No, not unless we have made some serious mistakes in our understanding of physics.
I wouldn’t even put money on interstellar travel.
Totally.
The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda, so we are already on our way!
Maybe Andromeda is coming to save us. Isn’t that what The Andromeda Strain was all about?
That was an interesting mini series, albeit nothing to do with Andromeda Galaxy.
I know enough physics to say no Even inter-Stellar is out of our reach (without generation ship).
We have zero reason to believe in an effective way to build wormhole, jump gates or anything similar. Even high energy cosmic rays have a limited range (due to collision with photons) which is a strong clue that there is no shortcut in space
This is the correct answer.
I think the closest we will come is detecting radio signals from another species. But like obviously 2 way communication would be almost impossible due to sheer distance.
Sadly the universe is filled with enough random radio radiation that its unlikely any coherent signal is going to travel more than a few light years. With our current technology there could be an identical version of earth around the nearest star and we probably couldn’t detect it.
The signal isn’t destroyed though. So one could argue that isolating it in the noise is doable with enough math.
Obviously the real limit is still distance since we’d need a radio dish like the size of earths orbit or something to pick up a signal weakened from many lightyears away.
But doesn’t the generation ship / cryogenic technology / nuclear technology make intergalactic travel possible (albeit very slow)?
In theory yes… but the oldest frozen specimen of humans we’ve found is only a few thousand years old. We don’t even know if long term cryogenic reanimation is possible.
Assuming the ship travels at 10x our current capabilities we’re still looking at ~8,000 years to reach our closest stellar neighbour at only 5 lightyears away.
Then don’t do it that way, put a human consciousness into a machine and wait. They said ever, we can get as sci-fi as we want here
We’ll still run into the same assumption/problem; shelf life.
Consider how memories work. Every time you remember something, your brain alters that memory slightly. Even looking at how the brain parses the data through several cortex (visual etc) implies that consciousness is potentially inseparable from the components of the brain. In this video about Cockatoo intelligence they speculate that birds brain anatomy causes them to think in ways that seem limited to us.
Basically we don’t even know if its possible to preserve human consciousness for that long. Similar to cryogenics we have to question if reanimation is even fundamentally possible after centuries.
You are talking about a trip that would last longer than human civilization has existed.
It makes interstellar travel plausible but not intergalactic.
Sort of - but there is no reason to think we will ever be able to make something that won’t break. Even intersellar is questionable just because the odds of the ship breaking in the time needed are too high.
Well I wouldn’t say it’s completely impossible. A lot of technology exists that would have been seen as impossible in the past. But I think intergalactic travel is extremely unlikely. I can’t imagine that we will ever create ways for the human body to withstand long distance travel as portrayed in shows like Star Trek
Absolutely.
What form it will take is the question. FTL, not likely but long ago we didn’t believe in breaking the speed of sound. Generation ships, solar sails, ion drives, folding spacetime, it will happen somehow if we survive as a species.
It’s already possible in a “does it violate the laws of physics or not” sense, the real question is, will anyone that has the requisite resources to do it actually want to.
It would take such an incredibly long time (as in, millions of years or longer for the very closest galaxies) that anyone and any organization sending out such an expedition isn’t going to get any meaningful return on their investment, so it would only bring a benefit to whoever was on the “ship” when it arrived. As such, to even have a motive for doing this, you either need a society that does things for the benefit of extremely distant descends, or which is extremely long lived and patient.
As to how you would actually do it, my guess (obviously though, the guess of someone from a society that lacks the technology to do a thing is likely to be wrong about how it later is done) would be that one would use a hypothetical type of structure called a stellar engine These are similar to the “dyson spheres” that science fiction sometimes likes to talk about (usually inaccurately to the actual concept but still), except that they would use the energy emitted by a star, or its mass, to do some particular task, like propel the star in a given direction.
