Is Interstellar Travel Really Possible?
Interstellar flight is a real pain in the neck.
Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University , host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio , and author of " Your Place in the Universe. " Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights .
Interstellar space travel . Fantasy of every five-year-old kid within us. Staple of science fiction serials. Boldly going where nobody has gone before in a really fantastic way. As we grow ever more advanced with our rockets and space probes, the question arises: could we ever hope to colonize the stars? Or, barring that far-flung dream, can we at least send space probes to alien planets, letting them tell us what they see?
The truth is that interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible . There's no law of physics that outright forbids it. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy, and it certainly doesn't mean we'll achieve it in our lifetimes, let alone this century. Interstellar space travel is a real pain in the neck.
Related: Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel
Voyage outward
If you're sufficiently patient, then we've already achieved interstellar exploration status. We have several spacecraft on escape trajectories, meaning they're leaving the solar system and they are never coming back. NASA's Pioneer missions, the Voyager missions , and most recently New Horizons have all started their long outward journeys. The Voyagers especially are now considered outside the solar system, as defined as the region where the solar wind emanating from the sun gives way to general galactic background particles and dust.
So, great; we have interstellar space probes currently in operation. Except the problem is that they're going nowhere really fast. Each one of these intrepid interstellar explorers is traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, which sounds pretty fast. They're not headed in the direction of any particular star, because their missions were designed to explore planets inside the solar system. But if any of these spacecraft were headed to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri , just barely 4 light-years away, they would reach it in about 80,000 years.
I don't know about you, but I don't think NASA budgets for those kinds of timelines. Also, by the time these probes reach anywhere halfway interesting, their nuclear batteries will be long dead, and just be useless hunks of metal hurtling through the void. Which is a sort of success, if you think about it: It's not like our ancestors were able to accomplish such feats as tossing random junk between the stars, but it's probably also not exactly what you imagined interstellar space travel to be like.
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Related: Superfast Spacecraft Propulsion Concepts (Images)
Speed racer
To make interstellar spaceflight more reasonable, a probe has to go really fast. On the order of at least one-tenth the speed of light. At that speed, spacecraft could reach Proxima Centauri in a handful of decades, and send back pictures a few years later, well within a human lifetime. Is it really so unreasonable to ask that the same person who starts the mission gets to finish it?
Going these speeds requires a tremendous amount of energy. One option is to contain that energy onboard the spacecraft as fuel. But if that's the case, the extra fuel adds mass, which makes it even harder to propel it up to those speeds. There are designs and sketches for nuclear-powered spacecraft that try to accomplish just this, but unless we want to start building thousands upon thousands of nuclear bombs just to put inside a rocket, we need to come up with other ideas.
Perhaps one of the most promising ideas is to keep the energy source of the spacecraft fixed and somehow transport that energy to the spacecraft as it travels. One way to do this is with lasers. Radiation is good at transporting energy from one place to another, especially over the vast distances of space. The spacecraft can then capture this energy and propel itself forward.
This is the basic idea behind the Breakthrough Starshot project , which aims to design a spacecraft capable of reaching the nearest stars in a matter of decades. In the simplest outline of this project, a giant laser on the order of 100 gigawatts shoots at an Earth-orbiting spacecraft. That spacecraft has a large solar sail that is incredibly reflective. The laser bounces off of that sail, giving momentum to the spacecraft. The thing is, a 100-gigawatt laser only has the force of a heavy backpack. You didn't read that incorrectly. If we were to shoot this laser at the spacecraft for about 10 minutes, in order to reach one-tenth the speed of light, the spacecraft can weigh no more than a gram.
That's the mass of a paper clip.
Related: Breakthrough Starshot in Pictures: Laser-Sailing Nanocraft to Study Alien Planets
A spaceship for ants
This is where the rubber meets the interstellar road when it comes to making spacecraft travel the required speeds. The laser itself, at 100 gigawatts, is more powerful than any laser we've ever designed by many orders of magnitude. To give you a sense of scale, 100 gigawatts is the entire capacity of every single nuclear power plant operating in the United States combined.
And the spacecraft, which has to have a mass no more than a paper clip, must include a camera, computer, power source, circuitry, a shell, an antenna for communicating back home and the entire lightsail itself.
That lightsail must be almost perfectly reflective. If it absorbs even a tiny fraction of that incoming laser radiation it will convert that energy to heat instead of momentum. At 100 gigawatts, that means straight-up melting, which is generally considered not good for spacecraft.
