Traveling to Other Worlds

Will we ever be able to explore the universe, travel to other worlds and find new races? In this article I explore this.
TV shows like Star Trek
have been doing it for years but will we ever be able to travel round the galaxy or even through the universe?

Voyager 1, traveling at around 1/18000 the speed of light covered 1/600th of a light-year in 30 years. It would take 72,000 tears to get to our next nearest star Proxima Centauri. This would not be of any use to us and so we need to look finding a faster way.

Now with the new missions in the pipeline like a manned mission to mars we have space craft capable of faster speeds. At the moment it takes a rocket 9 months to get to mars and at that speed it would take a long time to reach Proxima Centauri. And so even with the advancement of technology it would still not be viable to send a mission to Proxima Centauri.

If we had a space ship that could travel at 10% of the speed of light then it would take 40 years to reach Proxima Centauri. This is a lot better but still not very practical for a manned mission. There are some propulsion systems out there that can reach this speed but they are all very expensive and so not cost effective for a mission to use.

Now for the theoretical bit!

So if we could travel at the speed of light it would take a space craft under 5 years to reach Proxima Centauri

What about Wormholes?

In Stargate the SG teams use wormholes that created and held open by a ‘Stargate’ to traverse massive distances between planets.

A wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel that joins to distant points in space, creating a shortcut.

The idea for there existence originally came about as a way to explain what happened to matter that had been swallowed up by a black hole. These Schwarzschild Wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges are not traversible as the gravity inside a black hole is so strong it would crush you.

While there is no actual evidence of the existence of wormholes, they are valid solutions in general relativity.

Wormholes would be a great help to use exploring the universe if they did exist, but for now we will just have to watch Stargate and Star Trek DS9 reruns and imagine ourselves taking a trip through on to the other side of the universe.

Thanks for reading. The wormhole is stable please post your comments through to me.