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Intergalactic travel
Intergalactic travel
Intergalactic travel is space travel between galaxies. Due to the enormous distances between our own galaxy and even its closest neighbours, any such venture would be far more technologically demanding than even interstellar travel. At the speed of light, traveling from Earth in the Milky Way galaxy to the Andromeda Galaxy (the nearest major galaxy) would take roughly 2.5 million years (a distance of 2.367x10^22 meters) from the perspective of observers on Earth, but would take an arbitrarily short amount of time for the traveler (due to the effects of time dilation), depending on exactly how close to the speed of light the vessel is traveling, perhaps a few decades ship’s time. In current engineering terms, intergalactic travel is considered pure science fiction. It would require the available means of propulsion to become advanced far beyond what is currently thought possible to engineer in order to bring a large craft close to the speed of light. Another obstacle would be to navigate the spacecraft between galaxies and succeed in reaching any chosen galaxy, star, planet or other body, as this would need an understanding of galactic movements and their coordination that is as of yet not understood. The craft would have to be of considerable size, without reaching speeds with noteworthy relativistic effect as mentioned above it would also need a life support system and structural design able to support human life through thousands of generations and last the millions of years required, including the propulsion system -- which would have to work perfectly the millions of years after it was built to slow down the machine for its final approach. Current physics state that an object within space-time cannot exceed the speed of light[1], which seemingly limits any object to the millions of years it would at best take for a craft traveling near the speed of light to reach any remote galaxy. Science fiction frequently employs speculative concepts such as wormholes and hyperspace as more practical means of intergalactic travel to work around this issue. However, some scientists[1] are optimistic in regard to future research into techniques considered even in concept sheer science fiction in the past.
See also
• Intergalactic space • Faster-than-light
References
[1] ^ Star Trek’s Warp Drive: Not Impossible from space.com
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