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 interstellar 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.