Will we reach another star in our lifetime? No. Probably not.
Most people don’t realize where we’re at with space travel. The recent breakthroughs at SpaceX are great, but they barely graze the challenges of interstellar travel (traveling between stars).
People know that space is difficult. But in a world with immediate gratification, people have been led to believe that everything is inevitable, and “difficult” is just a placeholder term for our eventual success. That between brute force and sheer willpower, humans can make anything happen.
But interstellar travel is so difficult that it might actually be impossible.
The problem is distance. With current technology, it would take at least 100,000 years to reach the closest star system. Keep in mind, that it’s not because we’re traveling through air which has resistance and wind slowing us down. All we have to do is reach a speed, and then there’s nothing to stop us from maintaining it. But we can’t even explode an engine hard enough to go that fast.
Nuclear fusion will speed things up, but no one knows by how much. And it still would take hundreds of years to reach our closest star. To make matters worse, its planets are probably not even habitable.
A more reasonable group of exoplanets that might be habitable are in the TRAPPIST system at 40 light-years away, which is ten times the distance. Meaning that even at the speed of light it would still take us 40 years to reach.
Lightspeed has its own challenges, but one of the biggest ignored by the entertainment industry is the fact that the human body can’t accelerate that fast. Once we’re at a certain speed, it’s fine. We could go 100,000mph (161,000kmh) no problem. The issue is reaching it.
In a word: g-forces.
A g-force is when space itself is crushing you. There’s no getting around it. Reaching lightspeed means that we would need to slowly accelerate to those speeds so as to not crush anyone on the ship to death. And then we would need to decelerate from those speeds near the end of the trip. All of which means hundreds of years have already been wasted.
Traveling 40 years at lightspeed sounds fine at first, but then you do the math and realize that it comes out to 100+ years because of our soft dumb bodies.
Could we get around that, you might ask? If we did, then we found a way to manipulate space. Because remember, it’s space that’s crushing you when you accelerate. If we found a way to get around Iy, then we’d have interdimensional travel and wormholes at that point (which would be much faster), rending lightspeed travel useless.
Exploring our solar system is doable. It will be rough, but it’s at least within technological proximity. If we were to leave our solar system, however, we couldn’t use that same technology. We couldn’t even use the same physics.
The only way we’re getting out of here is if someone finds a way to shortcut space, or travel above it.
The order of operations for that is someone has to figure out the math first. Which nobody has. And that would be the easy part. The hard part is building an apparatus that breaks the laws of physics with materials that don’t exist, but react in just the right way to break through space, all while acting against a structure that’s holding itself together against those insane forces.
What I need you to understand is that we have one planet. Interstellar travel should be a pet project.
Not our last hope for survival.