Once accelerated to one-tenth the speed of light, the real journey begins. For 40 years, this little spacecraft will have to withstand the trials and travails of interstellar space. It will be impacted by dust grains at that enormous velocity. And while the dust is very tiny, at those speeds motes can do incredible damage. Cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles emitted by everything from the sun to distant supernova, can mess with the delicate circuitry inside. The spacecraft will be bombarded by these cosmic rays non-stop as soon as the journey begins.
Is Breakthrough Starshot possible? In principle, yes. Like I said above, there's no law of physics that prevents any of this from becoming reality. But that doesn't make it easy or even probable or plausible or even feasible using our current levels of technology (or reasonable projections into the near future of our technology). Can we really make a spacecraft that small and light? Can we really make a laser that powerful? Can a mission like this actually survive the challenges of deep space?
The answer isn't yes or no. The real question is this: are we willing to spend enough money to find out if it's possible?
- Building Sails for Tiny Interstellar Probes Will Be Tough — But Not Impossible
- 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
- Interstellar Space Travel: 7 Futuristic Spacecraft to Explore the Cosmos
Learn more by listening to the episode "Is interstellar travel possible?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com . Thanks to @infirmus, Amber D., neo, and Alex V. for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter .
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook .
Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].
Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research fellowship in Trieste, Italy, His research focuses on many diverse topics, from the emptiest regions of the universe to the earliest moments of the Big Bang to the hunt for the first stars. As an "Agent to the Stars," Paul has passionately engaged the public in science outreach for several years. He is the host of the popular "Ask a Spaceman!" podcast, author of "Your Place in the Universe" and "How to Die in Space" and he frequently appears on TV — including on The Weather Channel, for which he serves as Official Space Specialist.
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The voyage to interstellar space.
Susannah Darling
Katy Mersmann
The magnetometer, the cosmic ray subsystem, the plasma instrument.
By all means, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 shouldn’t even be here. Now in interstellar space, they are pushing the limits of spacecraft and exploration, journeying through the cosmic neighborhood, giving us our first direct look into the space beyond our star.
But when they launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had a different mission: to explore the outer solar system and gather observations directly at the source, from outer planets we had only seen with remote studies. But now, four decades after launch, they’ve journeyed farther than any other spacecraft from Earth; into the cold, quiet world of interstellar space.
Originally designed to measure the properties of the giant planets, the instruments on both spacecraft have spent the past few decades painting a picture of the propagation of solar events from our Sun. And the Voyagers’ new mission focuses not only on effects on space from within our heliosphere — the giant bubble around the Sun filled up by the constant outflow of solar particles called the solar wind — but from outside of it. Though they once helped us look closer at the planets and their relationship to the Sun, they now give us clues about the nature of interstellar space as the spacecraft continue their journey.
The environment they explore is colder, subtler and more tenuous than ever before, and yet the Voyagers continue on, exploring and measuring the interstellar medium, a smorgasbord of gas, plasma and particles from stars and gas regions not originating from our system. Three of the spacecraft’s 10 instruments are the major players that study how space inside the heliosphere differs from interstellar space. Looking at this data together allows scientist to piece together our best-yet picture of the edge of the heliosphere and the interstellar medium. Here are the stories they tell.
On the Sun Spot , we have been exploring the various instruments on Voyager 2 one at a time, and analyzing how scientists read the individual sets of data sent to Earth from the far-reaching spacecraft. But one instrument we have not yet talked about is Voyager 2’s Magnetometer, or MAG for short.
During the Voyagers’ first planetary mission, the MAG was designed to investigate the magnetospheres of planets and their moons, determining the physical mechanics and processes of the interactions of those magnetic fields and the solar wind. After that mission ended, the Voyager spacecraft studied the magnetic field of the heliosphere and beyond, observing the magnetic reach of the Sun and the changes that occur within that reach during solar activity.
Getting the magnetic data as we travel further into space requires an interesting trick. Voyager spins itself around, in a calibration maneuver that allows Voyager to differentiate between the spacecraft’s own magnetic field — that goes along for the ride as it spins — and the magnetic fields of the space it’s traveling through.
The initial peek into the magnetic field beyond the Sun’s influence happened when Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012. Scientists saw that within the heliosphere, the strength of the magnetic field was quite variable, changing and jumping as Voyager 1 moved through the heliosphere. These changes are due to solar activity. But once Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space, that variability was silenced. Although the strength of the field was similar to what it was inside the heliosphere, it no longer had the variability associated with the Sun’s outbursts.
This graph shows the magnitude, or the strength, of the magnetic field around the heliopause from January 2012 out to May 2014. Before encountering the heliopause, marked by the orange line, the magnetic strength fluctuates quite a bit. After a bumpy ride through the heliopause in 2012, the magnetic strength stops fluctuating and begins to stabilize in 2013, once the spacecraft is far enough out into the interstellar medium.
In November 2018, Voyager 2 also crossed the heliopause and similarly experienced quite the bumpy ride out of the heliopause. Scientists are excited to see how its journey differs from its twin spacecraft.
Scientists are still working through the MAG data from Voyager 2, and are excited to see how Voyager 2’s journey differed from Voyager 1.
Much like the MAG, the Cosmic Ray Subsystem — called CRS — was originally designed to measure planetary systems. The CRS focused on the compositions of energetic particles in the magnetospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Scientists used it to study the charged particles within the solar system and their distribution between the planets. Since it passed the planets, however, the CRS has been studying the heliosphere’s charged particles and — now — the particles in the interstellar medium.
The CRS measures the count rate, or how many particles detected per second. It does this by using two telescopes: the High Energy Telescope, which measures high energy particles (70MeV) identifiable as interstellar particles, and the Low Energy Telescope, which measures low-energy particles (5MeV) that originate from our Sun. You can think of these particles like a bowling ball hitting a bowling pin versus a bullet hitting the same pin — both will make a measurable impact on the detector, but they’re moving at vastly different speeds. By measuring the amounts of the two kinds of particles, Voyager can provide a sense of the space environment it’s traveling through.
These graphs show the count rate — how many particles per second are interacting with the CRS on average each day — of the galactic ray particles measured by the High Energy Telescope (top graph) and the heliospheric particles measured by the Low Energy Telescope (bottom graph). The line in red shows the data from Voyager 1, time shifted forward 6.32 years from 2012 to match up with the data from Voyager around November 2018, shown in blue.
CRS data from Voyager 2 on Nov. 5, 2018, showed the interstellar particle count rate of the High Energy Telescope increasing to count rates similar to what Voyager 1 saw then leveling out. Similarly, the Low Energy Telescope shows a severe decrease in heliospheric originating particles. This was a key indication that Voyager 2 had moved into interstellar space. Scientists can keep watching these counts to see if the composition of interstellar space particles changes along the journey.
The Plasma Science instrument, or PLS, was made to measure plasma and ionized particles around the outer planets and to measure the solar wind’s influence on those planets. The PLS is made up of four Faraday cups, an instrument that measures the plasma as it passes through the cups and calculates the plasma’s speed, direction and density.
The plasma instrument on Voyager 1 was damaged during a fly-by of Saturn and had to be shut off long before Voyager 1 exited the heliosphere, making it unable to measure the interstellar medium’s plasma properties. With Voyager 2’s crossing, scientists will get the first-ever plasma measurements of the interstellar medium.
Scientists predicted that interstellar plasma measured by Voyager 2 would be higher in density but lower in temperature and speed than plasma inside the heliosphere. And in November 2018, the instrument saw just that for the first time. This suggests that the plasma in this region is getting colder and slower, and, like cars slowing down on a freeway, is beginning to pile up around the heliopause and into the interstellar medium.
And now, thanks to Voyager 2’s PLS, we have a never-before-seen perspective on our heliosphere: The plasma velocity from Earth to the heliopause.
These three graphs tell an amazing story, summarizing a journey of 42 years in one plot. The top section of this graph shows the plasma velocity, how fast the plasma across the heliosphere is moving, against the distance out from Earth. The distance is in astronomical units; one astronomical unit is the average distance between the Sun and Earth, about 93 million miles. For context, Saturn is 10 AU from Earth, while Pluto is about 40 AU away.
The heliopause crossing happened at 120 AU, when the velocity of plasma coming out from the Sun drops to zero (seen on the top graph), and the outward flow of the plasma is diverted — seen in the increase in the two bottom graphs, which show the upwards and downward speeds (the normal velocity, middle graph) and the sideways speed of the solar wind (the tangential velocity, bottom graph) of the solar wind plasma, respectively. This means as the solar wind begins to interact with the interstellar medium, it is pushed out and away, like a wave hitting the side of a cliff.
