Do you believe that human space travel - faster than the speed of light will be possible within 50 years?
403917
We are developing technolgies at a rapid rate e.g. computational power increases by almost a factor of 1000 every 5 years. However, I dont think we can achieve faster than light speed travel in 50 years (partly because its not physically possible, according to Einstein) We would need a great deal of energy, as someone mentioned before, the power of a 100 suns. We are currently a Type 0 civilization, harnessing our energy requirements from fossil fuels. It would take a lot more than 50 years to achieve near to light speed travel.\n\nHowever, there are concepts which have been put forward that are a step ahead in space travel, like the Hydrogen Ramjet. This vehicle can possibly travel at 30% of the speed of light although it requires a miracle in terms of engineering
47037
You've hinted on most of the problems related with travel at extreme speeds.  In my view it isn't possible with our current technological and scientific knowledge, here's why:\nWhen you drive a car at 30 mph you require a certain amount of enery to sustain that speed.  If you double your speed you more than double your energy requierements, because of friction between your car and the surrounding air as well as your tires and the road. Even if you had no tires (the equivalent of a perfect hipothetical electronagnetic propulsion) you'd still have wind drag.  The same happens in space, which is not completeley devoid of matter.  You would require enormous amounts of power to increase speed by small amounts once you really got going fast.  Actually, you would probably  require more energy than the energetic output of our entrier Solar System, depending on she size and acceleration of your vehicle, maybe even more than that of the entire galaxy.  The material out of which your spaceship is made would melt, burn or crack and other side effects like increased weight and dimensions (Einstein and Lorenz based) would have almost unforseable effects on the spaceship.  The only way of reducing this would be to travel in a circular or almost circular trajectory with modest accelerations, it would take almost a year for you to reach extreme velocities at a 1g acceleration.\nSumed up: you would require more energy than the planet can provide and the material of your spaceship would have to de made of a susbtance not yet researched.  Even solving these two (the solution of which could be centuries away - or maybe just decades, who knows, but it's not at hand) we'd have to deal with Einstein and Lorenz side effects on weight and dimensions, to attain 97%+ light speed (180,000 mps).
478673
Looks like a controversy here....but no, gravity does not travel faster than light, it would take eight minutes before the earth's orbit changed.\n\n(If gravity was instantaneous, then it would be possible to use that to send messages faster than light!)
903234
Cant rule out the possibility. \nBut..... based on currently available technology its very unlikely  within the next 50 to100 years. Definitely not in our life time.
845950
well there r lot of major scienctists nowday ... working on it... for myself i do belive that time travels faster than light because we are living in alternate dimension.. inside vortex of time, we can be frozen in time and still time moves past us,the light travels is pretty slow.. when we look up in sky ans there r stars and next day same place, for about 3 days later it will be moved bit forward.. and that star is probably dead or giant black hole.. think about it
1082872
The sky's the limit!  Sorry, couldn't resist.\n\nIt really depends on what advances are made in physics and technology.  Right now it looks like it would be very unlikely that man will ever leave the solar system.  The reason for that is because it takes so much energy to push a craft at the speeds necessary to get anywhere in a decent amount of time.  NASA recently launched a tiny, little probe to Pluto, which will take 10 years to arrive.  To send a crew of people that far, a much larger craft would be needed to support the life systems, which means far more energy would be required to push it.  The energy source would further increase the mass of the craft and increase the energy requirements, etc.\n\nI think our best bet with "conventional" technology would be to send a suicide mission to Alpha Centauri (the next-nearest star).  I don't know what the point would be of sending humans there, but it could be done over a period of maybe 100 years.  The original astronauts might not make it, but they could have children or grandchildren during the voyage who could reach the star.\n\nIf scientists ever figure out how to create and travel through wormholes or other theoretical means, then there's really no limit to how far we can go.
1042619
Well, it is a fantastic concept! Also, even if this could happen, it would take billions, if not billions of years!\nAnother way is that who and why do we accept the time direction as we do now? Because it fits, us! Well, sometimes this concept is reversed! SO, time could go the other way or go faster or slower, but this only in certain moments, yet!
368929
Eventually, I believe it probably will.  Whether this takes 50 years or 500 is something only time will tell.
522026
Excuse me, @@ ljdynamique2???\n\nTraveling at the speed of light IS possible. I, personally, have never seen light just "mosey" along on its way. \n\nAnd there is not one shred of evidence that life does not exist in other galaxies. In fact, all experts consider it more than likely that there is.
483445
This is not possible yet .. maybe in the future for spaces, but not right now.
867534
I do believe that is correct.  I heard it will happen within 50 years.
