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Anyone know anything about interstellar travel?

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BobFish

Guest
Hey everyone, I'm currently working on a visual novel which is about travelling to another planet which can sustain human life.

The game is set in about 50 years from now and I was wondering, based on current scientific advancements and future growth, how fast we would be able to travel at that point?

To make the game slightly more realistic (I'm trying to make it at least somewhat realistic) I'd like to have the planet at least a few light years away (maybe like 5, there seems to be exoplanets that distance from us that have been discovered so far).

Pretty much what I'm asking is how far would people be able to travel in a few years once we reach the year 2060?

Thanks
 
R

Roa

Member
Nothing we have could ever reach planets that might be able to sustain life. Infact, we can't even be sure that those planets haven't been dead for some time and it just hasn't visually caught up to us. I think the closest thing we are looking at are a few moons around Jupiter.
To even break out of our system entirely would probably take a few years going light speed. Let alone reach another. We're prisoners here. You can always bypass this with wormhole schlock though :p
 
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NPT

Guest
The fastest outward bound spacecraft we've built thus far has been Voyager 1 and it's travelling approximately 61,000 K/hour and it recently left our solor system.

Our closest star (other than Sol) is Alpha Centauri (4.4 light years) and it would take Voyager 1 over 70,000 years to get there.
Here's a chart that shows how much faster we would have to travel to make the trip to A-Centauri.

Code: 
Relative                  Actual                  Time to get to
Speed                     Speed                      A. Centauri

    Now                  60,000 KPH                70,000 Years
    10x                 600,000 KPH                 7,000 Years
   100x               6,000,000 KPH                   700 Years
 1,000x              60,000,000 KPH                    70 Years
10,000x             600,000.000 KPH                     7 Years
So in order to get there in 7 years we would have to develop the technology to increase our speed by 10,000 times to approximately 50% the spped of light.

This is why science fiction invents techniques to bypass these huge distances and time frames such as warp drive , hyper-space and worm-holes.
 
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B

BobFish

Guest
Thanks for the insight, I think I can work with this. I'll try to mix fiction with science to make something that the average person would believe :)
 
Nocturne

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
Can I recommend this article to you? It covers the problems facing us in the near future in relation to getting to the stars...

http://wiredcosmos.com/2012/12/20/will-we-ever-really-travel-to-the-stars/

The last paragraph is an interesting one, especially for a game, as it states (more or less) "we currently have not found anything worthy of going to look at around another star". Could be a good plot device to have "found something worthy of investigation" and that this is what has fueled renewed interest and technological advancement to the point that we can travel at 50% light speed or whatever in 50 years. :)
 
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BobFish

Guest
Nocturne said:
Can I recommend this article to you? It covers the problems facing us in the near future in relation to getting to the stars...

http://wiredcosmos.com/2012/12/20/will-we-ever-really-travel-to-the-stars/

The last paragraph is an interesting one, especially for a game, as it states (more or less) "we currently have not found anything worthy of going to look at around another star". Could be a good plot device to have "found something worthy of investigation" and that this is what has fueled renewed interest and technological advancement to the point that we can travel at 50% light speed or whatever in 50 years. :)
Click to expand...
thank you very much, nice article and what you added at the end is a great idea!
 
chance

chance

predictably random
Forum Staff
Moderator
BobFish said:
I'll try to mix fiction with science to make something that the average person would believe :)
Click to expand...
Why make something believable? Things like hyper-drives, wormholes, and "the spice" are more interesting and fun.

Just make your game world logically self-consistent. Players will happily suspend disbelief, and immerse themselves in it.
 
B

BobFish

Guest
chance said:
Why make something believable? Things like hyper-drives, wormholes, and "the spice" are more interesting and fun.

Just make your game world logically self-consistent. Players will happily suspend disbelief, and immerse themselves in it.
Click to expand...
True, I just sometimes find it annoying when things are clearly fake. I agree that It will be impossible to be entirely realistic and still super fun. I've got a lot of work but I've managed to enlist a couple of friends to help :)

Very excited to be putting a lot of effort into planning for once.
 
