>humans will be able to attain FTL travel someday because

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>star trek will be just as impossible in 2269 as it was in 1969

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>>9155544
Move aside, pendejo

Stupid question.

Ignoring power, impulse, and warp drive, how much of a starship could we build?

>>9155637
Right now, fuck all.

It would just take too many launches. Like, the biggest thing we launched in one go (designed to stay in space/orbit, not counting propulsion, not counting what comes back to Earth) was Skylab I think.

ISS is a series of tubes, not much in the way of real rooms or quarters or anything.
If you want to build a starship you basically need a shipyard in space because you can't really do it by docking parts together. You need to build it.

>>9155544
Well yeah. To get some rocket to relativistic speeds you literally have to convert to energy an amount of mass of the same order of magnitude as the rocket itself. Tsar Bomba had a mass equivalence of like 2.6kg. To get a spacecraft to relativistic speeds you're probably talking about a few thousands of those, all converted to kinetic energy.

>>9155646
How far are we from building a space elevator and shipyards?

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>>9155637

>build interstellar probe from the atomic level on up, via nanotechnology
>this ship is composed of machine "cells", designed to both compute and "digest" matter to create copies of itself, like hot-rodded brain cells, but infinitely tougher, more flexible and smaller than living cells
>they can also create other types of machine "cells", and even organic cells
>interstellar probe is only a few grams in mass
>use enormous EM accelerator to launch it at nearby star (or stars)
>leaves solar system at an appreciable percentage of light speed
>sacrifices part of its mass to decelerate (again, in the grams, due to its tiny size)
>upon reaching nearby star, first mission is to build a transmitter from a captured asteroid or comet it "eats" and establish data link to "home"
>then build more duplicates of itself to launch at more stars (a la Von Neumann)
>it will never be necessary to send more than one successful probe...all it needs to "build" another civilization around the target star (whether its biological, or more likely, virtual) is information from the data link to "home"
>galaxy and universe eventually enveloped by this machine "organism", either at light speed, or something faster, it that's at all possible

Should be possible in ~100 years, definitely within 1000.

>>9155544
My biggest gripe is that people who say that just don't understand relativity at all. We don't need FTL travel. We can travel to the edge of the currently observable universe in what would seem to us as 1 second if we can just get close enough to the speed of light. Sure, that is highly unlikely, but at least it is theoretically possible. Unlike FTL travel.

>>9155637
>>9155646
>It would just take too many launches.

I just mean to build it on Earth, not in space.
Assume your fancy warp drive can get the thing in space.

>>9156960
The main point is to bring back information for the rest of humanity and make a space farring civilization. Not very interesting sending 10 people to another galaxy if humanity has died out untill they arrive there.

>>9156786
Last time I checked main issue is that we have no materials to substain a space elevator. Some believe that could be made if carbon nanotubes mass production becomes possible.

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>>9155544
Once we cure death, I think things will speed up.

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>>9155544
>humans will [math]never[/math] be able to break the sound barrier because if we ran that fast then our eardrums would burst and we'd go deaf!

>>9155544
So... The Earth is spinning, within a spinning solar system, within a spinning galaxy, within.... Within a spinning universe(?)... Relatively speaking, we (or the outskirts of the universe) could already be travelling FTL. Forms of quantum coupling or decoupling between these relativistic extremities could be possible... Meditative time travel anyone?

How does an alcubierre drive work and why can't it work irl? If it can work irl what are the energy requirements.

>>9157329
Yeah that's called a building. We've got those.