We Are On The Verge of Interstellar Flight...

Reading some of the comments here, i have to say that most of the issues have been solved already.

FTL is possible because the craft has no mass, it has been negated. For the same reason, it doesn't need humongous amounts of energy to accelerate.
The heart thing is probably meditative training to avoid heart attacks caused by the mental shock of FTL travel.

The Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction may or may not be true, i think that's another aspect of keeping mass in the equation, i don't think it will be observable as such.
Without mass there is no inertia, so you can do a 90 degree turn at Mach 50 and not even feel it.

The huge cost of these projects has already been paid for, about 25% of America's gross national product, meanwhile in Europe we are spending 17.5 trillion on the World's Most Expensive Toy, the LHC......

Oh yes, energy. Tons of it on the moon in the form of helium-3, its much better fuel than Dueterium (2H) but the reactor spews out fast neutrons when running. Ideal for moon bases or orbital reactor satellites (shhh) but not much use if you are sitting next to it. And they still have all that 'plutonium' er 'nuclear waste' er much better fuel than Uranium. Dont forget to tell the terrorists it makes useless bombs though........

Ingo Swann, that was the name, it is said his offworld RV attempts were denied by aliens, or such.
So even if that is true, we now have 2 branches in the theory: We have visited other worlds, for some reason our ET handlers either let us or they simply couldn't stop us. Or we just went, and ET just sat & watched. In that case there is no quarantine of Earth.
Although if i was ET i would think twice about letting hu-mons find another habitable planet, all they have to do is sit it out & we will destroy this one.

My theory on intergalactic species is this, if you manage to avoid killing each other & destroying your home planet, welcome to the club!...if not, just scratch another species (there are probably many) that didn't quite make it.

It's up to YOU the PEEPS to decide where you want to be 100 years from now.....

a reply to: SLAYER69

As always good to read your threads-but it may be grasping at straws.

Interstellar travel is near impossible. No conventional or inconventional propulsion system could get us to the nearest star let alone a planet 50 light years away. It would take a fundamental change in our understanding of the universe to make interstellar travel anything less than fruitless.

A baby doesn't go from crawling to climbing Everest and it's not all about getting there-we need to ensure that we can get there alive. Let's see if we can get to Mars first, then maybe Europa and then after we are long gone then maybe a von Neuman Probe will be sent out, and maybe a few generations after that then we might be able to send a manned mission- IF we can crack the cosmos code.

I know that we have come far- it took less than seventy years to go from the wright brothers to the first moon landing, but those milestones weren't breaching the laws of physics. This will a feat that generations in the future might see, but as it stands we will never see it.

a reply to: playswithmachines

FTL is possible because the craft has no mass, it has been negated. For the same reason, it doesn't need humongous amounts of energy to accelerate.

Mass increases as a craft accelerates. To continue to accelerate a craft needs fuel. The latest ion driven probes are lucky to make one percent the speed of light. One percent. And they are just probes-they don't have human cargo, provisions, fuel, etc. Saturn V burned through 400 tons of fuel a second just to make escape velocity, and that was just to send a one capsule. The logistics required and resources required to make a journey would boggle the greatest minds.

If such a craft was to be constructed it have to be constructed in orbit. but then a dock would have to be constructed to build such a craft...

originally posted by: Indigent
April 1961 first man on space, July 1969 first man on the moon, 47 years latter nothing much really, im not too optimistic about interstellar if we cannot even get to mars yet.

Also I bet if we ever make ships to travel space, they wont have windows

Umm I would have to disagree. Just look up any timeline of achievements in space since we put a man on the moon. We have been quite busy actually.

we're not gonna get anything that goes into space because then we'd see what's up there. It's too risky. There could be all kinds of stuff up there that they don't want us to know about. also space could cause a lot of cancer