Looking at each instrument in isolation, however, does not tell the full story of what interstellar space at the heliopause looks like. Together, these instruments tell a story of the transition from the turbulent, active space within our Sun’s influence to the relatively calm waters on the edge of interstellar space.
The MAG shows that the magnetic field strength decreases sharply in the interstellar medium. The CRS data shows an increase in interstellar cosmic rays, and a decrease in heliospheric particles. And finally, the PLS shows that there’s no longer any detectable solar wind.
Now that the Voyagers are outside of the heliosphere, their new perspective will provide new information about the formation and state of our Sun and how it interacts with interstellar space, along with insight into how other stars interact with the interstellar medium.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are providing our first look at the space we would have to pass through if humanity ever were to travel beyond our home star — a glimpse of our neighborhood in space.
Related links:
- Video: “NASA Science Live: Going Interstellar”
- Explore Voyager 2 data on “The Sun Spot” blog
By Susannah Darling NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center , Greenbelt, Md.
- The Magazine
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These New Technologies Could Make Interstellar Travel Real
Long considered science fiction, leaving the solar system and speeding amid the stars may soon be within reach.
On October 31, 1936, six young tinkerers nicknamed the “Rocket Boys” nearly incinerated themselves in an effort to break free of Earth’s gravity. The group had huddled in a gully in the foothills of California’s San Gabriel Mountains to test a small alcohol-fueled jet engine. They wanted to prove that rocket engines could venture into space, at a time when such ideas were widely met with ridicule. That goal was disrupted when an oxygen line caught fire and thrashed around wildly, shooting flames.
The Rocket Boys’ audacity caught the attention of aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, who already worked with two of them at Caltech. Not far from the location of their fiery mishap, he established a small test area where the Rocket Boys resumed their experiments. In 1943, the site became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and von Karman its first director. JPL has since grown into a sprawling NASA field center with thousands of employees, yet it has managed to retain its founding motivation: test the limits of exploration, convention be damned.
They’ve had many successes over the years. In the early 1970s, JPL engineers built Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to reach escape velocity from the solar system. A few years later, they followed up with Voyagers 1 and 2, the fastest of the many objects aimed at interstellar space. From the beginning of the Space Age to the launch of the Voyager spacecrafts — a span of just two decades — rocket scientists more than doubled flight speeds. But in the decades since, only one more spacecraft has followed the Voyagers out of the solar system, and nothing has done so at such a high speed. Now JPL’s rocketeers are getting restless again, and quietly plotting the next great leap.
The consistent theme of the new efforts is that the solar system is not enough. It is time to venture beyond the known planets, on toward the stars. John Brophy, a flight engineer at JPL, is developing a novel engine that could accelerate space travel by another factor of 10. Leon Alkalai, a JPL mission architect, is plotting a distant journey that would begin with an improbable, Icarus-esque plunge toward the sun. And JPL research scientist Slava Turyshev has perhaps the wildest idea of all, a space telescope that could provide an intimate look at a far-off Earth-like planet — without actually going there.
These are all long shots (not entirely crazy, according to Brophy), but if even one succeeds, the implications will be huge. The Rocket Boys and their ilk helped launch humans as a space-faring species. The current generation at JPL could be the ones to take us interstellar.
Rocket Reactions
For Brophy, inspiration came from Breakthrough Starshot, an extravagantly bold project announced in 2016 by the late Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. The ultimate aim of the project is to build a mile-wide laser array that could blast a miniature spacecraft to 20 percent the speed of light, allowing it to reach the Alpha Centauri star system (our closest stellar neighbor) in just two decades.
Brophy was skeptical but intrigued. Ambitious aspirations are nothing new for him. “JPL encourages people to think outside the box, and my wacky ideas are getting wackier in time,” he says. Even by that standard, the Starshot concept struck him as a little too far from technological reality. But he did begin to wonder if he could take the same concept but scale it down so that it might actually be feasible within our lifetimes.
What especially captivated Brophy was the idea of using a Starshot-style laser beam to help deal with the “rocket equation,” which links the motion of a spacecraft to the amount of propellant it carries. The rocket equation confronts every would-be space explorer with its cruel logic. If you want to go faster, you need more fuel, but more fuel adds mass. More mass means you need even more fuel to haul around that extra weight. That fuel makes the whole thing heavier still, and so on. That’s why it took a 1.4 million-pound rocket to launch the 1,800-pound Voyager probes: The starting weight was almost entirely fuel.
