Can Other Planets Be Our Lifeboats?

As we melt our polar caps and turn our oceans acidic, some people might be thinking, "Maybe we can just migrate to another planet." Space travel is not an easy task because, among other things, the universe is incredibly large. In fact, it is mind-blowing large.

Now, imagine our sun was the size of a basketball and someone was shooting the hoop in New York City. To reach the next closest star, which is Proxima Centauri, we'd have to travel to Moscow. The star is a mere 4 lightyears away, and we'll talk about lightyears in a moment.

So how many stars are in the universe? I'd hate to be the poor assistant who has to count them, but his name is Wiggins and he comes up with a figure of 10 sextillion, which is a 10 followed by 22 zeroes. Just in our own galaxy, known as the Milky Way, there are about 400 billion stars. Our galaxy is 106,000 lightyears across and is considered a larger, but still average, galaxy. Our sister galaxy, Andromeda, is even larger with 1 trillion stars. Both of our galaxies, along with about 100 smaller galaxies, are in a group known as the Virgo Supercluster. I recently learned that some of the smaller galaxies actually orbit around our own, which is amazing. The size of our supercluster is 110,000,000 lightyears. It is estimated that there are 10 million superclusters in the universe.

Now, we can only see what could be a tiny part of our universe because the universe is expanding faster than light can travel. So, all we can view is a part of the universe that's 93 billion lightyears across. In 1998 we learned that the universe is not only expanding but that the expansion is accelerating, and the space between galaxies is expanding faster than the speed of light. Some people believe the universe will expand to a certain point and then contract. Or, each galaxy may spin out into the vast nothingness to the point where we can't see any other galaxy.

For the most part, scientists believe the universe is flat, but some researchers have detected a slight curve of 0.4 percent. If that is true, then the universe is a giant sphere and it would take 250 visible universes to complete the round circle. In other words, if the universe is a big ball it would have a radius of 11.6 trillion lightyears. If, however, the universe is flat it could go on for infinity.

Lightspeed

Now, in middle school, you probably remember the teacher telling you that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, which is really fast. Our spaceships are getting faster and the recent Juno probe travels at an impressive 46 miles a second, but that's only .0002 times the speed of light. At that speed it would take 20,000 years to reach the nearest star, which is 4 lightyears away.

Einstein said it's impossible to travel faster than the speed of light but it may be possible. After all, galaxies are somehow separating faster than the speed of light. Whoever came up with the idea of warp drive engines on Star Trek was amazingly prophetic because such an engine is theoretically feasible. In fact, in 1994 Miguel Alcubierre, a Mexican physicist, actually came up with a theoretical model on how a warp drive could work. In basic terms, the warp drive, also known as the Alcubierre Drive, would stretch the fabric of space-time in a wave, causing the space ahead to contract while the space behind expands.

There are also theories for spaceships that use wormholes or jump drives. The whole idea is that space itself is manipulated for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel. Right now these theories are highly speculative. I believe that when we figure out dark matter, dark energy, and gravity we will be a step closer to FTL travel.

Conclusion

When I talk to people about climate change I find it deeply troubling how they react to it. I hear comments like, "India and China are creating more emissions." But isn't the United States supposed to be a world leader? Or "We don't really know the effects of carbon emissions." The body of research is vast, yet this is an issue that is nebulous and distant to most people. By our evolutionary nature, we can't seem to react to danger until it's in our face.

It's possible that our grandchildren won't ever experience eating seafood because our oceans are becoming fouled, overfished, and the alkaline level is increasing. Every day I grieve over the slow death of our beautiful planet. As the Earth dies, I die. The dominant species that has exploded in numbers and is consuming our planet is only behaving like any other species. We will simply reproduce to the limit of our food supply or until a competing species, like a virus, outperforms us. Or until our ecosystem is too harsh and unstable to sustain us.

I thought a virus would be too smart to kill its host because, after all, then it dies as well. But it appears that a virus is no smarter than a human. Why a species destroys its own habitat is confusing to me, but the bottom line is that lifeforms just eat and grow with little regard for the future.


Sources:
Visualizing infinity. Is the Universe Infinite? The Largest Scales, Arvin Ash
Alcubierre Drive: Warp Speed - Star Trek fantasy or plausible?, Arvin Ash
How Long Would It Take To Travel To the Nearest Star, Universe Today
Scientists Are Starting To Take Warp Drive Seriously, Science Alert

Photo: Leon Rohrwild