When will we be able to travel between the stars? 100 years from now? 200 years, 1000 years?

William's ancestors were probably saying that sending men to the moon was impossible.

In fact, special relativity makes interstellar travel possible, not the reverse. He's right to say that the energy requirements are massive but then humanity has barely scratched the surface in terms of deriving energy from nature. There are many potential energy sources that could power interstellar travel in the future : fusion rockets, antimatter drives, zero point energy.

Furthermore, the time dilation effects of relativity mean that, the closer one gets to the speed of light in a spacecraft, the more time slows down for the crew.

This means that a journey to the stars that would seem to take several years to an observer on Earth, would only seem like a few days, weeks or months (depending on how close to light speed you got) to the crew on the ship.

Einstein (and Rosen) also predicted the existence of wormholes that might link remote parts of the universe to each other, thus enabling a journey that should take many, many years to be achieved almost instantaneously. Whether wormholes actually exist, and more pertinently whether humanity will be able to utilise them for space travel, are topics of debate that are far from being resolved by the scientific community.

It just goes to show that we should not try and project our 21st century level of knowledge and technology onto our descendents. I don't think interstellar travel will be made possible within the next 100 years - I think even a 1000 is being optimistic - but you just can't tell when the next breakthrough in science is going to come.

Don't underestimate the human race... We went from drawing absurd pictures on stone walls with rock, to using a computer with a mouse and sending instant messages to each other. In each age there is something we dream about, or deem impossible, and in the next age there is always something that we have leapt from, and we take that for granted in its entirety.

We have the technology as it is to land on Mars, but going about that is the hard part. Who's to say that there isn't some kind of mineral on Mars, or somewhere else that can lend the energy to us in ways that nuclear power has on Earth, but stronger? Who's to say that these minerals don't exist? To say that we cannot reach these speeds is an understatement. We simply do not know.

Anything is possible, and I'll be damned if I ever believe that we cannot go much farther than we have already. We're just not ready to comprehend it yet. Small steps, to big discoveries.

Time will tell.

Never.

Our civilization is fueled by oil. Everything depends on it. There are no reasonable substitutes. Most substitutes require more energy to produce than the fuel provides. This is bad economics. As oil runs out, it becomes more expensive. There will probably be wars for the control of the last reserves. This could lead to dire circumstances.

As fuel prices increase, the cost of everything else increases. People will begin to starve. Starvation will lead to civic unrest. A government engaged in trying to hold things together is not going to waste money on space research.

If we are very lucky and our leaders are better than what we usually elect, we may be able to survive with a combination of modern technology and a mid-1800s sort of infrastructure. But we would be burning a lot more coal and the emissions would speed global warming. If we arent lucky then circumstances could become very dire.

There is no way we would be able to build starships in those circumstances.

Actually lemme tell u that We HAVE sent a spaceship- Voyager 1 and Voyager -2 amongst one of em has already crossed solar system....and as such is now trsvelling in the Interstellar(between stars) space or more precisely intergalactic space...it has also an attached CD with sounds from earth so that if any alien en ounters the craft it can know bout our planet earth...but sadly the precious evidence of our dear planet would remian function only for bout billion years bu the voyager will continue its unending venture into the mysteries of unverse(but communication with it'll become diff. due to large dist)

-->i guess u r talkin bout hyperfast travel right???

Well,u can usee :-(how)

1)quantum tunneling(travelling in an "instant" through a potential barrier-see the famous Cs vapour exp.)

2) transversable wormholes-

3)spacetime warps(this is quite unpractical-only fictional)

to do that,nobody knows when'll be succesful in that..but nothing is impossible..

Existence of ufos( i think its future humans themselves wanning to see thier past hv com) suggests that its gonnba be discovered...

helps?!1

nuclear pulse propulsion! project longshot was designed to be built with 1980's materials and could make the trip to alpha centauri in 100 years with another 4.39 years necessary for the data to return to Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propuls...

prior to longshot was daedalus

"Daedalus would be constructed in Earth orbit and have an initial mass of 54,000 tons, including 50,000 tons of fuel and 500 tons of scientific payload. Daedalus was to be a two-stage spacecraft. The first stage would operate for two years, taking the spacecraft to 7.1% of light speed (0.071 c), and then after it was jettisoned the second stage would fire for 1.8 years, bringing the spacecraft up to about 12% of light speed (0.12 c) before being shut down for a 46-year cruise period."

Never. It would require relativistic speeds, which in turn would require impossible energies for any appreciable mass, and death-inducing accelerations. Even at light speed (which is impossible for us to achieve), it would take over 4 years just to get to Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbor. At energies we could envision being able to harness and accelerations we might be able to survive, the journey is more likely measured in hundreds of years, if not eons.

Never!

Just study astronomy. you will get there.