Intergalactic Travel

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Hi all. I'm making this thread because I don't know how intergalactic travel would work in real life. Would it even be possible? I mean, the distance between galaxies is massive and full of dark energy. We don't even know what dark energy does. For all we know, dark energy could tear a spaceship to pieces.

Some people have suggested that we would develop a huge spaceship which generates artificial gravity by rotating. According to this theory, several generations of human beings will stay on this ship as it crosses the vast space between galaxies.

Here's the thing: The ship would probably need to cross space for several centuries. In that time, someone could eventually blow up the ship and kill everyone. It's hard to predict the sorts of cultural shifts that would occur in people crossing the universe for hundreds of years. A person born and raised without ever seeing the earth could potentially become as crazy as a clownfish that has never seen an anemone.

So ... would intergalactic travel even work?

We're not even 100% sure what's in the interstellar medium let alone the intergalactic medium. Andromeda is the nearest galaxy to ours and it's like 2 million light years away, meaning at the speed of light it would take longer to get there than humans and their two previous ancestors have existed on Earth. There's no way a 'colony ship' gets there with life on board at that speed. I doubt with cryogenics reanimation is possible on an organism as complex as humans after 2 million + years, and if we're not talking cryogenics it most likely wouldn't be 'humans' that completed the journey, adaptation to living in space over thousands of generations would lead to evolution of the species into a descendant species of humanity.

Of course, there's always going faster than the speed of light, but that's pure science fiction and has a very high likely hood of not even being possible. Same with the 'wormhole' concept, the theory of general relativity allows for them to exist, but until we've observed one it's still theoretical. Also of note a wormhole would be classified as a sub-type of black hole, meaning it would be virtually impossible to send a human through one without being crushed to the size of a sand grain (much, much smaller than a sand grain actually).

My opinion is that if humans (or realistically a superior species well into the future after we've destroyed ourselves) want to explore the stars it's going to be robots that do it for them, and over a very, very long course of time and they'll most likely use solar sails for propulsion (top speed ~1/10th the speed of light).

Do you think that Jesus exists in outer space? What might his spaceship look like?

Perhaps the robots will meet Jesus and he'll say "Sorry. Only beings with souls may pass."

That would suck. Wouldn't it?

If Jesus is rockin' an intergalactic spaceship that would be enough for me to believe he wasn't just a really wise social philosopher, but he was in fact a deity. I'd be a true believer at that point-- albeit I'd be an 11th hour adventist because I've still got a few years left of sinnin' to do.

Did I say Jesus? I meant to say Muhammed. Muhammed has a spaceship that is fueled by depictions of himself. He is best friends with Batman and Spider-Man who are also real. His spaceship moves faster than Thomas the Tank Engine on a Tuesday.

Buddha also has a spaceship. It uses veggie burgers as fuel. He and his friends are frequently visited by green-skinned space babes because they all use steroids and they all have the same haircut.

Ozzy Osbourne also has a spaceship. He spends most of his time in space. The Ozzy we know on earth is a fake made by Zeus who is also real.

By the way, your mom is fat. LOL

First, I already knew Ozzy was a deity, that's self explanatory.
Second, if I could get an intersellar spaceship ride from any of those people I would worship them as a deity, aside from Batman, Ben Affleck makes me want to hurl.
Third, I already know my mom is fat, she prefers the term 'big-boned' though, but what I really want to know is does she have a spaceship I don't know about too?

You might find this video from Isaac Arthur interesting as far as intergalactic travel goes:

With even the neatest galaxy (not counting Magellanic Clouds) about 2 million or so lightyears away, intergalactic travel would need some completely new and exotic physical principle that couldn't even be guessed-at now.

Even ordinary interstellar travel could only become feasible in the very distant future (if even then).

If they ever did interstellar travel, it almost surely would be robotic, and no humans would go. Robotic probes don't mind long travel-times, and could be made less vulnerable to such things as cosmic rays, etc.

But it would take so long to get information by sending an interstellar probe, that it would have to be very longterm investment, for a stable society, with maybe no living person being around to find out anything from it.

If there are other civilizations in the galaxy, most are probably much older than our civilization, and much more advanced technically. So, if civilizations are inclined toward interstellar travel, or even communication, we'd probably have heard from someone by now.

So it looks as if the nearest spacefaring civilization is so far away from us that, as far as we're concerned, it's as if they didn't exist. (But maybe they don't.)

Michael829

I am beginning to believe that humans are little more than what was depicted in that movie "the island." IOW for us there is no "island" or existence elsewhere in the galaxy, as we were never intended to develop beyond a type 0 on the Kardachev scale. i feel we likely are just some more advanced [so advanced as to be to us what we are to amoeba] civilization's science experiment.

