On 21/02/2017 22:35, Quadibloc wrote:
On Sunday, February 19, 2017 at 9:00:14 PM UTC-7, BogeyOne wrote:

My thinking is that science is not capable of everything and visiting
even the nearest stars is a good example. I do not doubt that millions
upon millions of other developed civilizations exist in this universe,
but they could not escape being bound by the same laws of physics and
the restraints of time that we are. So it is best to accept that all
must just sit around and ponder the "if we only could" scenario.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Well, I don't know either.

I do think that it's unlikely science will discover a way to travel faster than
light, but I don't know for sure.

As for ways to travel at close to the speed of light, so that we could travel to
the nearest stars in 400 to 4,000 years, _that_ is an engineering problem. It's
not something I have any reason to think science is not able to do. But, on the
other hand, what science may not be able to achieve is to make doing that easy
enough that it would seem to humanity to be _worth_ doing.

Juno at 165k mph is about the fastest space probe we have ever sent.
Compared to the speed of light which is 186000 miles a *second* we are
about 4 orders of magnitude short of the mark for relativistic travel.

Until we can do it in under a 1000 years or so elapsed it is probably
faster to sit on our hands and wait for the technology to improve.

So the obstacle there is not what science can do, but how much effort and wealth
we are willing to dedicate to that goal.

There are some pretty severe engineering challenges too. Even at Earth
orbital speeds tiny dust grains are a big threat but as you go faster
they become much much worse. At truly relativistic speeds blue shifted
background microwave radiation and shockwaves from adiabatically
compressing the incredibly thin interstellar medium become problematic
too when you are ploughing through so much of it in a second.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown