WAIT. a star 3 light years away takes 3 years at the speed of light when measured by an outside (or not on board the space ship) observer, but not near that amount of time according to the clock on the ship. it would probably be a pretty short trip, tho if you traveled much farther at light speed, all your friends at relative slow speeds would grow up and die way before you. einstein's time machine only moves forward...

This post was edited by juliusjuice on Nov 6 2009 08:29pm

By the time our sun turns into a red giant, something else will or would've happened. E.g. Asteroid, comet, disease. Either way we are doomed for something eventually

Space travel seems fairly impossible to me. There is no way you can shoot a human fast enough through space to make it anywhere in good time (Faster then the speed of light), without ripping the human into billions or particles.

Also, the human race will be gone LONG before this happens. Thing such as black holes (not proven), super novas (for instance if our nearest start super novas, we will most likely all die), pandemic, gamma ray burst, solar flare, ecocide, and even a large comet impact. There are MANY more, but these are only a few of the ones I have looked into for fun.

the humans we send wouldnt be coming back or ever communicating with earth again. they would either be cryogenicly frozen or put in some sort of suspended life state until they got to the other star system (probably frozen to preserve muscles). they might travel for 50 years, maybe 100 years maybe much much more.

the human race is at a crucial point in technology vs everyhting that could possibly go wrong. if we live out another couple hundred years, it is quite possible the human race will survive for millenia.

but this can pretty much apply to any age

i hope i'm around when i see it

ill be playing diablo 2 and on jsp with 6 millions posts

i agree but increasingly so with every coming age to a point. once technology reaches a certain point we have ability to control things more and more, once human space colonization starts it will most likely never stop -once it reaches that point. we have come dangerously close already, space hotel can harbor guests for years, it opens in 2010. soon after there will be other stations that can harbor life for extended periods of time making human extinction much less likely.

- we arent in any danger of black holes any time soon. over billions of years our solar system has been cruising along with no interruption of that kind.

This post was edited by juliusjuice on Nov 12 2009 01:32am

Well from what science tells us today, cryogenically freezing someone is impossible, because water expands when it is frozen. This would cause all the cells in our body to burst. Although you do have a good point.

there are already people that have been cryogenically frozen. if someone chooses to be frozen in case they are legally pronounced dead, they are done so. brain dead doesnt count unfortunately. ted williams was frozen, there has been rumor that walt disney was frozen as well.

p.s. you have to drain the blood, maybe even remove some organs depending.

http://www.alcor.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics

This post was edited by juliusjuice on Nov 12 2009 04:35pm

Interesting, thanks for the links.