Since his graduate student days in the late 1970s, Brophy has been developing a vastly more efficient type of rocketry known as ion propulsion. An ion engine uses electric power to shoot positively charged atoms (called ions) out of a thruster at high velocity. Each atom provides just a tiny kick, but collectively they can push the rocket to a much greater velocity than a conventional chemical rocket. Better yet, the power needed to run the ion engine can come from solar panels — no heavy onboard fuel tanks or generators required. By squeezing more speed out of less propellant, ion propulsion goes a long way toward taming the rocket equation.
But ion engines come with drawbacks of their own. The farther they get from the sun, the more limited they are by how much electricity their solar panels can generate. You can make the panels huge, but then you add a lot of weight, and the rocket equation slams you again. And ion engines have such gentle thrust that they can’t leave the ground on their own; it then takes them a long time in space to accelerate to their record-breaking speeds. Brophy knows these issues well: He helped design the ion engine aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which just completed an 11-year mission to asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres. Even with its formidable 65-foot span of solar cells, Dawn went from zero to 60 in an unhurried four days.
Ion the Prize
While Brophy was pondering this impasse between efficient engines and insufficient solar power, the Breakthrough Starshot concept came out, and it got the gears turning in his head. He wondered: What if you replaced sunshine with a high-intensity laser beam pointed at your spacecraft? Powered by the more efficient laser, your ion engine could run much harder while still saving weight by not having to carry your power source on board.
Two years after his epiphany, Brophy is giving me a tour of an SUV-size test chamber at JPL, where he puts a high-performance ion engine through its paces. His prototype uses lithium ions, which are much lighter than the xenon ions Dawn used, and therefore need less energy to attain higher velocities. It also runs at 6,000 volts compared with Dawn’s 1,000 volts. “The performance of this thing would be very startling if you had the laser to power it up,” he says.
There’s just one minor issue: That laser does not exist. Although he drastically downsized the Starshot concept, Brophy still envisions a 100-megawatt space-based laser system, generating 1,000 times more power than the International Space Station, aimed precisely at a fast-receding spacecraft. “We’re not sure how to do that,” he concedes. It would be by far the biggest off-world engineering project ever undertaken. Once built, though, the array could be used over and over, with different missions, as an all-purpose rocket booster.
As an example, Brophy describes a lithium-ion-powered spacecraft with 300-foot wings of photovoltaic panels powering a full-size version of the engine he is developing at JPL. The laser would bathe the panels in light a hundred times as bright as sunshine, keeping the ion engine running from here to Pluto, about 4 billion miles away. The spacecraft could then coast along on its considerable velocity, racking up another 4 billion miles every year or two.
At that pace, a spacecraft could rapidly explore the dim areas where comets come from, or set off for the as-yet-undiscovered Planet 9, or go ... almost anywhere in the general vicinity of the solar system.
“It’s like we have this shiny new hammer, so I go around looking for new nails to pound in,” Brophy says dreamily. “We have a whole long list of missions that you could do if you could go fast.”
Interstellar Medium Well
After Brophy’s genial giddiness, it is a shock to talk to Alkalai, in charge of formulating new missions at JPL’s Engineering and Science Directorate. Sitting in his large, glassy office, he seems every bit the no-nonsense administrator, but he, too, is a man with an exploratory vision.
Like Brophy, Alkalai thinks the Breakthrough Starshot people have the right vision, but not enough patience. “We’re nowhere near where we need to be technologically to design a mission to another star,” he says. “So we need to start by taking baby steps.”
Alkalai has a specific step in mind. Although we can’t yet visit another star, we can send a probe to sample the interstellar medium, the sparse gas and dust that flows between the stars.
“I’m very interested in understanding the material outside the solar system. Ultimately, we got created from that. Life originated from those primordial dust clouds,” Alkalai says. “We know that there’s organic materials in it, but what kind? What abundances? Are there water molecules in it? That would be huge to understand.”
The interstellar medium remains poorly understood because we can’t get our hands on it: A constant blast of particles from the sun — the solar wind — pushes it far from Earth. But if we could reach beyond the sun’s influence, to a distance of 20 billion miles (about 200 times Earth’s distance from the sun), we could finally examine, for the first time, pristine samples of our home galaxy.
