A thought about space travel

Some clear nights when I sit outside looking up at the stars I can't help but wonder if God or nature or whatever you want to call it hasn't played some cosmic practical joke on humanity. Making us just smart enough to figure out what space is and how big the universe is but not smart enough to even get to the nearest star with planets. At least not in a time frame that would allow an individual to go there and then return home to tell others about the trip. How cruel is that knowledge? It's like putting a banana split in front of a hungry child and placing an inpenitrable barrier between them.

My question is different: is there life somewhere in this vast universe? And can we connect to it using some kind of signal? If we were the only life form in the universe, that would be a practical joke. Maybe an answer to your question could be found in a book by an Italian astronomer, Paolo Maffei, titled "Al di la' della Luna" and translated in English by another astronomer, Father Daniel O'Connell,SJ, as "Beyond the Moon" and published by MIT Press. The book was written after Apollo 11 when many people thought we had conquered space. But the Moon is only our backyard.
Tullio
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I have no doubt that life exists all over this galaxy and by extension all over the universe. And probably some of that life is way smarter than we are. But unless there is a way around the speed of light even communicating with any of them would have such a delay involved that two way communication would be of little value other than knowing they are there. Can you imagine sending a message that the aliens might receive 50 years later, then they would have to analyse our message, determine whether or not they want to reply and then compose a reply and 50 years later we get an answer. But the original senders are long dead and who knows what governments would exist at that point. Maybe no one would remember the message we sent so our experts would have to analyse the message and decide whether to respond....yada yada yada.

And that case involves a star fairly close by.

It could be that in more advanced civilizations than ours, both governments and individuals are much longer-lived. 100 years between the sending of a radio message and receiving a reply might seem trivial to them. It's also possible that there are useful exceptions to the light speed barrier, both in communications and space travel. Artificial warping of the the space time metric and something analogous to quantum tunneling on a much larger scale have been given serious speculative consideration among scientists. Recall that Dr. Carl Sagan used something of the latter sort in his novel Contact, after consulting with a top physicist about a reasonable possibility for a faster-than-light space travel scenario.

I grew up in the 1960s watching Star Trek, 2001 A Space Odessy, Star Wars and anything else involving space travel and I would love to find out that there is a practical and workable way to get around the speed of light before I die, but the longer I live the more I doubt it. In 1972 when I was a senior in college I wrote a term paper reporting on progress with mastering fusion for power generation and the concensus then was that the world would be running on fusion reactors within 20 years. Next year will be 40 years and there isn't even one continuously working fusion reactor. I imagine that some of the techniques described in various Sci Fi stories will eventually show more than a little promise but the science just isn't there yet.

So I still sit outside at night looking at the stars and go there only in my imagination and dreams.
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Bob DeWoody

But as we are not sending out any signals or messages, how would they know we are here?

All we are doing is listening out for them, and they may be doing exactly the same back for us ..... Anyone got a spare Sputnik beep beep beep

But unless there is a way around the speed of light even communicating with any of them would have such a delay involved that two way communication would be of little value other than knowing they are there.

I think that is it in a nutshell. Unless of course they have conquered the speed of light barrier and can teach us how to do it as well. But as we are not sending out any signals or messages, how would they know we are here?

All we are doing is listening out for them, and they may be doing exactly the same back for us ..... Anyone got a spare Sputnik beep beep beep

I've often wondered about that myself: here we are listening for something we don't produce ourselves. A certain sense of tongue-in-cheek irony is needed to be a seti cruncher.

RE. Speed of light. True, that is a barrier but remember, the faster you go the slower time passes so it is possible to travel a tiny bit slower than light and have time pass so slowly that thousands of years of travel will have the ship and crew only age a few months. There are a few technical and engineering problems to be solved first, tho. :P

The concern that all stellar civilizations are listening, none talking, probably isn't as big a problem as it might seem. It would be possible for an only modestly advanced civilization to detect even our incidental radio emissions, if they wanted to. Dr. Frank Drake has written about how this could be done. It involves using our Sun as an immense gravitational lens. Starting some 550 astronomical units from the Sun, there are an infinite number of focal points, he says. He thinks 1000 AU (~9.3 billion miles out) would be ideal; avoiding interference from the solar atmosphere. A small receiver at that distance, aimed at the Sun, could intercept transmissions from all over a substantial portion of the galaxy. Michael

Found this in theregister.co.uk:
Interstellar spaceshio
Tullio
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To my mind the only hindrance is the inability to protect from cosmic rays--we would wait for favorable orbital alignments and could possibly make the journey in 6 months transit time.

I would think that 20 years would be enough to accomplish this--given the commitment and the funding--but a solution for the cosmic ray problem must also be found.

My intuition (hope I am wrong) is that there will not be any planets suitable for the delicate balance required for the development of a contemporaneous, advanced civilization. I am not sure that our spurious emissions could be detected at this distance anyway. Since we are not beaming (to my knowledge) a "we are here" message; the chances are slimmer than necessary that anyone will hear us.

As Commander Adama said to Starbuck: JUMP

What is needed is a Jump Drive(FTL), so far most searches online for even theoretical info on this result in a lot of junk fiction and not much else, that or I'm using the wrong search words. Of course finding a working model in orbit or on some moon or asteroid would be a lucky break.
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BSG Anthem
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K,

The problem would be in knowing where you were going. It would be more exciting if we could find a habitable planet within 10 light years or even 20 or so. I have stated elsewhere that I have little confidence that we will ever find another "Earth". We are probably talking multi-generational trips here even if we could get up to 10% of the speed of light and find a planet near Proxima Centuri.

Another thought might be a self sustaining ship with breeder reactor, garden plots, animal farm that would just wander and exist for many generations. For now I would just like to know how we could survive cosmic rays for even a trip to mars.

I have begun to think that the cosmic ray/radiation issue is why we haven't sent humans beyond LEO since the moon missions. We got real lucky back then that there were no CME's directed toward the earth and the moon. We would have had three fried astronauts.
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Bob DeWoody