Deep space
calculator was introduced in the same year. The advances made in not only technology, but also safety should have made it possible for manned aircraft to go beyond the cis-lunar barrier and explore the endless bounds of our galaxy, yet . . .
Interstellar travel
Understanding deep space is one thing, the other is understanding how, if it were theoretically possible, we would get there and sustain life. The dream of every child inside us, and my 17-year-old self, is to explore beyond the limits of our bubble, the universe and our galaxy. Technically, it is possible, there are no laws in physics which completely blow it up but that is the only positive there is. There are already multiple unmanned aircraft outside what’s known as our solar system, curr ently drifting in space at tens of thousands of miles per hour, which on earth sounds pretty quick, yet in terms of space is nothing. In the late 70s, NASA sent up two interstellar probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, both of which had the task to collect data from both Saturn and Jupiter and relay it back to earth. After they fulfilled their task, they were left to drift into space. To further emphasize the scale of the universe, if theoretically (a lot of this is theoretical) the probes were heading toward the closest galaxy to us, Proxima Centauri, which is 4 light years away, it would take 80,000 years to get there. That is far beyond any of our lifetimes and, even if they did manage to reach it, relaying images and data back to earth would take around 5 years, which is a little more reasonable yet completely absurd. It is only when light-speed travel becomes plausible that we will be able to explore this far into deep space. Not only this, but no battery is able to last that long so in the end the multi-million dollar aircraft we sent into deep space would die and be useless space junk, hurtling around at thousands of miles per hour. We are nowhere near creating a ship which is capable of taking humans to other galaxies like Proxima Centauri, but we are closer to finding solutions to LEO space travel (Nasa.gov, 2012: Sutter, 2019).
Star Wars?
The Millennium Falcon, the esteemed ship of Han Solo in the Star Wars franchise is capable of travelling at the speed of light, which is accompanied by moving light rays and some ahead-of-its-time CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). Unfortunately, this is not possible. The quickest humans have managed to travel was with the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, a military aircraft which managed to come close to breaking Mach 3 (2,310 mph) and fly at speeds of 2,100 miles per hour. The quickest commercial aircraft, however, was the Concorde, travelling at 1,354 miles per hour, just under Mach 2. Although the Concorde is over 50 years old, we have taken a step back, soon after the devastating crash of 2000, high-speed commercial air travel was put on standby, and has not been re-started. There will be more high-speed commercial aircraft in our lifetime, but we won’t ever see light -speed aircraft in the future. According to Einstein and the theory of relativity, the speed of light is seen as a limit; nothing can travel faster than it, so light-speed travel is a physical impossibility, especially when the object attempting to travel that quickly has a noticeable mass. The closest humans have gotten to sending something at light speed was through a pushed proton at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which travelled nearly at the speed of light, where the proton (which has a mass of 1.67262192 × 10 -27 kg) would require infinite amounts of energy to travel any quicker, which is something we have not figured out just yet (Aeroplane.biz, 2022; Sutter, 2019).
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