Intergalactic Travel?

[Reaper]

This thought actually came up to me when I was looking at some pictures of distant galaxies. What I was wondering is, given the incredible distances between galaxies, could it actually be possible to colonize other galaxies than our own?

 

Even with Star Trek technology it could still take hundreds of thousands of years to actually reach another major galaxy. If wormholes, warp drive, etc. is possible then I could see intergalactic travel as feasible.

 

But if FTL travel in any form isn't possible at all, then would it even possible to colonize other galaxies and spread all over the universe?

 

For instance, colonization of the solar system shouldn't be that difficult, as long as we don't blow ourselves up while we are at it, and should take a couple or so centuries.

 

Colonization of our galaxy at sublight speeds shouldn't take that long on a cosmic scale either. While it would be slow, colonizing the entire galaxy could happen in a few million years.

 

But what about sending colonists, or anything at all for that matter, one a one way journey to the Andromeda galaxy? At sublight speeds, it would take thousands of years to even leave the Milky Way, and then millions of years to actually reach Andromeda even though it is blue shifted and coming at us. Even reaching the Magellanic Clouds could take well over a million years to actually get to at sub-light speeds. Never mind the local cluster. I'm not sure if anything could function that long.

 

Could it even be possible to send anything across the intergalactic space in a finite amount of time, or are we, or any other space faring creature for that matter, forever stuck in the Milky Way?

 

For one, most galaxies are receding away from our galaxy and from each other, save for Andromeda and a few others that are blue shifted. While I can imagine that we would be capable of reaching the Magellanic Clouds (since they orbit around the Milky Way), and even Andromeda, I'm not so sure about other galaxies, even with Star Trek level technology. But then again, I could be wrong.

 

What are your thoughts?

[JohnF]

You could wait for a galaxy to coalesce; assuming you have sorted out interstella travel.

 

But why would anyone want to travel to another galaxy? What could justify such an undertaking?

[Sayonara]

Because it is there.

[JohnF]

Because it is there.

 

I wouldn't consider that a justification.

 

What are the chances of finding something in another galaxy that we couldn't find in our own galaxy?

 

Not only would we need to know that something existed in the other galaxy, but not in our own, we would also have to find it; and it would have to be worth the expense of going there.

 

I'm assuming though that intergalactic travel will always be expensive.

[YT2095]

I wouldn't consider that a justification.

 

if you`re talking about Humanity doing this, then yes, it`s probably the Only justification.

 

I`m sure there was never any "real" reason to climb Everest, But... It was there, so why not

[JohnF]

if you`re talking about Humanity doing this, then yes, it`s probably the Only justification.

 

I`m sure there was never any "real" reason to climb Everest, But... It was there, so why not

 

Everest is the highest mountain on our planet; it is a limit. Another galaxy though is just another galaxy. Climbing Everest isn't too expensive either. In terms of real cost it uses up a relatively small amount of a persons available time and perhaps a small amount of a few other peoples time.

 

Considering what a galaxy is made up of, it seems likely that what is in one galaxy is also in the next. If there were mountains on each continent as high as Everest then you are going to climb the one closest to you first. And if climbing that one takes up a significant amount of your available time then you are unlikely to travel to another continent to repeat the process for no gain.

 

It all comes down to cost. Travelling to another galaxy is going to be very expensive. If it is going to cost more than you have then why would you do it?

[-I-]

Pseudoscience and speculations

 

THE DEVICE- R.Russell-cat/sci-fi

 

We learn that the greatest power is the mind, then one day we somehow enhance our ability>>>>>>>> by say>>>>>>, I don't know, use a materialistic monistic electronicaly enhanced awareness device that gives awareness of each other so that we can think as each other.

So we all can do it and you can advertise time on E Bay "where you can jion me on holidays in my body while your bodies sleeping".

 

If you wear the device thousnads of people can just pop in on you every day. You can immeadiatly pop into any brain if you and them are wearing the device and your sleeping, no exceptions.

You will know when you hear truth.

