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Originally Posted by Shirina
From what I understand, even the scientific community has essentially given up on trying to break the speed of light barrier so I'm not sure how we'll ever get off this rock aside from "generational ships" or some such.
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Alcubierre drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This Star-Trek-like warp drive concept has been taken up in recent years by a skunkworks project within Nasa. Many of the difficulties have been worked out, many have not, and a full solution is not Just Around the Corner. But I would not say it's been given up on, just not getting much funding.
I don't see generational ships as a bad solution. The upcoming TV miniseries
Ascension is a fun what-if alternative history treatment of what would have happened if the late 1950s Orion project had not been shut down by the nuclear test-ban treaty in 1963, resulting in us having a generational ship already halfway to Proxima Centuari here in 2014.
I watched
Interstellar this past weekend, though, which is a darker vision of the future, and without giving away anything, let's just say that at one point, traveling to another galaxy via wormhole quickly results in a to-the-death fistfight between two guys in space suits on a frozen planet -- two guys who are lauded on Earth as the best, brightest, and most heroic humans ever. At that point in the movie, I said, okay, if this happened to me, I'd conclude the human experiment an obvious failure and quit trying to save the world.