The truth is that interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible. There’s no law of physics that outright forbids it. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’ll achieve it in our lifetimes, let alone this century. Interstellar space travel is a real pain in the neck.

Wormholes connect two points in spacetime, which means that they would in principle allow travel in time, as well as in space. However, according to general relativity, it would not be possible to use a wormhole to travel back to a time earlier than when the wormhole was first converted into a time “machine”.

So-called “warp drives” have been proposed before, but often rely on theoretical systems that break the laws of physics. That’s because according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, it’s physically impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light.

Intergalactic travel for humans is therefore possible, in theory, from the point of view of the traveler. Accelerating to speeds closer to the speed of light with a relativistic rocket would allow the on-ship travel time to be drastically lower, but would require very large amounts of energy.

Voyager 1

Real-time distance and velocity data is provided by NASA and JPL. At a distance of 152.6 AU (22.8 billion km; 14.2 billion mi) from Earth as of April 24, 2021, it is the most distant man-made object from Earth. The probe’s objectives included flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Possible distance away from Earth Since one might not travel faster than light, one might conclude that a human can never travel further from the Earth than 40 light-years if the traveler is active between the age of 20 and 60.

Accordingly, “warp 1” is equivalent to the speed of light, “warp 2” is eight times the speed of light, “warp 3” is 27 times the speed of light, etc.

IXS Enterprise is a conceptual interstellar superluminal spacecraft designed by NASA scientist Dr. Harold G. White, revealed at SpaceVision 2013, designed for the goal of achieving warp travel. The Alcubierre drive uses exotic matter (not to be confused with antimatter) to travel faster than light.

A tachyon (/ˈtækiɒn/) or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always travels faster than light. Most physicists believe that faster-than-light particles cannot exist because they are not consistent with the known laws of physics. No experimental evidence for the existence of such particles has been found.

The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, no electric charge, and no colour charge.

Neutrinos are created by various radioactive decays; the following list is not exhaustive, but includes some of those processes: beta decay of atomic nuclei or hadrons, natural nuclear reactions such as those that take place in the core of a star.

Overview of tachyonic condensation The “imaginary mass” really means that the system becomes unstable. The zero value field is at a local maximum rather than a local minimum of its potential energy, much like a ball at the top of a hill.

In theoretical physics, negative mass is a type of exotic matter whose mass is of opposite sign to the mass of normal matter, e.g. −1 kg. Currently, the closest known real representative of such exotic matter is a region of negative pressure density produced by the Casimir effect.

A neutrino is able to react with an atom of gallium-71, converting it into an atom of the unstable isotope germanium-71. The germanium was then chemically extracted and concentrated. Neutrinos were thus detected by measuring the radioactive decay of germanium.

The Baikal Neutrino Telescope is installed in the southern part of Lake Baikal in Russia. The detector is located at a depth of 1.1 km and began surveys in 1980. In 1993, it was the first to deploy three strings to reconstruct the muon trajectories as well as the first to record atmospheric neutrinos underwater.

A quark (/kwɔːrk, kwɑːrk/) is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei.

preons

In layman’s terms, they “glue” quarks together, forming hadrons such as protons and neutrons. In technical terms, gluons are vector gauge bosons that mediate strong interactions of quarks in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Gluons themselves carry the color charge of the strong interaction.

A free neutron is unstable, decaying to a proton, electron and antineutrino with a mean lifetime of just under 15 minutes (879.6±0.8 s). This radioactive decay, known as beta decay, is possible because the mass of the neutron is slightly greater than the proton. The free proton is stable.