The Sky Calls to Us...

"If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars." - Carl Sagan

Laying down in a soft, dew-filled meadow on a warm summers night one can find themselves lost in a myriad of awe looking up at the heavens. Towering above us in all imaginable dimensions is a veritable sea of stars that the naked eye can only glimpse a passing visage of. With the colossal distances between stars one sometimes develops the impression that space is a void; a black expanse of nothingness that simply filled in the nearly unending gap between a few points of light. But simply stars are not all that fill the universe. The cosmos if full beyond measure. Clouds of dust and gas larger than the collective distance every human has traveled combined, swirling oceans of metals, rock and crystals, stars of all sizes, classes, ages, and congregations, massive collections of matter in microscopic points we know as black holes, and of course other worlds permeate places that we call space.

With the knowledge of what lies beyond our diminutive homeworld it is only logical that one would want to ask the question: "How do we get there?". As a child wandering around and exploring so do we have the desire to travel from our home and wander around the backyard of our universe.

The primary difficulty of interstellar travel is the large distances between points of interest. A prime example of this is the

Alpha Centauri is an important star in human history and probably the future of our race. The Centauri star system is  the Centaurus constellation and is the third brightest star in the night. Being one of the most visible stars during any given night, Alpha Centauri has been widely known for centuries around the world as a navigational reference. In actuality what we call Alpha Centauri is really three separate stars, Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B, and Proxima Centauri. Alpha Centauri A and B are main sequence stars and are both around the same age, size, and color of our own Sun. A and B are what is called a binary star system, which is two stars that are close enough that they actually orbit each other. Proxima Centauri is what is called a Red Dwarf, a light-weight star that emit mostly infrared light and sometimes release strong pulses of energy such as x-rays.

Because of the relatively short distance of the Alpha Centauri star cluster to our own world many see it as the most realistic step towards space travel beyond our own solar system. Just as it was a goal to put a man on the moon, so would it ultimately be a goal to put a man on a planet near Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately  even though it is the closest, the distance between our system and the Centauri system is quite large. From our sun to there is 4.4 light years or 44,000,000,000,000 km away.

Because of the difficulty of traveling this massive distance, it is generally accepted that with our current technology it is impossible to attempt interstellar travel. With our modern propulsion systems to travel through space it would take 100 times the energy output of the entire earth to reach Alpha Centauri and the time required would be several decades if not centuries. Also other problems exist as a vessel would travel through space. The vacuum, radiation, weightlessness, and debris all pose imminent threats to the survivability of spacecraft. Anyone knows the dangers of crashing into things, especially someone who has driven a car before. Space travel however is greatly amplified from just hitting a deer at 40 mph. A shuttle for example, hitting a speck of dust only a few millimeters across at even a tenth the speed of light would be more than enough to completely obliterate the entire vessel and everyone and thing inside of it.

Still the question remains, will we bear witness to an age where people live on other worlds? Only time will tell.