Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Interstellar Travel

As cool as it would be to travel to another planet outside of our solar system, I don't think it is actually possible.  Even if we did have the technology to travel multiple light years in a lifetime, there is no guarantee that you will be the same person by the time you arrive at your destination. Let's just look at some of the ridiculous problems with space travel:
  • Cosmic Radiation - did you know that every time you fly on an airplane, you expose yourself to high levels of cosmic radiation?  That's because the closer you get to leaving our atmosphere, the more radiation gets through said atmosphere and bombards your body.  So, now imagine traveling the universe and instead of just our relatively small sun trying to kill you, you are exposing your body to much larger stars and their immense cosmic radiation output.
  • Roving Black Holes - that's right, there are black holes out there that are not staying in one place, but moving around just waiting to eat your spaceship.
  • Magnetars - this is a neutron star that likes to emit high-energy electromagnetic radiation.  This radiation can and has shut down all satellites orbiting our planet even when that magnetar was over 9,000 light years away.  Now imagine getting hit with one of these bursts of radiation while you are floating through the universe.  In other words, your ship will instantly shutdown and you will either freeze to death or run out of air because your air pump has shut off.
  • Rocks - in order to get to your new destination, you will have to travel at "Ludicrous Speed".  So, what happens when you hit a random rock that is floating around the void of space?  It will probably tear right through your ship and you will somehow blow up in a Michael Bay-esque fashion (even though there is no air in space, therefore there shouldn't actually be an explosion).
There you have it, unless you can come up with a radiation-proof and rock-proof ship while avoiding the invisible death traps, the only way for us to be able to travel vast distances through space will be if we can invent one of those cool transporter things like in Star Trek.

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