Is it possible man will be able to travel to the nearest star?

Answer 1

Yes, this is probably true. Interstellar travel has always been a major fascination of mine. Many Science Fiction novels depict interstellar colonies, empires. Growing up I always just assumed we would probably figure this problem out the same way we figure everything else out: we would just 'do it.' We're such an inventive species. I imagined computers would likely solve this paltry dilemma for us. Supercomputers only decades from now would probably develop some kind of 'warp drive;' it was only a matter of time. It only occurred to me well into adulthood that the difference between launching a rocket to the moon with some people in it and inventing a 'warp drive' to 'teleport' living matter across the unfathomable distances that stand between even the closest solar bodies and us is like the difference between spelling 'cat' and writing James Joyce's Ulysses backwards. No, short of some miracle we probably won't ever go to the stars as a species. Mankind is 99.9% likely to live and die right here on earth. Pretty depressing, huh? There has been some talk of sending self replicating probes to explore the galaxy, but the human race would probably be extinct by the time these probes had returned any information on their preliminary findings. There has been talk in the next century of sending a crew of actual people to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star (only 4.2 light years away), but the scale of such a challenge would be incomprehensible. For a sense of scale; It would take the Voyager spacecraft, traveling at 60,000 mph, roughly 10,000 years to cover this minuscule distance, a distance so small in interstellar proportions as to virtually not even exist. Even propelling such a craft with a continuous series of nuclear explosions would still likely take an entire century to accelerate the craft to Proxima Centauri. Of course someday, maybe even tomorrow, a scientist at MIT or Stanford might discover how to implement 'teleportation' in his lab, but in my opinion we're more likely to achieve permanent world peace under a unified government in the next decade than to discover a system that bypasses the space/time continuum. One hundred years or so later we'd be Off to See the Wizard; exploring the Andromeda Galaxy and depositing happy little human colonies on every terrestrial planet we discovered as we jaunted effortlessly along in our warp spacecraft. A scientific discovery of that magnitude - one that enables us to actually leave this solar system - would be 10,000 times more profound than all major discoveries in human history combined, so I'd have to say 'yes' to this question with a touch of sadness.

Answer 2

At present man cannot travel even to the nearest planet so stars are out of the question just now.

Answer 3

NO!