Will it be ever possible to have long term space travel?

[ReadyAndWilling]

hey all, i was thinking about this earlier and i just don't see how it will be possible.

man is a part of nature. so, the more man moves away from nature the worse his situation becomes. we can look at people of African ancestry living in Scandinavia who are now being found to have severe deficiencies of Vitamin D. VitD is produced by the body ONLY from contact with the sun. so, their skin color protects them in Africa, which is necessary because the sun is so harsh, but in Northern Europe, this protection becomes a negative factor.

now, if we see health problems occurring where people have moved merely to the other side of the globe, imagine the problems people will encounter by moving to the other side of the solar system.

i've had a long day so i hope i made some sense.

 

[stj]

The problems in long term space travel have to do with the debilitating effects of microgravity on the human body and the harm done by radiation. (Low Earth orbits are partially shielded by Earth's magnetic field.) Plus, there is the detail of sufficient air, food, water and fuel for the journey.

Both problems are soluble. Spinning the habitat would serve to provide a substitute for gravity. Sufficient shielding would serve to protect against radiation.

The problem is that both solutions would massively magnify the logistic difficulties in putting all that air, food, water and fuel into space. The interplanetary craft (which is the kind that would require long term travel) would have to be assembled in space. This is why people tend to get excited over things like water on the Moon. If water could be obtained in space, it would be cheaper than boosting it up into orbit.

While it is physically possible, there is a strong likelihood that it may never be financially practical. There is no hot prospect for cheaper methods of transport.

 

[sojourner]

Pretty sure this has already been solved in Star Trek.

 

[Gaith]

Will it be ever possible to have long term space travel?

Almost certainly not. And besides Mars, where would we go, anyway? Not that Mars is all that exciting. A barren bunch of rocks - we have lots of places like that here. Whoop-de-doo. And cuter girls, too.

Chances are we'll always be limited to Starship Earth - but that's hardly a bad thing, imho.

 

[ReadyAndWilling]

The problems in long term space travel have to do with the debilitating effects of microgravity on the human body and the harm done by radiation. (Low Earth orbits are partially shielded by Earth's magnetic field.) Plus, there is the detail of sufficient air, food, water and fuel for the journey.

Both problems are soluble. Spinning the habitat would serve to provide a substitute for gravity. Sufficient shielding would serve to protect against radiation.

The problem is that both solutions would massively magnify the logistic difficulties in putting all that air, food, water and fuel into space. The interplanetary craft (which is the kind that would require long term travel) would have to be assembled in space. This is why people tend to get excited over things like water on the Moon. If water could be obtained in space, it would be cheaper than boosting it up into orbit.

While it is physically possible, there is a strong likelihood that it may never be financially practical. There is no hot prospect for cheaper methods of transport.

why do the space craft need to be assembled in orbit?

 

[YARN]

It's already possible. It's been possible for decades. It's called ORION.

 

[KJbushway]

Isn't this the wrong thread for this.
I don't see why you can't get the vitamins you get from sunlight by the regular lights inside the space craft. I don't see why there wouldn't be windows in a space craft that is able to fly through the cosmos.

 

[KJbushway]

Will it be ever possible to have long term space travel?

Almost certainly not. And besides Mars, where would we go, anyway? Not that Mars is all that exciting. A barren bunch of rocks - we have lots of places like that here. Whoop-de-doo. And cuter girls, too.

Chances are we'll always be limited to Starship Earth - but that's hardly a bad thing, imho.

Humans in nature are explorers and conquerers, I don't think we will want to stay here forever, besides we won't be able to stay here forever unless we get to some serious changing. However, now is the best time, lets go when the interest is high.

 

[T'Girl]

VitD is produced by the body ONLY from contact with the sun..

Well, you can absorbed vitamin D through supplements too. I take calcium pills, so I also take vitamin D-3 which "forces" my bones to absorb the calcium.

You can also eat kidneys as part of your diet and there are tanning light bulbs (not sure how safe that is though).

Children in 17th-18th century London used to get "rickets," bone disease , because there was a near perpetual cloud of coal smoke hanging over the city, less sunlight.

