Sh: The futu of interstellar travel has infinite possibilities. R: I envision a day in which whenever we look up, the faint shilluette of a giant O’Neil cylinder, will be slowly rotating, suspended on the horizon. Sh: Maybe a fleet of antimatter ships leaving for other faraway systems hovers in the night sky, their rockets painting giant blue streaks across the sky like comets disappearing from view. SI: Or we might look up and see the glimmering circle of a warp gate, leading to who knows where. R:Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll see the blinding flash of light when a vessel passes though the ring to somewhere only known to the ones on board. SH: Space might be nothing more than a 15 minute elevator ride on the hundreds of carbon fiber space elevators scattered across the globe, terminating in giant space stations suspended with centrifugal force. Si: Instead of going sailing on yachts, well have personal spaceships docked at these space stations, which will look like a cross between a giant five story duty free mall the size of small cities, and an island airport with thousands of terminals. R:Each of these terminals the size of sideways skyscrapers, large enough to house and service ships ranging from tiny earth orbit space yachts to giant interstellar arks housing multiple O’Neil cylinders, individually rotating, 20 miles long with millions of eager young souls bound for alpha centauri or some other exotic system. Sh:If you’re lucky enough, rich enough, or motivated enough, you might be able to secure yourself a spot on these vessels and start your life anew on an alien world. Si:They would stop first at lunar research stations, then to mars and its own space elevators, though the sparsely populated asteroid belt mining districts, then off to the spacestations around the gas giants, each the size of counties powered off pure hydrogen harvested from their atmospheres. R:If I gave you the chance would you take it? The idea of going to alien worlds and starting your life anew enchants me.
Introduction humanity has always wanted to look beyond the stars and dreamed about one day living amongst them. Earth is the cradle for humanities, but we can’t stay here forever, especially with the way we were treating our planet. Even though we are trying to protect the environment, it is getting worse anyway. The radical way of preserving it is to leave it. That’s what interstellar travel is for. If we could find a way to send millions of people to a new planet to continue their life or look for natural resources outside the
Earth, those would make great contribution to our Earth. There are basically three categories for interstellar travel, classified by the traveling speed, which are slow mission, fast mission and tricky mission. Here we are going to introduce each one of them specifically.
First we will be talking about the first category of spaceship that humanity will be using to get to other planets. This category of spaceship is collectively known as slow ships because they do not attempt to achieve the speed of light, and instead, try to use size and substainablity t o weather the centuries it takes at ten percent light speed. The most prominant example of a slow boat is the Bussard Ramjet, a giant interstellar vessel that uses a giant magnetic scoop to harvest hydrogen to power the ship and its engines.
Some advantages of this design are the infinite amount of fuel that is available and its scalablity. It is capable of holding many passengers and becasue of its infinite power source, there will be no need to conserve power at any time. But it does not come with its faults, hydrogen fusion is incredibly difficult because it requires the fusioning of protons and not atoms, increasing the difficulty ten fold. It also has a very real speed threshhold, because the hydrogen must be slowed to staionary before