117448
From our current undestanding of physics, we cannot. That does not mean in 500 more years or 5000 more years we will not have a better understanding of physics that includes methods for travelling faster than the speed of light in a vaccuum. However, at the moment it looks very doubtful. \n\nWe have substantial evidence that special relativity is true from years of operating particle accelerators. From special relativity, it appears that it would require an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the speed of light. The glib manner people here are discussing an infinite amount of energy tells me that people do not understand what infinite means. \n\nAn infinite amount of energy is more energy than the sun produces. It is more than the energy produced by a billion suns. It is more than the energy produced by a billion galaxies full of hundreds of billions of stars. It is more energy than would be produced if every particle in the universe (about 10^70, the Eddington Number) was converted into a star like our sun. In fact, it is an INFINITELY greater amount of energy than 10^70 suns would produce. \n\nIf something is going at a speed greater than the speed of light in a vacuum (tachyonic speeds), then presumably the formulae we have for special relativity would not apply. There has been some occasional attempts to look for tachyons (particles going faster than the speed of light), but they have never been reliably discovered. \n\nThere are postulated entities called wormholes that might enable this kind of travel. Of course, we have no evidence for them at all.\n\nHowever, our understanding of physics is still very crude. We do not understand dark matter. Unifited field theory is still unproven. Even if it is proven, we do not understand the consequences of it (a lot of technology came from unifying electricity and magnetism). We do not understand what happens in black holes. We do not understand how the quantum world and gravity fit together. Even in quantum electrodynamics, which is viewed as settled and accepted, we end up performing illegal mathematical operations to get answers that agree with experiments. The role of the observer in quantum mechanics is not understood. We do not understand quantum teleportation very well. We do not understand BCS theory and its instantaneous coupling very well. We do not understand the apparent accelerating expansion of the universe (a sort of anti-gravity). There are immense holes in our understanding. Therefore, I would not be too confident that our current physics means very much here. \n\nThe only way to address this, is to continue to enhance our basic understanding of the way the physical universe operates. This might not be as romantic as it appears in the movies, but the hard work has to be done.
16773
To add a little to the above, there are also some very good scientific reasons to be skeptical about the possibility of little green men doing flybys besides merely a lack of evidence.  Among these is the enormous distances that need to be covered, the time it would take to do so, and the energy it would take to do so.  \n\nAs far as we can determine, light speed is the absolute speed limit of the universe.  As a material object approaches light speed it gains mass in an asymptotic way.  The closer you get to light speed, the more mass you have, and the more energy it takes to accelerate you. Unless our intelligent brethren out there have discovered fantastic ways around these problems, which while possible is not generally thought very likely, they would have to have arisen right on our doorstep cosmically speaking to even hope to get here.  If they managed 50% of light speed, which would take an energy source more potent than any we have imagined, and they arose by miraculous chance at the next solar system over (Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away) it would still take them a decade to get here.
50535
OK, first fo all Mr cliffx has it backwards.  As you continue to acellerate tworads the speed of light time will slow down for you and stay normal for everyone else.  Thus at that speeds you could travel 10000 lightyear in only 1 year, your lifetime, but thousands of years could pass on earth.\n\nIt has been theorized that time travel is posible but you could not simply accelerate to that speed.  Even if we could travel that fast the economical need would be currently beyond what any country has, even if they put all there funding into that one project.  but I am getting off the subject.\nOne theory is to travel into a black hole.  The gravetational field in a black hole is so strong that it has been theoryzed that even time cannot escape.  Thus if we were able to travel into a black hole we could use the captuered time there, so to speak, and transverse the timeline.\n\nThen there are ideas of actually traveling on light waves, lasers, to allow us to travel to the speeds necisary.  Of course then we could only travel to the time of how long that peice of machinery is on.  Also we would have to convert ourselvesinto an electrical signale, data (essicially transport), which would then bring up the promblum of measuring matter without moving it and blah blah blah.\n\nSummery, Yes it is possible to travel through time.  We just do not havet he knowledge and/or technology to do it yet.
560353
Not we as humans, but scientists are working on the technology to send atoms back in time.  The logic to behind this makes no sense.  Here's part of an article I read once on the website Space.com:\n\nTaught in physics classes the world over, Albert Einsteins theory of special relativity holds that no object or information can move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, or 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second. But NECs Lijun Wang says he created an experiment in which a light beam raced through a gas-filled chamber so quickly, it exceeded the speed of light by a factor of 300. Whats more, the light pulse appears to have left the confines of the chamber before it even entered a seemingly impossible occurrence according to theories of causality, which predict that causes must always precede their effects.\n\nSo, this possibly hints that the light is going back in time, but if this is what it means it violates laws of causality and sends quantum physics into disrepair.  \n\nTraveling to the past is impossible given our current views of the universe and physics.  However, if the universe isn't a universe, but rather a multiverse of infinite parallel universes we could jump to another universe that exists simulatneously at an earlier time.  This would not violate causality or the grandfather paradox (which is that if you could go back in time you could kill your grandfather  which would mean you would never be born to kill your grandfather).  YOu could kill your grandfather in another universe and you would never exist in that universe, but you would still exist because in your universe your grandfather had never died.
495644
EINSTIEN once said that he can't travel in time but one can SEE THE FUTURE . he said that if such a lense can be made that  it can allow us to see the edge of the EARTH in the prescence of  a   powerful laser the affect shall be like: one endsup seeing himself and in a totaly other situation and thus he proposed a theory on this concept of time travel\n\nbut we have to  just cross the speed of light ....... to have this another theory in action\n         this theory states that one can travel in time when he travels the  7times faster speed of light, and   it is surely going to take a lot of time to prove or disprove this theory ................as EINSTEIN could never prove the previous one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
356639
I hope so...\n\nI would like to imagine a future of space travel for the human race.\n\nBut I have no expereince in the field to offer suggestions.