Random nerdy thought about space travel
Space travel is a great idea. The thought of flying around the solar system, galaxy and even the entire universe sounds like a great idea.
Problem with it. If we somehow solve the problem with not-being able to go fast enough to make interstellar travel possible, we still have the problem of being able to find our way home. It’s not like the ship would be able to use a GPS device.
The universe is constantly expanding at a rate great enough to where even if we were able to achieve speeds faster than the speed of light, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to reach the furthest reaches of space and come back. The problem with coming back is, our picture of the universe is fixed in time, heck, a lot of the stars we are looking at in the sky could very well not even exist by the time we were able to get to them.
Basically, if we send off a space-ship to travel the far reaches of the universe (which for all we know, has no end). We should never expect the ship to return, ever. Because it won’t. If it magically did, it would be hundreds of thousands of years later. People would have either wiped ourselves off the face of the earth, or evolved into something unrecognizable to the inhabitants of the space-ship (which probably also would have evolved on a completely different pathline.
It’s really sad to think about the fact that unless beings from other planets make themselves known to us, that we will never truly know if there is life on other planets. And who’s to say the aliens that may make themselves known to us aren’t just the old inhabitants of earth or mars, or whatever, returning from a hundred thousand+ year old journey.