You can Induce sleep, By setting the device to L/M/H asleep/awake.

 

Not so great? there's more.

 

I can travel to other galaxies and you can join me in my body when I get there.

Hey lets send people everywhere and those on the ships heading out, they can be others while asleep, and vise-wersa when they get there.>note you can't stop being you at any time, your body would have to sleep as normal while your out, but you could party in other bodies while you sleep, going 24/7 if you wanted. (if you were woke by noisy vistors poping in, you would be awake and back in your body)( you have to wear the device while asleep, to be out, and anybody can pop in.)

Death>

When your body/mind is gone so are you, you are still only just you mind and body. But you know you can be everybody to, because you can pop in.

 

___________________________You are everybody when your not you. __

 

 

Either the universe is able to realise itself through our lives

________________________________Or_______________________________

 

The universe is my left testy and you all crawl around on it.

[swansont]

You're worried about intergalactic travel, when we haven't taken many steps into travel within our solar system, much less travel elsewhere within our own galaxy.

 

There is a line of thought that you send bacteria or spores of some sort, which can lie dormant for the long journey and survive the environment. Not really that expensive.

 

edit: How did Kennedy justify going to the moon? How would Washington have justified it?

[Royston]

The universe is my left testy and you all crawl around on it.

 

So your left testy is expanding at an accelerated rate...sounds nasty.

 

 

 

EDIT: Sorry for going off topic.

[Realitycheck]

What are the chances that there are pieces of solid dark matter out there in the abyss? I realize that most of it is probably just gas, but there will be some out there on the fringe of solar systems. What are the capabilities of scanning little pebbles that turn out to be like boulders at ultra-high speeds? What would be the capabilities of shifting course at high speeds in order to maneuver around them? Even at a modest 200K mph, these would pose a problem out on the fringe.

[YT2095]

Everest is the highest mountain on our planet; it is a limit. Another galaxy though is just another galaxy. Climbing Everest isn't too expensive either. In terms of real cost it uses up a relatively small amount of a persons available time and perhaps a small amount of a few other peoples time.

 

Considering what a galaxy is made up of, it seems likely that what is in one galaxy is also in the next. If there were mountains on each continent as high as Everest then you are going to climb the one closest to you first. And if climbing that one takes up a significant amount of your available time then you are unlikely to travel to another continent to repeat the process for no gain.

 

It all comes down to cost. Travelling to another galaxy is going to be very expensive. If it is going to cost more than you have then why would you do it?

 

the fact that you wasted that entire post trying to pull apart my Example, means that you`ve totally missed the Underlying Principal behind what was being said, it`s not ABOUT "Everest" in specific, it`s about the inate urge to Explore and infact that mountain has claimed Many lives (can you think of greater cost?), and yet as a species you carry on anyway, because it`s There!

[JohnF]

YT2095: I knew exactly what you were getting at with Everest. What I am saying is "because it's there" is not enough of a reason to do something. You do something "because you can" and being able to do it requires lots of other things to be true. If going to another galaxy would take more than a lifetime then anyone that sets off isn't going to get there.

 

Next time you want to buy something consider travelling to the other side of the country to buy it from a branch of a store there that you would have used locally. This is not something you would do just because the other store is there; you would buy locally. There are lots of reasons why people do things but "because it's there" is only one of them.

 

The greater cost of any of the lives that were lost in attempting to climb Everest is my time. My time is what I have. The lives of others are not mine, neither is the time they had.

[YT2095]

YT2095: I knew exactly what you were getting at with Everest. What I am saying is "because it's there" is not enough of a reason to do something.

 

it enough of a reason for Pioneers and Explorers though

[Royston]

Precisely, if we had the means, there wouldn't be a corner of the universe that wasn't probed. Even from a physics point of view, that we need to assume that the same laws hold in our galaxy, compared to another...it doesn't retract from satisfying our curiosity, and doesn't retract from achieving what appears to be an impossible feat.

 

Agentchange...look up gravitational lensing and dark matter for the method of detection of those pesky non-baryonic particles. Other than that, I don't really have the foggiest what you're going on about.

