“Space, the final frontier”
This part of a star trek quote gives me goosebumps all over my body! I am a huge Stat trek and Star Wars fan! But will we ever be able to trek through the galaxy and boldly explore where no man has gone before? Here is the real science facts!
On September 27, 1905, a German patent clerk with the name of Albert Einstein published a paper where the world saw for the first time ever the famous (and infamous for space travelers) E = mc^2. It was one of the most important discoveries of the 20th Century and mankind! It stated that there is not enough energy in the universe for a object to accelerate at 100% the speed of light! And even worse, there is nothing that can travel faster than the speed of light!
The speed of light is roughly 3×10^8 m.s. This is bad news for space travelers! The reason why I say it is bad, is because we can not even reach the fastest speed in the universe! To top it all off, that speed is not even fast enough to travel fast around the universe. The stars we see at night, is so old that some of that lights stars is dead! If we were to move to the sun at the speed of light, it would take us around 8 minutes to get there! To escape our solar system moving at the speed of light would take around a fast 1 year, 9 months and 18 days!
In fact space is so huge we do not even measure it in km or miles we use a new unit: light year! It tells us how long it would take to travel to a certain point whilst traveling at the speed of light! (Please note that there is a astronomical unit in which 1 A.U = to the distance from the earth to the sun! But for better understanding we will be using light years!) To travel to the nearest neighboring stars (Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B) would mean we have to travel around 4.3 light years worth of distance! And to travel across our galaxy means you would have to travel around 100 000 light years worth of distance!
Speed of light is fast fast but slow! But you would not believe that, that is not only our smallest problem! Traveling at the speed of light would mean you age slower while other people moving at a slower pace relatively to you, would mean that they would be three years older than you when you reach your destination! Time is relative and that is also something Albert Einstein discovered! But I am not going into too much detail about that, that is worth a post on its own! But If you would like to know more, read a bit about Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity!
Ok now we know that we can not reach a top speed that is relatively slow speed compared to the size of the visible universe, Is space travel even possible?
Do not fret too much there is the Alcubierre drive or as Sci Fi fans would call it : Warp drive!
theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a paper where He found a theoretical possible way of traveling faster than the speed of light without breaking any law of physics! According to the maths, the keeper of this governing law is space itself, or more formally Space-Time. Space-Time is a fabric that can be warped and bent through entities with mass, the larger the body the more bent or warped is space-time. So Alcubierre found a plausible way of bending Space_time to form a wave or ripple on which a spacecraft could “surf on”. This means that you are standing still and space time is moving for you faster than the speed of light! The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light And keeps moving faster and faster. One of the reasons (and we do not know why this is happening) is space around galaxies are expanding faster than light, it is not the galaxy itself moving. We think this phenomena is happening because of Dark Energy, but once again a post on its own!
The problem with the Alcubierre drive is, it needs a type of exotic matter (something we do not have yet) and we need large amounts of the stuff :(
Like stated before, it is plausible only if we find this type of exotic matter. So CERN I hope you find it!
The verdict:
With tears in my eyes I say, no I do not think we will ever be able to travel around space like in Star Trek. And if it is possible, Well not in our lifetime. But yet again People thought it would take hundreds of years to start flying in the beginning of the 20th century! But let us not lose hope, and enjoy the fictional exploration of the universe!
What do you think? Do you think we will ever explore the universe! Leave a comment below, Upvote and follow me if you liked what you read!
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