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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.
About the Author
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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