Doing this, your “ship” is actually an entire solar system. Getting that up to speed could take millions of years even for the most efficient designs, and obviously requires an economy capable of building stuff at incredible scales, and having an entire star spare to use for the trip. However, you’re going to be taking that kind of time anyway, and so you’re probably going to need an entire self contained civilization to have a hope of keeping things running that long, and literal worlds worth of raw materials. There’s not much else that even theoretically has enough fuel to move all that to notable fractions of lightspeed. Since there’s little point to going to live in another galaxy if there are still unclaimed places to go within your own, a whole star system is probably a relatively small expense for the implied size of civilization that would even want to try to sebd such an expedition. Galaxies contain a huge number of them after all.
While this is all obviously far beyond us now, both in technology and sheer economic scale, there’s nothing physically impossible about it, and at least some logical motive (the future resources of a galaxy for one’s descendants, if alien life is rare enough for uninhabited galaxies to exist). Given that and just how huge the universe is, I’d actually be willing to bet that somewhere there is someone or something doing this, and that if humans last long enough and keep advancing our technology and infrastructure all the while, some descendant of our species might, though they’d probably seem pretty alien to us by the time it took to reach that point.
Nope
Humans? Nope. Some kind of actual AGI that doesn’t care about long time scales and can be lashed to a metal rich asteroid and flung out of the solar system? Still probably not, but it could maybe make it to some interesting intra-galactic destinations.
This is basically the foundation for Stanislaw Lem’s book The Cyberiad. What if robots built robots that write poetry and fight robotic dragons and travel the stars.
Also the Bobiverse books. Human brain uploaded to a machine and strapped to an engine to sail the stars where stuff happens
Ooh! I love Lem! I do recommend him for any sci-fi lovers.
We could maybe eventually load up multiple asteroids with building materials, frozen embryos, a self-healing nanobot factory, blueprints for building artificial breeding chambers and humanoid robots, controlled by an AGI to serve as educators, and send them off to nearby stars.
Upon arrival on suitable planets, the systems wake up and jump-start colonies.
After several hundred or thousand years of development, those colonies could build their own seeder asteroids, kicking off an exponential progress.
If every colony in turn colonizes 4 new systems within 10,000 years, we could theoretically colonize every suitable star system in the Galaxy after 200,000 years. At a very reasonable ~0.1% of light speed.But we would have zero control over the colonies, no shared culture, no trade, hardly any meaningful communication. So there would be very little benefit to it, and knowing human nature, a war of total annihilation would be likely as soon as suitable planets get scarce.
Intergalactic travel will never be possible for humans.
The nearest galaxy is 2.537.000 light years away. By the time we get there, we wouldn’t be humans anymore.Depends how long you have.
I hope we come up with warp drive or something crazy, but technically I don’t see any way this happens.
But if we could, we would ruin wherever we find habitable, and it would be the impetus for us to totally trash the Earth because suddenly it’s disposable and we can just go to Elysium or whatever other place.
We’d find planets and just fill them with toxic waste factories, because who cares, “we” (the rich) don’t have to live there.
We’d take visa scams to the extreme, forcing people into slavery on planets they could never escape from, and quash uprisings with bombs or stranding the people there.
Humans are too greedy and flawed.
With current physics, nope. But who knows, shit is weird. We might just be completely wrong about how the universe really works.
Ain’t nobody got time fo dat.
i think we’ll destroy ourselves before we get that far
Me, trying not to write a political comment on a non-political question.
I’d guess we’re either going to reach futuristic Star Trek communism or a dystopian world-wide techno-feudalism.
Can’t get to the United Federation of Planets without World War III first.
Just need to convince the billionaires that there are underage kids to rape on the other side of the galaxy
I was about to pedantically attack the term “underage kids,” but then I realized how many juvenile adults there are out there and decided it was valid.
Possible? It’s possible today!
I think it’s just an engineering and more likely a desire problem right now. It is expensive to get things into orbit and we just haven’t studied what other problems will arise.
If you mean faster than light speed, there is some intriguing things in physics but with our current understanding no we cannot move massive objects faster than light.
There are still a lot of gaps in our understanding though so perhaps we will learn that it isn’t impossible.
