The Ultimate Goal of Future Travel

NOTICE: This is the work of Will Cioffi, the posted name is a username only.

Letzer, Rafi. "Interstellar Travel Won't Look Anything Like The Movie." Popular Science. Popsci.com, 28 Oct. 2014. Web. 04 Nov. 2014. <http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/interstellar-travel-wont-look-anything-movie?dom=PSC&loc=topstories&con=interstellar-travel-wont-look-anything-like-the-movie>.

Since the beginning of the space race, mankind has been fixated toward the idea of what truly is out there. We have struggled to achieve the most impossible of tasks, which is the successful and efficient travel through space to other worlds. Such a magnificent feat is this that it rivals the first ideas of flight during the renaissance, or even the ideas of large floatable ships earlier than that. But is this goal truly possible to achieve. In an article I read in Popular Science, written by Rafi Letzer, the list of challenges of such a task are explained in great detail. According to the article, such exploration and travel in interstellar space is not possible with today’s technology, or even technology in the near future. Some of the reasons behind this mainly have to do with propulsion, one of the key components to creating an effective ship. We simply do not have the capabilities to possess an propulsion system that both accelerates in a positive and negative direction quickly and yet also requires a reasonable amount of fuel of some kind. The article then proposes that maybe Nuclear Fusion would be a suitable engine for this kind of exploration but has not been successful in testing when constructed. Even this is an issue because of international laws restricting this kind of use.

           

 Why this is important to us today is the mad craze we have with space. There are major pop culture references about space and all its possibilities, whether it be the contents or what could happen. One example where we might find this space craze is in the new movie Interstellar. The article mentions this movie and goes to explain that such a scenario would not work due to spaceship design, technologies (as explained above), and human occupants. If we were to create a society on another distant planet, we would need more occupants in order for a stable gene pool to be established, otherwise the off springs of the occupants would be incredibly similar to each other. Not only is this movie a good example of the pop culture craze behind space but also popular video games in the market. Games such as Halo, Mass Effect, and even new Call of Duty games have a plot that relate to space in some way, whether it be exploration, colonization, or even just plain war tactics. Regardless, we are in an age where space talk is becoming common and where our heads are once again are in the clouds, where we imagine the countless possibilities of space ideas.

           
 As for the article itself, Rafi did an amazing job in the descriptive detail in his explanations. For example, he says in his section about Antimatter, “Antimatter, produced in tiny, fizzling samples at CERN, annihilates with still greater power when it contacts matter.” It is important for an article to make clear of the possible definitions, such as antimatter, that might confuse the reader, and the author does an amazing job at doing so. Even though the description is good, he could have explained more factors that affect a spaceship. The reason why I say this is that he mainly talks about propulsion and population in the article. To be fair, he did talk about other important factors such as protection and self sustaining methods, but he could have talked about these more, because it seemed to only give the reader a glimpse of how important these factors are instead of giving a full understanding to the reader. Otherwise, this article was an amazing read and definitely worth the time to look over.