 

EDIT: the first paragraph was in response to post 11...away from desk.

[JohnF]

it enough of a reason for Pioneers and Explorers though

 

Not really. Some will have expected to find wealth on their explorations, others fame perhaps. They will all have expected to return home within a reasonable, to them, period of time. Where the possibility of death existed then you have denial or "it will never happen to me" thought to counteract it.

 

People will do things because of what they can get out of it and because they are in a position to do those things.

 

Going to another galaxy is going to require a massive investment both from individuals and groups, nations, even the whole planet. There is going to have to be a very good reason for all those people to put so much time in to such an undertaking. I would doubt that even survival of the species would be enough of an incentive to get such a journey underway; humans, like all other animals, are just too selfish.

 

However, if future discoveries enable people to travel such distances in a relatively short time and at a reasonable cost then I am sure many will undertake the journey. But if one person could make the journey one way and not communicate back or return then would any one person want to go?

[YT2095]

and why wouldn`t being the 1`st to set off on a one way never been done before mission not count?

 

the "what they can get out of it" might be Knowing the above, and the Challenge and the hope of seeing things never before seen!

 

Hell, If I was single and childless, I`de go for it, just for the View

[the tree]

Not really. Some will have expected to find wealth on their explorations, others fame perhaps. They will all have expected to return home within a reasonable, to them, period of time. Where the possibility of death existed then you have denial or "it will never happen to me" thought to counteract it.?

Not every single person in the world is 100% boring. Sometimes people do do things just because they might be interesting or just because they can. This includes pretty insane and dangerous things.

[someguy]

you could travel to a distant galaxy if you don't mind the fact that your colony will need to live out the first really alot generations on the way there. a motivation would be to get away from earth and design a society that lives under a different philosophy, which you cannot really do on earth without the rest of the population directly affecting you and likely the philosophy of your colony as well unless you censor a bunch of stuff and that's just plain dangerous.

 

-I- you couldn't share awareness between galaxies instantly because no matter what your method of sharing is it can't move faster than light. also i'm not really sure if you could distinguish your thoughts and experiences from someone else's if you were linked that way, the problem is that the thing of you that is aware is inseparable from the thing of you that thinks, if you add another thing that thinks now you've got mental problems of voices in your head and split personalities. I don't think you can be aware of two things at once, so you couldn't concentrate and be aware of your current surroundings at the same time as someone else's so you'd basically need to borrow only their senses, maybe control their body or just their eyes. but you can do this with a robot that you control with current technology. but still not instantly only at a minimum delay of the speed of light.

[-I-]

THE DEVICE Cat/sci-fi

R.Russell

Your not popping in and meeting someone else, this is an awaking, you are them, you always were, you were just unaware of the fact, there is only one person in the body you pop into, you, you meet yourself living another life.

 

You are every life, your just unaware of it.

 

Someguy

Yes your right, you could not have two identities in an awake body but maybe you could if you were both asleep and just remembering what you did today as somebody else. Or any other day. (No secrets, I know what you did last summer)

Fred and Bill are both asleep wearing the device, Fred doesn't become Bill or Bill Fred, but they remember each others whole life as though they were each other. If you put on the device you would have to go to sleep before you could move through the memories of anyone else, as long as they also were wearing the device.

 

Maybe the device could be like a phone, you ring specific people and the devices send the same signal in wards toward the mind, not outwardly through space and time. Therefore distance between devices means nothing.

 

The world would change in a very short time as these experiences would expand our minds exponentially, they would be sort by all, not shy ed away from as one may think, (you have short comings and realize it's not worth dwelling on what you have done as you or anyone, but now what you can do.)

 

So Fred signs up with a group for an interstellar journey that will take three generations, he has nothing to fear, He knows he is everybody and can, anytime while wearing the device, call up his Self - a friend - and remember their day as if they were each other.

You could speak or even think a message during the day while your awake as if your speaking to your friend and that night while asleep you ring them with the device, and if they are wearing their device, they remember your message instantly across any distance.