Intergalactic?

Were are getting WAY ahead of ourselves.

Lets try to tackle interstellar first.

The nearest star is unfeasible. And that's only four light years away. The nearest other galaxy is two million LY away, so it would be 500 thousand times as unfeasible/impossible.

And "dark energy" isn't gonna threaten your space ship. Its old fashioned light matter, and light energy.

Even going to a neighboring stars requires speeds at large fractions of the speed of light. And we know from drivers Ed about how the force of a collision increases with the square of the velocity of the vehicles. So if you're going at ten percent the speed of light and you hit a microscopic piece of dust in space that speck of dust will hit your space ship with the force of something like the whole pay load of a B52 bomber going off at once.

It could very well be that the reason that we never encounter extraterrestrials is that technologically advanced societies "flash in the pan"; they arise, briefly flourish, then quickly snuff themselves out due to overpopulation, resource depletion, runaway climate change and war before they can develop the tech necessary to master interstellar travel.

Maybe, but isn't that pessimistic, assuming that every technical species and society is as pathological as ours? Of course if they're anything like us, then we don't want to meet them anyway. So overpopulation, resource-depletion, runaway climate change and war weed out the pathological species--and there isn't anyone else left?

But maybe that's the explanation. Or maybe, as many biologists believe, the start of life on a planet is a vanishingly improbable event, so that, even if the universe is very large or infinite, the nearest civilization is too far away.

But of course it doesn't matter which explanation is the right one, because, in any case, the conclusion is the same: No visitors, no communicators yet, suggests that, for whatever reason, there aren't going to be any.

That's regrettable, because our society is a miserable snakepit, without the help of babysitters from space.

Michael829

i'd read somewhere that according to one run-through of the drake equation, the final number of other surviving [made it past the nuclear bottleneck and other planetary/cosmic hazards] technologically advanced civilizations was something like a hundred million for the whole universe, which of course works out to far less than one per galaxy, something more like one per every thousand galaxies. so intelligent life in our universe at least, seems like it is comparatively rare. assuming there is some working law of parallel development going on [talked about on Star Trek et al], it may be a good thing we are so widely separated, otherwise we might make war on one another. but one still can hope and pray for a happy near-future day where we can all go together in a better way-

i think the concept of "travel" would not be a consideration for such a feat.

i am about 50,000 generations short of the intelligence required to consider it.

but it would more probably be a quantum translocation that would achieve the feat.

this thread reminds me of an old article about adult neotany I read in Discover Magazine a few decades back, where the author speculated that eons in the future, humans would be a lot more technically advanced by dint of the vastly increased brainpower afforded by the human evolution towards having much bigger frontal lobes/cerebral cortex relative to present-day mankind. the neotenic aspect is that those future humans would have relatively big heads similar in proportion [to the rest of their bodies] to present-day human babies. so the stereotypical picture of a big-headed ET might be us in the future, if we don't blow it somehow or get murdered by planetary/cosmic misbehavior.

goodness gracious it is so far beyond my speculation. i gave it a few minutes thought but i can not even touch the beginning of an idea.

so the quantum translocation in my way of referring to it is the possibility for something to disappear from one location and reappear instantaneously in another location no matter how far away, and the same happens for the matter in the destination location.
it has to obey some law i am not aware of which is like a conservation of occupation.
if it was a one way "relocation", then any particle that currently occupies that location would be instantaneously displaced and either disappear (as well as what was relocated there) or release huge amounts of energy.
maybe what would happen is they would both be ripped apart until an equilibrium of location is again arrived at.

i think it is a trading of existence of locii between 2 entities that each occupy the others destination that is what i call a translocation.

i always thought there is a universal "now" instant that is the same through out the universe.
it may take us 50,000 years to become aware in any way of even a "local" supernova, but that is because in the electromagnetic world of perception it takes time for the information we can sense of the event to become apparent.

but the fact it it really did happen at the same "now" instant all throughout the universe.

something immense is probably happening today that electromagnetic information of which will take 1 million years to get here.
so this universal time constant runs beyond the electromagnetic understanding of the universe we rely on.

how would one focus the translocation site if it was 3 million light years away?
it would have to rely on a parallax stereoscopic focus on that point which is impossible even with 2 telescopes at the 2 opposing points of pluto's orbit.

maybe brachiation will be the mechanism used. a simple description of that is you progressively widen your observation bases by projecting in a widening angle to distances that are achievable.
and then continue doing that to exponentially broaden your stereoscopic field.

but how do you prepare a deliberate group of atoms for a quantum translocation, and how do you inculcate one?

i think it will take evolution of intelligence quite a while to be able to truly consider the solutions to that.