Space Travel: Science or Fiction?

There are those who deny Neil Armstrong walked on the moon
and maintain the whole story was a government conspiracy.
The idea that man could actually break away from our cradle
of atmosphere and gravity was once fiction of the highest
sort. Yet one dreamer made it a reality. What is there not
to believe about space travel? Will there be a time when
such a thing is feasible?

If interstellular travel requires traveling at light speed,
the situation is not promising. The biggest hurdles against
such travel are g-forces and time. G-forces are the force
exerted on your body when undergoing high accelerations.
Accelerating to the speed of light would have to be done
gradually or the body would be torn apart. It would take
about 2 ½ months to get to just half the speed of
light! This explains the need for inertial
dampers—the cosmic shock absorbers created by the
writers of Star Trek. Inertial dampers somehow cancel out
the force responding to the accelerating force. While this
solves the problem for script writers, there is no such
tool in the real world of physics.

Which takes us to the problem of time in space travel.
Theoretically, two things happen when objects travel at the
speed of light. First, time becomes relative and
“slows down” for the objects in motion. A ten
year journey on a star craft would correspond to 25,000
earth years—making any communication impossible. In
addition to this, objects get heavier the faster they
travel. When approaching the speed of light they become
infinitely heavy, which is why only massless objects, like
waves, can travel at such speeds.

Hence, space travel at light speed or faster is probably
not feasible; however, space travel could still become
reality. Imagine you are a microscopic mite on a flat piece
of paper. Your world would seem to be flat; and indeed, all
experimentation on your immediate environment would lead
you to that conclusion. If your world was flat, the fastest
way to get from your position to a point at the other end
of the page would be a straight line. However, if the page
was to bend, and you could drill a hole through the page,
you would find a shortcut. This is the idea behind
wormholes. Unfortunately, geometric equations show
wormholes to be impossibly unstable. Before they could be
used as viable bridges to new star systems or galaxies, one
would have to find a way to keep them from pinching off the
moment a speck of matter entered its throat. Still,
wormholes are our greatest hope for space travel. While
wormholes are still only hypothetical (there is no
experimental evidence for them), they are great theoretical
fun, and valid solutions of the Einstein equations.
It’s no wonder that they are a topic of interest
among scientists and writers science fiction alike.

Francesca Black has always enjoyed Science Fiction and she
manages the content at: Science Fiction Corner
http://www.science-fiction-corner.com

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