 

Either we sort out a way to stay in contact across vast distances

 

Or

 

we shrink the universe like my testes shrink when I hop in cold water.

[Reaper]

You're worried about intergalactic travel, when we haven't taken many steps into travel within our solar system, much less travel elsewhere within our own galaxy.

 

Well, why not speculate on that?

 

This is a little like asking why Renaissance and Enlightenment astronomers, or even some ancient Greek philosophers, pondered about traveling through the solar system even though they haven't even explored or mapped the entire Earth yet.

 

 

There is a line of thought that you send bacteria or spores of some sort, which can lie dormant for the long journey and survive the environment. Not really that expensive.

 

Then there is the question of whether or not they would survive the trip. But then, if Panspermia is possible, then it would make the task far easier. Also, there is the famous case of microbes hitchhiking on space craft on one of the Apollo missions and surviving for a number of years.

 

YT2095: I knew exactly what you were getting at with Everest. What I am saying is "because it's there" is not enough of a reason to do something.....

 

 

Well, then you have to ask yourself this: Why did humans even bother leaving Africa? Or building boats, or colonizing the Pacific Islands, or doing anything that involved enormous risk and/or lots of resources?

 

After all, our current exploration of space, whether manned or unmanned, uses up considerable resources and carries a lot of risk. And better yet, the only real justification we have for even spending resources on exploring other planets is pretty much "because its there". With better knowledge of our solar and galactic neighborhood, it becomes easier to find more justifications for going back (e.g. economic, political, population control, etc.)

 

 

---------------------------------------------

 

Anyways, I took the time to make some basic calculations about how long it would take to get to the Large Magellanic Clouds (about 1.6 X 10^5 light years from Milky Way) if you were to be traveling at 0.2c. At that speed, it would take about 803872 years minimum. And this is of course assuming perfect conditions (such as leaving from the furthermost edge of our galaxy that is close to the LMC).

 

Of course, these are very simple calculations, and I left out things such as energy requirements. I'm going to work out energy requirements and length of time for a few galaxies in the local area a little later.....

[Realitycheck]

Here is some descent reading for interstellar travel. I like the part about the wormhole.

Worm Hole transportation

 

Just when you thought it was confusing enough, those physicist had to come up with wormholes. Here’s the premise behind a "wormhole." [graphic] Although Special Relativity forbids objects to move faster than light within spacetime, it is known that spacetime itself can be warped and distorted. It takes an enormous amount of matter or energy to create such distortions, but distortions are possible, theoretically. To use an analogy: even if there were a speed limit to how fast a pencil could move across a piece of paper, the motion or changes to the paper is a separate issue. In the case of the wormhole, a shortcut is made by warping space (folding the paper) to connect two points that used to be separated. These theories are too new to have either been discounted or proven viable. And, yes, wormholes do invite the old time travel paradox problems again.

 

Here’s one way to build one:

 

First, collect a whole bunch of super-dense matter, such as matter from a neutron star. How much?- well enough to construct a ring the size of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Then build another ring where you want the other end of your wormhole. Next, just charge ‘em up to some incredible voltage, and spin them up to near the speed of light -- both of them.

 

No problem? Well if you could do all that, and notice you already had to be where you wanted to go to, I’m sure you could think of more clever ways to travel. Don’t expect any wormhole engineering any time soon. There are other ideas out there too - ideas that use "negative energy" to create and to keep the wormhole open.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/ideachev.html

[JohnF]

Lockheed: People didn't just leave Africa and move to Europe or Asia, they will have drifted outward. They will have also moved in quite small stages, ensuring a supply of food and essential resources before going further.

 

There will be plenty of reasons for doing what they did, for building boats etc. over and above "because it's there". You should ask yourself first, what reasons could they have for doing it? You will find plenty.

 

You even take the trouble to end your paragraph with a list of reasons for doing things other than "because it's there". I really don't think the USA sent men to the moon "because it's there"; they did it because it was politically usefull. Since the last man visited the moon, the moon is still "there" but that just isn't enough of a reason to go "there".

