• Question: Do you think we will ever be able to travel out of our solar system?

    Asked by rider491 to Claire, Matt, Sam on 27 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Yes! We already have probes that are outside the solar system. But it takes decades to get to other stars, even near light speed, so the problem is keeping people alive in deep space for long enough. We don’t yet have the engineering knowledge to do this.

    • Photo: Claire Lee

      Claire Lee answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Definitely. Unfortunately without a major major breakthrough I don’t think it’ll happen in our lifetime though 🙁 (I’m probably more sad than I should be about that)

      Space is just so so so big – mindbogglingly big – that it really takes a long time to get anywhere in it. That means that, if you’re just travelling “normally” through space, you will have to plan for generations of people to live and die on your spaceship before you get anywhere interesting. So this means you need a pretty big ship with quite a lot of people otherwise everyone will probably end up pissing each other off 🙂 (We’re working on cryogenic freezing but haven’t got that down yet)

      A different sort of plan is to create a wormhole, or some other sort of method of travelling faster than light. The theory of wormholes is very sound – in fact a wormhole is one of the solutions to Einstein’s equations (black holes are another, and we know they exist). The practicalities of wormholes are a bit more difficult though and we haven’t yet figured out a way to make them happen, let alone develop the technology to do so.

      But humans are naturally adventurous people and one day I’m sure we will venture forth – perhaps you could even work on something that gave us the important breakthrough we needed!

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