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Could we travel the universe in one lifetime?
Why are we fiddling around with missions to Mars or the Moon when we could be travelling the universe? Is it time to dream big again?
According to this author,we could travel the universe within one human lifetime in a spaceship that travels at a constant 1 G acceleration....page 378
Magic Universe: A Grand Tour of Modern Science
By Nigel Calder
http://books.google.com/books?id=kbPmQX-OoBgC&pg=P...
And this engineer proposes a ship like the Enterprise that could be built in 20 years.
"Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise in 20 Years
"In Star Trek lore, the first Constitution Class Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail – building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years. “We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it,” writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE Dan.
This “Gen1” Enterprise could get to Mars in ninety days, to the Moon in three, and “could hop from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse – rovers, special-built planes, and satellites.”
http://www.universetoday.com/95099/engineer-thinks...
Thoughts? Problems?
Good points as to chemical rockets which is why most interstellar travel ideas suggest using ion drives or nuclear, matter-antimatter, fusion, ...etc.. Nuclear energy is a perhaps million times more powerful than chemical for a given mass of fuel source.
"Project Orion was the first serious attempt to design a nuclear pulse rocket. The design effort was carried out at General Atomics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The idea of Orion was to react small directional nuclear explosives against a large steel pusher plate attached to the spacecraft with shock absorbers. Efficient directional explosives maximized the momentum transfer, leading to specific impulses in the range of 6,000 seconds, or about twelve times that of the Space Shuttle Main Engine. With refinements a theoretical maximum of 100,000 seconds (1 MN·s/kg) might be possible. Thrusts were in the millions of tons, allowing spacecraft larger than 8 × 10^6 tons to be built with 1958 materials.[3]
The reference design wa
The reference design was to be constructed of steel using submarine-style construction with a crew of more than 200 and a vehicle takeoff weight of several thousand tons. This low-tech single-stage reference design would reach Mars and back in four weeks from the Earth's surface (compared to 12 months for NASA's current chemically powered reference mission). The same craft could visit Saturn's moons in a seven-month mission (compared to chemically powered missions of about nine years)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pul%E2%80%A6
I stlll don't get how the author claims we could travel the universe in one lifetime even at speeds approaching lightspeed with the inherent problems of cosmic dust impacts since the universe is some 13.7 billion light years in size at the very least. Time dilation?
Bad link on nuclear pulse propulsion...this is the link..
9 Answers
- ?Lv 79 years agoFavorite Answer
No...
There is no known propulsion system hat can go on giving acceleration for more than a minute or two.
And bear in mind that a large space ship would require much more power to accelerate than a small capsule.
So it is all just fantasy / science fiction at the moment.
By 2040 we MIGHT be in a position to send a small capsule to Mars - and it will take 3 months to get there at the very least.
That is still about 3 years off - and it does require some advances to technology that are currently being worked on.
- ?Lv 79 years ago
Thoughts? That this is a bit silly. Mars is hardly 'the universe'. The observable universe is around 40bn light years across. We could travel (say) a maximum of 80 light years in a life-time even if we were able to travel at c, which we can't. Accelerating a large object at 21ft/sec/sec for a long time would necessarily absorb very large amounts of energy. We have more important things to do with it than saving a few days on a journey to the moon or a couple of years on a journey to Mars.
- 9 years ago
I strongly don't think so. That is physically impossible. Because the universe is thousands of light years in size, maybe even billions and we don't live that long and the speed of light is said to be the universal speed limit, they say that it is physically impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. It is said in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity that if you come close to the speed of light, time slows down, if you reach the speed of light, time stops completely, and if you exceed the speed of time, then time moves backwards. So if it were theoretically possible to build a ship that can travel at speeds that make the speed of light look like a city golf compared to a buagtti veyron supersport version, then it would be possible but when you come back there will likely be no Earth or no solar system because you would come back in a time before you left. But to answer the question, it may be theoretically possible, maybe, but it is most probably physically impossible. That is breaking the laws of physics.
- ?Lv 45 years ago
There are more effective than one hundred billion galaxies contained in the universal universe-what we can see from Earth-and all and numerous stages in length from ten million to a trillion stars. even if we greater a spaceship to bypass swifter than the speed of sunshine the universe is an outstanding form of area to go back and forth. it would want to take more effective than one lifetime.
- ?Lv 79 years ago
Let me put it this way.
Even if we had warp 10 capability, warp 10 being infinite velocity by the way, and we stayed in a solar system for 1 second, it would take thousands of years to visit every solar system in this galaxy alone.
The most you could hope for is to visit the galaxies in clusters or groups at once.
- 9 years ago
Yes, at the speed of light or an atom, we're studing how we clash atons together but a new discovery is set to give you speed in the universe. Chances are a machine (robot) might be our solution for now to see the impact it could take.
But nothing it is impossible with dark matter.
- 9 years ago
'theoretically' if you travel at a speed which is so close to the speed of light(assuming your body survives,you get the required nutrients,there being such a spaceship etc),you could traverse the universe in even one minute.However when u return,there might be no earth or even no solar system!
- Anonymous9 years ago
You could traverse the universe in 0 time IF you could travel at the speed of light.Since no one has convinced Albert that is possible, i think you are out of luck.However,times are changing.So stay resourceful.