[Reaper]

Lockheed: People didn't just leave Africa and move to Europe or Asia, they will have drifted outward. They will have also moved in quite small stages, ensuring a supply of food and essential resources before going further.

 

There will be plenty of reasons for doing what they did, for building boats etc. over and above "because it's there". You should ask yourself first, what reasons could they have for doing it? You will find plenty.

 

You even take the trouble to end your paragraph with a list of reasons for doing things other than "because it's there". I really don't think the USA sent men to the moon "because it's there"; they did it because it was politically usefull. Since the last man visited the moon, the moon is still "there" but that just isn't enough of a reason to go "there".

 

Not really. Space exploration only became political at the dawn of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the US were locked in an arms race. The reason the US funded the space program was so that they feared that the Soviets were surpassing them technologically, and that they were developing the capability to bomb them anywhere in the world.

 

Before then, space exploration was confined to telescopes, and the reason for even looking up at the stars was more or less human curiosity.

 

As for boats, they wouldn't have had any real reason to do that, except for maybe crossing rivers initially. The usefulness of boats, especially for exploration, would have been discovered afterwards.

 

And I did not say that humans left for any particular continent when they did leave Africa. But why did they even bother in the first place. Humans (modern humans that is) back then were just as intelligent as they are now, there was certainly more to it than just drifting, especially when you consider that they migrated to populate every continent except for Antarctica.

 

I know its hard to believe, but most of humanity really isn't that imaginative. Not everything that is thought of or explored of will have a direct use or a economic, political, etc...reason to do so as most people seem to think. Just look at mathematics .

 

"just because its there" is every justification to go ahead and go somewhere or do something. Curiosity is a very powerful motivation.

[YT2095]

Curiosity (and Compassion) are a couple of the more redeeming traits of Humanity, there aren`t Many others!

[-I-]

THE DEVICE

NOT ALL SCI-FI

R.Russell

 

One body/mind, one identity in control, learning new things does not change the physical makeup of a mind, neither does watching a movie. If we naturally were each other then we should be able to find a way to realize each other consciously.

 

When our original ancestor replicated and split in two, it would have, (considering the presence of life), now been present in both the original and the replicated. The one presence of life that existed in the original is now separated and existing in two membranes.

(Think of the moment before seperation of a bacterium, just before the two life bubbles close off, almost two bodies but with a single life presence, then two bodies with two lives, or two bodies with one life presence?)

The replicated would start anew and always be unaware(because they are seperate) that it has the same life presence of the original and be free to go off as an individual. The separated individuals can branch of to become many new incredible life transformations over billions of years, and some, we know, became human.

We as humans still have a presence of life, the question is, is that presence now what we experience as consciousness.

Was the original organism's presence of life the precursor of consciousness, that which was the same presence in those membranes.

 

Q1. Is life presence the same in all organisms, just unaware because of physical seperation?

Q2. Is life presence the precursor of consciousness?

 

If you ask me how I class myself as being here, what makes me feel present, and feel alive, I would have to say it's consciousness. As Someguy correctly pointed out you would not be able to control your body in two minds, so I imagine it would not be a matter of control. Anyway the point is there is only one consciousness that can be in control, it lives all lifes, organisms are just unaware of this.

 

I think it may be possible to realize but not control, our other identities but only if it was this way naturally.

 

Not getting of topic- interstellar travel has the implication that many generations may have to live and die during the journey to a destination, this realisation may make it no big deal if it's just a matter of inner mind.

 

Sci-Fi

I would go on the journey body/mind, and you and I may be able to wear a device that would allow us to realize you have always been present in me, and I in you, simultaneously.(maybe there would be something to set up before I left with those I wish to realise and they could pass that connection on, or maybe theres a HUB and and I can realise everybody connected) We would still only be each other I would imagine but would realize, but no be, our other identities.

 

Soooo when I touch my balls it could really be you doing it.

Or you could let the blind see.