• Question: will we ever reach interstellar travel ?

    Asked by Bilbo to Anthea, Chloe, Kevin, Michel, Sean on 18 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Sean Kelly

      Sean Kelly answered on 18 Nov 2014:


      I’m no expert on this so I checked with the lovely people at NASA (via their amazing website) and at the moment we definitely can not achieve interstellar travel. That’s not to say it won’t ever happen, it still could, but we need three things: (1) a greater understanding of physics and how exactly to travel faster than the speed of light, (2) incredible new technology that can travel without a propellant (that is, fuel) and (3) a really, really efficient and powerful fuel source to power this technology as it travels through space. I hope that helps!

    • Photo: Kevin Healy

      Kevin Healy answered on 19 Nov 2014:


      Its very hard to know but I dont think we will. As Sean says we would need to be able to as fast as the speed of light which we are no were near acheving and dont even know how we would do this! We would need this because the neasrest stars are so far away even if we could travel that fast it would take 4 years to get to the nearsest star (and much longer to get to anything more intresting). Even if we go slower the amount of energy to do this is extremly high so high a confernce in 2008 on Propulsion said it was pretty much impossible.
      The only option I think that would allow us to do it is using wormholes. These are shortcuts in space that join up two different places. However while these are theretically possible thier is no evidence that they exist at all never mind that we would be able to use them.
      So between all the options it looks like earth is all we have so we should really be taking good care of it!

Comments