it would take 50 billion years of Earth time to do that... in other words, there would be no Earth, no sun, no galaxy to come back to. It would all be gone. The universe would have grown old and dim. And all you would have done is to spend your life in a flying coffin.

Wanna go for a ride?

;-)

PS: there will be no breakthroughs in quantum mechanics. QM changes absolutely nothing about basic relativity. If you think that sucks, so be it. Nature is not impressed.

Answer 3

It would take more energy than there is in the entire solar system to speed up a person to light-speed. If all the mass of the sun and planets was converted to energy, and somehow used to speed up one person and her equipment (1 ton), she would reach a speed of 0.999998 of light speed.

Time dilation would then allow her to travel across the universe in less than a nanosecond (14 billion years back on Earth, which was somehow left out of the mass to energy conversion).

Now if we just had the engineering to convert the Suns mass to energy ... maybe in a few 1000 years.

Answer 4

Traveling at the speed of light, provided it was possible, it would still take a few years to reach the nearest planetary system. Probably the astronauts would have to be hibernated for such trips.

Answer 5

There is so much negativity associated with this concept that to indulge in compliance immediately tandems the speculator to conform to the negative approach.Therefor the preferred result must be erroneously simple and immediately overlooked.

Answer 6

you're looking at it correctly, however one can not say how far we are from developing that technology, it is just a theory & until some major breakthroughs occur a theory it remains. with current technology it would take too many lifetimes.

Answer 7

You can't escape time.