Traveling through the stars is not only the dream of astronomers. We all would love to travel in space. It doesn’t matter if they are wormholes or spaceships, rockets or any device, the goal is to achieve interstellar travel.
We see it in the movies – a manned journey through the stars – easily applied; a journey of immense distances that work according to the order of the light year and that according to physical laws becomes impossible to reach (at least for now).
Space travel allows you to navigate among the stars
Space agency experiments now focus on interplanetary travel, but we navigate the stars with only a few devices who manage to leave the solar system to discover what exists beyond: the Voyagers and new expeditions have undertaken the .
Now the Voyagers are at the bottom of the galactic dust where the (remnants of the sun’s particles) reside. But, Scientifically, it would be impossible to know the end of our solar system because space probes – which travel at thousands of miles per hour – are about 4 light years from Proxima Centauri. (the closest star to Earth), which is equivalent to 80,000 years away, which ends up complicating interstellar travel for the next thousands of human generations – if there are any.
Also in: Oumuamua, the first interstellar visitor, is a cosmic snowflake
How can interstellar space travel be achieved in decades?
Interstellar travel will only be possible if space probes manage to cross the sky at a speed three times faster than the speed of light and even faster, and several generations of astronomers would be needed to reach the end of the expedition.
Not only are generations of human energy needed to achieve interstellar travel, technology requires probes with enough fuel to traverse the entire solar system; however, the more additional load, the greater the difficulty in propelling themselves in the middle of space.
The objective is to redesign ships based on nuclear propulsion – an energy that is under debate due to the environmental implications in the event of accidents – but this would only involve the construction of energy bombs that we do not know if they will work.
Interstellar laser: a possibility of crossing the solar system
If we want to send a probe with enough energy to travel throughout the universe without causing a massive nuclear explosion. All through sucking the energy of a 100 gigawatt laser (1 gigawatt = 1,000 million watts) forward so that it works as a thruster.
The only problem is that the structure of the laser and the entire ship would have to weigh exactly one gram to have the ability to reach an incredibly fast speed to travel through space in a few decades, which would make that ship an ideal rocket to stay on paper because the elements it must include cannot be heavier than a grasshopper.
If a project of this size can be developed, interstellar travel could be possible – without humans as travelers – only with a ship that is capable of feeding itself, supporting its weight in the solar system and going faster than the speed of light. .
So we can keep our interstellars hoping for nuclear designs, miniature ships, or science fiction movies, while hundreds of generations of astronomers develop a way to make interstellar travel.