The problems in long term space travel have to do with the debilitating effects of ... the harm done by radiation. (Low Earth orbits are partially shielded by Earth's magnetic field.)

Shielding can be obtained by mean other than bulk material shielding, surrounding a larger spacecraft with artificially generated magnetic field would provide the same protection that the Earth's magnetic field gives us.

 

[USS Excelsior]

Put the crew in suspended animation to prevent boredom, and to carry far less food supplies as well as cut down on energy used for life support.

But the rotating gravity and sufficient shielding against radiation would also be required.

 

[Lookingglassman]

I doubt it.

 

[Verteron]

why do the space craft need to be assembled in orbit?

Because the large amount of 'kit' you need for long term space travel is not feasible to send up with chemical rockets in a single launch. If we come up with some sort of magic antigravity tech in the next few centuries then sure, Earth launches become possible again, but this is currently science fantasy - no known physics allows us to escape the gravity of a solid object like the Earth without reaching escape velocity, which is so high (over 5000 mph) only a rocket can realistically reach it.

I don't think long term space travel will always be impossible - despite the pessimism in this thread, a five thousand years ago, we thought it was impossible to move faster than a camel,
and a hundred years ago we thought the speed of sound was an unbreakable barrier.

Think what we'll accomplish in the next few centuries or thousand years - it's impossible to predict if we do indeed last that long.

There are definite problems in transporting biological creatures in to artificial environments - there are many complicated natural cycles we're involved in, but it's already been shown we *can* live in closed, artificial environments for long periods of time: there are various projects like Biosphere 2 which have proven reasonably successful using Algae, plants, etc. to support the cycles in nature that humans participate in.

If you take this with you on to a ship, and add some artificial Sun lamps (there's nothing special about the Sun's rays that can't be replicated artificially), and spin your habitat to create gravity, there's a good chance you might be able to stay up indefinitely.

Add some rockets and away we go...

That said, in a couple of hundred years, perhaps it won't be us doing the exploring, it will be artificial intelligences we create, possibly holding a crew whose minds have been uploaded virtually, who need nothing more than a power source and a microprocessor to live off of...

 

[Captrek]

With sciences like genetic engineering and robotics hardly beginning to scratch the surface of what they will provide to future generations, the longterm solution may be that our descendants will modify themselves to adapt to alien environments rather than constructing Earth-like environments everywhere they go.

 

[T'deD'Edkeid'Ende'Dejdid]

I believe it will be possible but it's several centuries away, at the earliest.

 

[Deckerd]

By long term do you mean long distance? As in away from our solar system? The answer I think is it would be possible but nobody would do it.

 

[MikeS]

By long term do you mean long distance? As in away from our solar system? The answer I think is it would be possible but nobody would do it.

Why do you think nobody would do it? It is the only way our species will survive. I think there'd be a huge queue of interested participants.

Just as in the age of exploration, it would bring fame and fortune!

 

[Deckerd]

It would bring nothing of the sort. It would bring life and death in the void. Nobody wants that when there's a perfect planet right here.

 

[The Wormhole]

Absolutely, I believe long term space travel will some day be achieved. Not in our lifetimes, and likely not for several hundred years, but someday it will be possible.

 

[MikeS]

It would bring nothing of the sort. It would bring life and death in the void. Nobody wants that when there's a perfect planet right here.

I was using a phrase.

The planet may be perfect now but what if we destroy it? Climate change, nuclear war etc. And there is always the threat that something extra-terrestrial, such as an asteroid, could destroy it.

We have to get off this rock and propogate!

Have you been reading about all the exoplanets discovered recently? I'd hazzard a guess that the galaxy is teeming with habitable planets. I would sign up for the trip and I wouldn't be the only one. Hence your sentence "The answer I think is it would be possible but nobody would do it." is incorrect.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

It would bring nothing of the sort. It would bring life and death in the void. Nobody wants that when there's a perfect planet right here.

Really, Deckerd?

If you had said that economics would prevent long term space travel by preventing the building of interstellar spaceships, your argument would have had some value.

But you said nobody is interested/would volunteer for such an expedition. You have already been proven wrong.
Both in this thread and by humanity's history.