• Question: If aliens turn out to have spaceships, how would they travel through space? Will it be big enough to hold all the generations for centuries (like in Wall-E) or will it somehow shorten space behind and expand before them or other?

    Asked by ravastar to Adam, Catherine, Leila on 22 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 22 Mar 2012:

      There’s only a few options for travelling between solar systems –

      a) accept that it’s going to take a long time and build a ‘generation ship’. This is like the one in wall-e where it essentially has everything it needs for people to live for thousands of years, eating and reproducing as normal so that several generations will have passed by the time they get to where they’re going. This would be a lot simpler if we found out ways of making humans live longer (or possibly forever) but aliens could live longer that us.

      b) travel faster than light – this isn’t possible by what we know of physics at the current time

      c) freeze yourselves for the journey – again, we don’t have the technology to do this, though people are working on it. It may well be that aliens advanced enough to build starships would have this technology. They would have had to leave a long time ago though!

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 22 Mar 2012:

      If there are intelligent aliens out there, its quite likely they will be more advanced than us, because Earth has only (!) been around for 4 billion years, but the universe has been around for nearly 14 billion years, so they could have a 10 billion year head start on us! So they could have developed technologies that we can’t even imagine yet!

      But they will probably still be governed by the laws of physics as we know them – so no faster than light travel, and no warping space to make the journey shorter. 🙁

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