Humanity will one day have to abandon the earth due to lack of resources, overpopulation, or an extreme disaster. Most likely, this day will not come anytime soon, however, if the fate of humanity depended on leaving our planet and colonizing new planets, it goes without saying that at this moment in history, humanity would become extinct.
Our way of space travel is extremely outdated. Yes, future missions to travel to and potentially colonize Mars has been confirmed by both NASA and Space X and can be speculated to take place within the next 10 years, however, our methods of space travel and how we plan to carry out these missions to Mars are unpractical.
In order to become an advanced space traveling society, there are two obstacles that must be crossed. These obstacles are earth’s gravitational prison and the speed at which we can travel through space. Let’s talk about our gravitational prison and theories on how we can potentially surpass this issue.
Everybody has seen a rocket before. Its main component is its massive thrusters which are used to launch an extremely small load of weight compared to the actual mass of the rocket. The majority of the rocket is made up of mostly fuel, a place to store this fuel, and large thrusters to propel the rocket out of earth’s gravitational pull. This is extremely costly and inefficient due to the fact that we are only able to take rather small loads of mass out of earth’s atmosphere in exchange for a rather large use of fuel and rockets.
Space X has already solved part of this issue by creating reusable rockets that return to their launching point after propelling the cargo in which it carries out into space. Unfortunately, a large amount of fuel is still used up in every launch. Some theories on how we can escape earth’s gravitational prison involve establishing a moon base in which a large amount of fuel would be saved when existing the moon’s gravitational field, however, this is only a temporary solution that does not solve the actual issue. Setting up a moon base would be costly, and once we do stat colonizing other planets, their gravitational pulls may be the same if not greater than earth’s.
One popular theory at the moment is the space elevator. The space elevator is made up of a space station which orbits the earth and is connected to the earth by an extremely large cable which will life future space ship out of earth’s atmosphere without requiring fuel, then launching the rockets from the space station. This theory would avoid a planet’s gravitational pull all together, but we unfortunately do not know of a durable material to construct the cable out of, and if the cable were to break off and wrap around the earth the destruction would be catastrophic.
Let’s take a break on earth’s gravitational prison and move on to the fun stuff… Space Travel! At the moment, with the fastest man-made object in space, (The Voyager 1), it would currently take around 60,000 years to reach the nearest star, (Alpha Centuri). There are multiple theories that can be discussed on how to travel faster through space, however, I would have to right a rather large book to go over all of them.
One rather popular theory on how vast distances of space can be traveled over a short amount of time sounds a little too much like science fiction, but so far has proven to be mathematically possible. This theory revolves around the creation of… The Warp Drive. The warp drive works by bending space time in font of the ship and making the space time denser behind the ship. This could create a potential “slope” the ship could ride on and potentially travel faster than light! Traveling to the fastest star system with this method would take a little less than 10 years.
At the moment, it’s impossible to tell the direction space travel will take, or the amount of time it will take humanity to get there. Perhaps in the near future we will start colonizing Mars, creating a moon base or a space elevator, or even launching our first mission to earth’s nearest star. The possibilities are endless.
Never Stop Questioning
Here, Here, and Here are some interesting videos and articles related to this blog that you may find interesting. There are also multiple other videos and articles related to this blog and previous blogs as well. Explore the internet for more answers to space and its multiple theories!
