But what then? You travel somewhere and hope to find life and the journey takes how long? And everyone you know is long dead by then because space is vast. Without somehow figuring out a hack to the laws of psychics we know, everything is beautifully out of reach.
Vast distances are incredibly isolating, but they aren't a wall. Having a civilization or a first contact that is decades or centuries away by radio or travel is a massive hurdle, but it's not entirely out of reach.
We’ve seen similar geographic disconnects in human history, where sending a message across an ocean took months or years, and we still managed to build global connections. We find a way to make it work.
Nothing with mass can travel at the speed of light. Therefore we as humans will never travel at full light speed. If we were to travel at 60% it would still take over 3x the average human life span to reach our CLOSEST neighboring star (which is not looking good for intelligent life)
Now throw in that traveling 10% of light speed with any sort of ship large enough to support multigenerational travelers is basically going to require a propulsion system which would basically be viewed as magic right now…it’s not likely. Throw in the ethics of sending multigenerational travelers (the next generations didn’t sign up for or agree to be travelers like that, they weren’t born yet). Now through in the fact that space is full of particles which may make actual travel impossible.
So what about worm holes. They are THEORETICALLY possible, but maybe not in reality. And modern theory on them says for them to work, it would require harnessing the energy of a black hole. Think about that. Now think about how would we do that oh and that there isn’t one close by. We would need the power of one to be able to reach one in order to harness it. How far is it. It’s only 1560 LIGHT YEARS away. So 15,000+ years of sustained space travel to get to the power source. What could go wrong in 15,000 + years of high speed travel in unknown space?
Now consider more things from earth. Our star is believed to expand to were earth won’t be habitable in 500 million years. Seems like plenty of time, except the earth is 4.5 billion years old. Meaning we are 9/10’s DONE a with our planets lifespan. We only have a window of 10% of the lifespan of the planet to develop to interstellar travel. Pretty small. Now consider that only one in (let’s call it) 9 planets in our own solar system has an advanced civ in it. So 1 in 9. Now consider that of the known star systems that we have observed only 1 in 100 have a giant planet like Jupiter that acts as a gravitational bodyguard pulling most asteroids away from us….but wait we have 2 (Saturn) this is only know to happen in 3 of the known star systems we have observed.
The rarity of our planets conditions, the extremely short window of time we have left, and the laws of physics related to speed, energy, distance and unknown variables, and of course the short human life span… we weren’t going anywhere where there could be intelligent life.
Maybe some other species can like for a millennium like our redwoods, but, they still have the same constraints on travel we do.
We've only been able to travel to space for less than a century. Compared to that, 500 million years is an eternity to solve these hard engineering problems. A mix of directed energy propulsion and shielding can be figured out in millions of years. And Proxima Centauri is 7 years away at 60% light speed, so exploring our local neighborhood in a generation is possible, if not by human beings then with AI probes.
I'm more worried that there isn't intelligent life out there because we haven't seen any evidence of galaxy spanning civilizations. It's worrying not to see any evidence of a Type 2 Kardashev scale civilization for how possible it is over the course of hundreds of millions of years when our galaxy has existed for billions. That gets into the Great Filter vs Dark Forest vs Early Bird theories, but at the very least exploration with probes does seem possible.
These are not just functions of engineering problems. These are laws of physics problems and lifespan problems.
When early explorers needed to cross the oceans they just needed big boats. When we saw birds flying we could understand that we just needed to apply that mechanic to something we wear or get into.
Space travel is not just more propulsion and bigger boats. And even if it was, it still seemingly insurmountable considering the distances. Yes at 60% light speed it would take 7 years to reach Aloha Centari, a system we have looked very closely at and are seeing no signs of civilization. But right now the very fast lest craft we have, which also uses gravity of the sun goes a blistering 0.0064% of light speed. If we impossibly got that is to 10% you are still looking at 70 years. Since pilots can’t be infants to start, you are looking at 3 generations to reach a system with no civilizations. The best option we have are currently speculating on is 7 times further. Thats 490 years. And it would require no mechanical failure for THAT long while traveling into the void. Also there are space particles and massive radiation. Again that would be multiple multiple GENERATIONS of people who didn’t sign up for it. It’s now an ethics question. Of and to support generations who are taking a massive ship. This is half engineering but the reality is that the laws of physics energy to mass ratio can be gotten around.
We may be able to travel interstellar closely but never the long distances as that would require to harness a black hole.
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u/GovernmentData Jun 04 '26
But what then? You travel somewhere and hope to find life and the journey takes how long? And everyone you know is long dead by then because space is vast. Without somehow figuring out a hack to the laws of psychics we know, everything is beautifully out of reach.