1) The costs of deep space travel will always be prohibitive. The price tag just to launch the Mars Curiosity rover in November of 2011 was $200 million. This was just 10% of the entire mission’s budget. An engineer with the Icarus Interstellar Project has estimated the cost of travelling to the nearest star at $174 trillion.
2) Just reaching a nearby planet like Jupiter
would take five to seven years with today’s technology. What about the
beckoning stars? A Star Trek Warp
Drive would necessitate radical breakthroughs light years away from today’s
science. Every rocket scientist would need Albert Einstein insight and vision
just to get the project into its infancy!
If the Warp
Drive were one day to be considered outside the realms of possibility, the picture
gets even gloomier. If sound traveled through space it would zoom at 157,000
miles per hour. A space ship leaving Earth at that incredible speed would take
19,000 years to reach our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. This would
necessitate a multigenerational ship with travellers dying of old age in the
bleakness and darkness of space.
3) Just one example of the challenges of
traversing mind-boggling distances is the egg ship solution:
“To remove as much uncertainty as possible in
generation ships, egg ships could be used. These would carry frozen fertilized
human eggs which would be nurtured by carefully designed machines, acting as
wombs, parents, and educators. The eggs would be grown into humans when the
distant star or planet is reached, and computers would teach them all they
needed to know about their mission, how to survive, and what to do. Designing
care-giving machines that would not emotionally stunt the new humans is well
beyond us at the moment, but perhaps not impossible in the future. However,
like the generation ship, an egg ship does not help the individual who wants to
travel to the stars himself or herself. Waiting for artificially-raised humans
to live the dream of reaching the stars long after you have died is
unacceptable to many people.”
4) Just leaving our planet would be a big
problem. The NASA image below is a computer generated depiction of all the
objects in Earth orbit today. At least 95% of the objects are actual debris and
not working satellites. “The US Space Surveillance Network has eyes on 17,000
objects—each at least the size of a softball—hurtling around Earth at speeds of
more than 17,500 mph; if you count pieces under 10 centimeters, it’s closer to
500,000 objects. Launch adapters, lens covers, even a fleck of paint can punch
a crater in critical systems.”
5) Radiation in space is ubiquitous and deadly.
When its particles make contact with a spaceship’s aluminum hull, even more
radiation is created. Unless an innovative, revolutionary type of plastic can
be created to form the ship’s exterior, any space traveller would be plagued
with numerous cancers early into the journey.
6) Long-term weightlessness prevents certain
cells from working and causes muscle and bone loss. Major breakthroughs in
artificial gravity need to emerge or the astronaut’s body over time would
slowly turn to mush.
7) There are no convenience stores in space and
galactic gardening is in its infancy. Farming and water production are
problematic in zero gravity. The present day pee-and-water recycling system
would need a massive upgrade.
8) Multi-year space travel in cramped conditions
and lousy food would cause serious psychological issues for even the toughest
pioneer. The only solution: sleep through it! Bears and the many other animals
adept in hibernation are so far ahead of us and our current know-how in human
long-term sleep, we may as well send them!
9) Unlike
road trips across the country, there are no repair stations in the vastness of
space. Unexpected emergencies would mean the end.
One
Possibility
Astronomer,
NASA scientist and educator Dr. Sten Odenwald gives one down-to-earth
alternative:
“When you
subtract manned exploration, which is hugely expensive, and replace it with
robotic rovers that relay high-definition images back to Earth, all of humanity
can participate in their own personal and virtual exploration of space, not
just a few astronauts or colonists. The Apollo program gave us 12 astronauts
walking on the lunar surface, a huge milestone for humanity, but today we can
do the Apollo program all over again and augment it with a virtual,
shared experience involving billions of people! This is the wave of the future
for space exploration, because it is technologically doable today and scalable
at ridiculously low cost per human involved. NASA's Curiosity rover is only the
Model-T vanguard of this new approach to human exploration. More sophisticated
versions will eventually explore the subsurface ocean of Europa and the river
systems on the ‘Earth-like’ world of Titan -- perhaps by the end of this
century!”
The 12
Greatest Challenges for Space Exploration
http://www.wired.com/2016/02/space-is-cold-vast-and-deadly-humans-will-explore-it-anyway/ (Print issue
contains the full article)
Top 10
Problems with Interstellar Travel (egg ship) http://listverse.com/2012/02/27/top-10-problems-with-interstellar-travel/
Dr. Sten
Odenwald , “The Dismal Future of Interstellar Travel” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-sten-odenwald/the-dismal-future-of-interstellar-travel_b_5965060.html
Interstellar Travel as Delusional Fantasy http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/interstellar-travel-as-delusional-fantasy-excerpt/
Photo: http://listverse.com/2012/02/27/top-10-problems-with-interstellar-travel/ CC
Jerry De Luca is a Christian freelance writer who loves perusing dozens of interesting and informative publications. When he finds any useful info he summarizes it, taking the main points, and creates a (hopefully) helpful blog post.
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