• Question: would you ever want to go to space and explore our galaxy?

    Asked by Molly.x to John, Laura, Luke, Rob, Ruth on 17 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by the force be with jeff.
    • Photo: Laura Finney

      Laura Finney answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      I think it would be loads of fun and so interesting. I would love to see the earth from space but only as long as I could come back! I wouldn’t want to go on a one way mission!

    • Photo: Robert Williams

      Robert Williams answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      I’m too old to go into space.
      However if I won the Lottery I would find myself a nice place well away from streetlights and build an Observatory with a large – maybe 1-meter class telescope – to view the galaxy at my leisure.

    • Photo: Ruth Patchett

      Ruth Patchett answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      I would love to, but I think I would be pretty scared too!

    • Photo: Luke Williams

      Luke Williams answered on 19 Jun 2016:

      Galactic exploration? That would be a one way trip, whichever way you look at it. The only way humanity can look at exploring outside our solar system is with an intergenerational ship – a spaceship so large that it can be an entire colony itself.

      For example, our nearest neighbouring system is Alpha Centuri, a mere 4.4 lightyears away. Current craft would take tens of thousands of years, at best, to get there. There are highly theoretical craft designs that *may* get that down to something actually reasonable, but I somehow doubt it’ll be much less than a century, at least for the forseeable future.

      That would bring our nearest star neighbours into intergenerational ship range, with the children and grandchildren of the initial astronauts being the ones who actually arrive and look at the new system.

      Given the above, I would be interested in serving on such a ship, but it would be a pretty strange experience, indeed it may not even be possible for those who arrive at a new system to even get to the planet, due to their extended stay in space. There are also all kinds of health hazards from extended stays in space on the scale of months, rather than your entire life. Optimistically most of the issues might be ironed out with a big enough spaceship and some more advanced technology.

      Exploring any substantial part of the galaxy though? I would be interested in that, but I don’t see that happening in my lifetime unfortunately. We would have to get on of the faster than light travel technologies to work out, or at least be able to travel at some substantial fraction of the speed of light to make travel time reasonable.

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