Do you think humans will ever travel to another solar system?

[Gizmo j]

The closest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away.

Will we ever get there?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri

 

[Greenman]

Seems unlikely. Assuming we could get close to C, it's a nine year round trip. That's a lot of groceries, water, and fuel to haul. Looks 4500 pounds per year per person of food and water is the bare minimum, crew of three would need 121,000 pounds. That doesn't account for toilet paper, ot flushing.

 

[BoomerD]

Not with current tech...I doubt we'll set foot on another planet in this solar system in my lifetime.

 

[Ken g6]

I've wondered if a few cells might be sent to another system and cloned into a full person on arrival. It would be nice if memories could be included; doing it Superman-style would be slow and hard.

Seems unlikely. Assuming we could get close to C, it's a nine year round trip. That's a lot of groceries, water, and fuel to haul. Looks 4500 pounds per year per person of food and water is the bare minimum, crew of three would need 121,000 pounds. That doesn't account for toilet paper, ot flushing.

That's what each person needs to eat; you never know what tech might reduce what you need to pack.

Not with current tech...I doubt we'll set foot on another planet in this solar system in my lifetime.

I'm not even sure we'll get back to the Moon in your lifetime. I expect someone will get to the general vicinity of Mars within mine.

 

[IronWing]

Not live people.

 

[DigDog]

realistically we will likely have a mission to proxima, uhh .. in the next 100 years?
i see no problem in grooming a team of 20yo astronauts for a 20year journey, and it's likely this is something WE WILL REALLY WANT TO DO. And we'll do it. And it will be useless. I'm purrrty sure we had a moonbase planned for the 80s during the 60s.
I strongly doubt we will "expand", as in having a second earth on Mars, our ideas of space colonization exist because we are still very primitive psychologically.

Space exploration is futile. If you assign a value to how advanced a race is, you'll see that at our stage growth in population is no longer a contributing factor.

Right now, we want to explore space for two reasons, one is WOW SPACE EXPLORATION, and another is a concern for our continued existence as a race. When we will be more mature and we'll have a more grounded idea of what evolution means, we won't be looking to go into space. We CERTAINLY will not be "moving our race ot other planets", because you ain't moving a few billion people off world.
(..this completely hypotetical of mine would easily solve Fermi's paradox, by the way..)

Also consider that eventual colonization will likely *not* have the effect we imagine.

TLDR: we are too primitive to make plans.

 

[UsandThem]

Nope.

The distance is too far, and there are too many hazards in space. Proxima Centauri like you said is 4.2 light years away, which doesn't sound bad until you realize that is 24 trillion miles.

The Milky Way Galaxy (one of an estimated 2 trillion galaxies) is thought to be around 100,000 light years across wide, so I think it is very unlikely that any civilization would live long enough in order to develop the kind of technology that would be needed to successfully travel those distances.

I love watching anything about space, but the thing that always stands out from everything else, is just how far away we are away from everything else. Well, that and trying to wrap my head around things like the size of something like a super-massive black hole estimated to be around 40 billion solar masses.

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/12/this-huge-galaxy-has-the-biggest-black-hole-ever-measured

 

[dawp]

eventually, yes, in my life time? no.

 

[brainhulk]

Once we refine and master our dna editing tech, humans will become immortal. Then all thats left is to design a craft that can make the journey

 

[SKORPI0]

Never. Humankind will be extinct before we can leave this solar system.

 

[TXHokie]

That's only slightly more than one parsec...simple hop for the Falcon. Yeah, not in my lifetime. Hell I'm just hoping to see man on Mars before I die.

 

[ShookKnight]

Nope.

Space is MASSIVE. I mean, huge.

Traveling at light speed is not enough. We would need to bend space & time to get to another solar system. Otherwise, we migrate there - which would take 100s of 1000s of years and multiple generations.

 

[KMFJD]

List of artificial objects leaving the Solar System - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

We've got Voyager 1+2 and Pioneer 10 outside the solar system, only took them 40 years Voyager 1 is still humming along at 17km's