Surgeon_

Surgeon_

Symbian Curator
I'd like to add a few things to this (very interesting) topic:
  • I don't know if this contradicts the story of the game, but many books, movies etc. don't even bother looking out of the solar system, simply because there are many interesting and (in a wide sense of the word) habitable places in it. Our own moon, Jupiter's and Saturn's moons (Titan, Europa, Ganymede, Io etc.), and Mars are the most realistic places, but nobody says that people in a Sci-Fi story can't live on Mercury, Venus or Pluto (there's even one movie where there are people in huge floating cities on Jupiter). If you're looking for realistic this is definitely something to consider.
  • Another option is to look at poorly understood chemical elements and / or physical phenomena. There are things like quantum entanglement, quantum fluctuation and many other things with "quantum" in their names which are still very much being looked into. Now, the things I mentioned above don't really have to do much with the topic, but the point is you could say that in 50 years humans discovered a new property in one of the larger elements or a new physical phenomenon which they can harness in order to achieve near-light speeds, open wormholes, and such.
  • I think this is my most important point here: Don't over-elaborate on bull💩💩💩💩. It has a terrible counter-effect. For example, in Battlestar: Galactica, one of the premises of the story is that there exists an FTL (faster than light) drive. In the show they mine Tylium ore and refine it into Tylium dust, which ships need to consume in order for FTL drives to work - and that's it, no further explanation is given - because there is none. And ultimately it doesn't matter because that's not the point of the story. On the other hand, in the "Sci-Fi" movie Lucy (which is one of the worst movies I've ever seen) they decided to go a different route. Now, that movie has so much fiction in it that it's closer to Alchemy than Science (you take a pill which unlocks 100% of your brain for you and suddenly you can magically use telekinesis, change shape, and travel through time). Well I could swallow that if it served the plot. But, trouble is, they spent like half the movie spewing some fake, made-up science in order to back up what's basically magic. And that's what got me angry. People who know a lot about physics will be bothered by it. So, to recap: If something is a necessary plot device but doesn't really work in real life, just leave it at that and focus on other things. Then it will be easier for the audience to focus on other, more important things. Don't reinvent the laws of nature, it's annoying.
I feel like I could have formulated my thoughts better, but I hope you get the idea.
 
Yokcos

Yokcos

Member
Y'have wormholes and alcubierre drives as feasible possibilities. Nobody's creating a wormhole in 50 years unless we as a species seriously get our science on. An alcubierre drive, however, I could see that being done in 50.

Both of these methods are gosh darned cheating the laws of the universe and I love it. The basic premise of the alcubierre drive is this: Universe says you can't move through space faster than a certain speed, and you respond by just picking up the space and moving it to some star somewhere or something. I didn't move anywhere, I'm still at (612, 413), that location just happens to be right next to that planet I wanted to get to. And people know how to do this, more or less, it just takes a stupid huge amount of energy to actually do. Like, we might need to start draining the sun to make this work, that kind of quantity.

You know what, I changed my mind. It looks like we're not getting FTL any time soon unless I'm wrong which I very well might be because I don't look at the maths that much and predictions of futuretech are almost invariably way wrong.
 
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BobFish

Guest
Thanks to both of you. I agree that if something is made up, spending ages trying to justify why it exists is annoying. I shall also look into "alcubierre drive"
 
Yokcos

Yokcos

Member
You could also do something like saying the speed of light is infinite in your universe, or something like that. It's fiction, you can do anything.
 
P

piksil_demon

Guest
BobFish said:
Hey everyone, I'm currently working on a visual novel which is about travelling to another planet which can sustain human life.

The game is set in about 50 years from now and I was wondering, based on current scientific advancements and future growth, how fast we would be able to travel at that point?

To make the game slightly more realistic (I'm trying to make it at least somewhat realistic) I'd like to have the planet at least a few light years away (maybe like 5, there seems to be exoplanets that distance from us that have been discovered so far).

Pretty much what I'm asking is how far would people be able to travel in a few years once we reach the year 2060?

Thanks
Click to expand...
pm me, i can tell you pretty much anything youll need to know, aswell as scientificly acurate, theorectically possible ways to get around real world problems in a futurisic civilazation (i.e. inertia, FTL travel, colonization, energy collection, ect.) theres a long list of things you need to make it believable and not have fans complain about how imposible it is
 
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piksil_demon

Guest
Yokcos said:
You could also do something like saying the speed of light is infinite in your universe, or something like that. It's fiction, you can do anything.
Click to expand...
the speed of light is what governs out universe. if it was infinite, then all actions would effect everything in the universe instantly, that would mean all event that would ever happen in that universe would happen at the moment of conception, and it would rapidly enter heat death. if you need faster than light travel, there are many real world solutions that we simply do not have the technology to implement.
 
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BobFish

Guest
piksil_demon said:
pm me, i can tell you pretty much anything youll need to know, aswell as scientificly acurate, theorectically possible ways to get around real world problems in a futurisic civilazation (i.e. inertia, FTL travel, colonization, energy collection, ect.) theres a long list of things you need to make it believable and not have fans complain about how imposible it is
Click to expand...
Ok I shall. Thanks!
 
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roytheshort

Guest
Why isn't there something called hypo-space that makes you go slower?
 
K12gamer

K12gamer

Member
Don't think we'll see too much advancement in space travel in the next 50 years...

500 years maybe.

What surprises me is when scientists talk about colonizing Mars...but look at all the barren deserts on earth that humans haven't colonized.
Also...you'd think by now we'd have colonies underwater.
 
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