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So,we know how big the Universe is,and,how far away celestial bodies are,what are the chances that humanity will get outside our own solar system?

mike1951 6 Dec 21
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20 comments

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If we survive as a species, we'll do it eventually.

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it's hard enough getting people out of there own little bubble

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It's funny but we actually need warp speed (like on Star Trek ) to accomplish that. Who knows it may be possible.

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Zero... unless one of those aliens show us how.

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Humans are like a virus. We multiply, spread, kill, rape/steal, and repeat. I have no doubt we will leave our star and do what we ‘do best’ on other planets.

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They way things are now politilly and socially, probaby not within our lifetime. I don't think we'll even try. I'd LOVE to be proven wrong.

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Unlikely if ever. Given that we have a 95% chance of being wiped out within the next millennial

[en.wikipedia.org]

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I think exploration outside our solar system by live humans to be low-likelihood. Unless incredible propulsion & BRAKING achievements are developed, any such mission would be an effective Kamikaze Mission (never coming back) for the crew, which would limit mission approval.

That kamikaze aspect could be embraced in a more "sending out a colonization force" level mission, but the material and wealth required to send such a contingent to such distances purely on a speculative no-chance-of-return mission ... again, there're huge hurdles of feasibility, finding capable & willing people, and getting society & governmental approval.

If we get a millennium of pre-supernova warning for the solar demise, that might be enough time to dedicate enough resources into a proper "colonization" (read: "lifeboat" ) effort.

Mass driver to get us out, Busard ramjet to get where we're going, orbital braking when we get there, Easy Peasy. 😉

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I lean optimistic. I think the odds are good I just don't know about the time frame. I also am torn between whether we will first depart in a generational ship or a seed ship. I think seed ships may have more potential for rapid expansion.

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If we survive the impending crisis of global warming, disappearing agricultural soils, chemical contamination, lack of potable water, risk of pandemics, and interspecies strife we might get our machines beyond the confines of this little star system, but, the odds are against us.

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I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not going anywhere. 🙂

I honestly don't know what our chances are. There are some serious technological, and biological, challenges to overcome for that to become a reality.

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The distance to the edge of the observable universe is about 46 billion light years because the universe is expanding all of the time. So how big is our universe? Well we don't really know, but it's big. So big that even light hasn't had time to cross it in nearly 14 billion years! And it's still getting bigger all of the time.

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Not in our lifetime.

Pessimist....

Maybe, maybe not. I firmly believe we'll get out there, it really is a matter of when...

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If we manage to survive ourselves for another century, I'd say our chances of venturing beyond the heliopause with a manned mission are pretty good, providing we find promising signs from the Centauri system. That is within our reach with perfected VASIMR technology, and we're close to that now. Maybe another 10 to 20 years. When that happens, Mars is about 40 days away.

If we find a way to produce antimatter more efficiently than we can now, then near relativistic speeds are within reach and it is conceivable that the Centauri system would be a 15 to 20 year ride.

Depends on what you mean by interstellar. Just interstellar or INTERSTELLAR? Anything within 10ly is doable without generation ships.

Optimistically we're talking 16 years to 40 years at 0.25c. Yes, that's pretty optimistic. More realistically -- somewhere between 21 and 50 years for everything within a 10ly radius. Technology for reasonable stasis for prolonged periods up to about 6 months is looking promising, so we sleep for 6 months, do some chores for 6 months, then go back to sleep -- repeat until arrival.

I'm not dealing with this lightly, though. We will need a reason somewhat better than wanting to see what's there before it would be worth considering. And there's one whale of a lot of other technology to be developed first.

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Too early to tell, we’re still in our infancy in that regard … though moving a lot faster than the days of Magellan.. But if we can’t break the barrier of lightspeed ..what’s the point?

Varn Level 8 Dec 21, 2017

@mike1951
Maybe that difficulty needs to be emphasized, so we’ll begin taking better care of this planet. With the multitude of media ‘space adventures,’ that I love so much.. we may be leading folks to the false assumption that we’ll be heading ‘out there’ sometime soon...

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No, I'm going to make the argument that we don't know how big the universe is. We can see 13.8 billion light years, but until we develop the technology to travel beyond our corner of the universe, we will never really know how big and how many layers of what we exist in?
And age?

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Damned small chance.

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It’s already outside. Voyager

A machine headed no where that is requiring more and more effort to stay in contact with, the US government will soon lose interest and it will just disappear into the abyss.

It’s still our eyes and ears outside the solar system, unless you happen to think there’s a 9th unknown planet.

I got that.

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I doubt our chances for getting out of the 21st century. Or for some of us to get into it.

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We'll never make it. We've already started sliding backwards in science. We have a majority in political office who don't believe in basic scientific discoveries like evolution and man made climate change. Some of them actually believe the earth was "created" in 6 days. I don't know if we can come back from this.

If we’re not so US centric, there may be hope. There’s a reason the Hadron Collider is in Switzerland and France … and not Texas.. Seems the US may become little more than a raw resource provider to the growing number of nations already moving past our technical capabilities. Mighty sad for those of us having grown up with Apollo...

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