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Asked by Physicser to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 10 Mar 2015.
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Jaclyn Bell answered on 10 Mar 2015:
I think the closest galaxy to ours is the Canis Major dwarf galaxy which is about 25,000 light years away from our solar system (but still sits within the Milky Way). This means it would take light travelling from our solar system 25,000 years to get there, and light travels much much faster then us at about 300,000,000 metres per second. Humans cannot travel nearly as fast as light and even if we managed to travel at 50% the speed of light (which is still very difficult to do) it would take us 50,000 years to get there. The only way I can think of doing it is if we discover wormholes or invent a way to go into cryogenic stasis (or suspended animation) and wake up when we get there. This is where Sci-Fi starts to become reality.
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Michele Faucci Giannelli answered on 11 Mar 2015:
Not any time soon. Travel to a different galaxy with conventional engines will take an incredible amount of time, of the order of hundred of thousands of years. That is as long as Homo Sapiens has been living on Earth. And there will be no fuelling stations on the way, so it is a no-go for now. The only concrete hope to travel such long distances are warmholes, but the space-time is flat in this region so I cannot see how that would be possible, warp engines, there are some ideas on how to used them but they would require an incredible about of energy which we do not know how to generate, or even fancier methods like using warped extra dimension, but I am not aware of any method to shift to any of such hypothetical dimension and come back. May be will will meet some other intelligent race which as been around longer than us and has already solved these problems, but so far the SETI program has not found any signal from ET.
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Oliver Brown answered on 11 Mar 2015:
As Jackie and Michele have said, it’s some way off if we ever manage it at all. Don’t think I’ll ever get to join Starfleet 🙁
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