Alkalai wants answers, and he wants to see the results firsthand. He’s 60, so that sets an aggressive schedule — no time to wait for giant space lasers. Instead, he proposes a simpler, albeit still unproven, technology known as a solar thermal rocket. It would carry a large cache of cold liquid hydrogen, protected somehow from the heat of the sun, and execute a shocking dive to within about 1 million miles of the solar surface. At closest approach, the rocket would let the intense solar heat come pouring in, perhaps by jettisoning a shield. The sun’s energy would rapidly vaporize the hydrogen, sending it racing out of a rocket nozzle. The combined push from the escaping hydrogen, and the assist from the sun’s own gravity, would let the ship start its interstellar journey at speeds up to 60 miles per second, faster than any human object yet —and it only gets faster from there.
“It’s very challenging, but we’re modeling the physics now,” Alkalai says. He hopes to begin testing elements of a thermal-rocket system this year, and then develop his concept into a realistic mission that could launch in the next decade or so. It would reach the interstellar medium another decade after that. In addition to sampling our galactic environment, such a probe could examine how the sun interacts with the interstellar medium, study the structure of dust in the solar system and perhaps visit a distant dwarf planet along the way.
It would be a journey, Alkalai says, “like nothing we’ve done in the past.”
Catch A Glimpse
Solar thermal rockets and laser-ion engines, impressive as they may be, are still absurdly inadequate for crossing the tremendous gulf between our solar system and exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. In the spirit of the Rocket Boys, Turyshev is not letting absurdity stop him. He is developing a cunning workaround: a virtual mission to another star.
Turyshev tells me he wants to send a space telescope to a region known as the solar gravitational lens (SGL). The area begins a daunting 50 billion miles away, though that’s still hundreds of times closer than our closest stellar neighbors. Once you get far enough into the SGL, something marvelous happens. When you look back toward the sun, any object directly behind it appears stretched out, forming a ring, and hugely magnified. That ring is the result of our star’s intense gravity, which warps space like a lens, altering the appearance of the distant object’s light.
If you position yourself correctly within the SGL, the object being magnified from behind the sun could be an intriguing exoplanet. A space telescope floating at the SGL, Turyshev explains, could then maneuver around, sampling different parts of the light ring and reconstructing the snippets of bent light into megapixel snapshots of the planet in question.
I have to interrupt him here. Did he say megapixel, like the resolution you get on your camera phone? Yes, he really is talking about an image measuring 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, good enough to see details smaller than 10 miles wide on a planet up to 100 light-years (600 trillion miles!) away.
“We could peek under the clouds and see continents. We could see weather patterns and topography, which is very exciting,” Turyshev says. He doesn’t mention it, but he doesn’t need to: That kind of resolution could also reveal megacities or other giant artificial structures, should they exist.
Assuming the JPL boffins can solve the transportation issues of getting to the SGL, the mission itself is fairly straightforward, if enormously challenging. Turyshev and his collaborators (Alkalai among them) will need to develop a Hubble-size space telescope,
or a mini-fleet of smaller telescopes, that can survive the 30-year journey. They will need to perfect an onboard artificial intelligence capable of running operations without guidance from home. Above all, they will need a target — a planet so intriguing that people are willing to spend decades and billions of dollars studying it. NASA’s TESS space telescope is doing some of that reconnaissance work right now, scanning for Earth-size worlds around local stars.
“Ultimately, to see the life on an exoplanet, we will have to visit. But a gravity lens mission allows you to study potential targets many decades, if not centuries, earlier,” Turyshev says merrily.
A journey to the SGL would take us beyond Alkalai’s baby steps, well onto the path toward interstellar exploration. It’s another audacious goal, but at least the odds of catching fire are much lower this time around.
Corey S. Powell , a contributing editor of Discover , also writes for the magazine's Out There blog. Follow him on Twitter: @coreyspowell. This story originally appeared in print as "Boldly Go."
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Intergalactic travel
Intergalactic travel is the term used for hypothetical manned or unmanned travel between galaxies. Due to the enormous distances between our own galaxy the Milky Way and even its closest neighbors—hundreds of thousands to millions of light-years—any such venture would be far more technologically demanding than even interstellar travel. Intergalactic distances are roughly a hundred-thousand fold (five orders of magnitude) greater than their interstellar counterparts.[a]
The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction.
However, scientifically speaking, there is nothing to indicate that intergalactic travel is impossible. There are in fact several conceivable methods of doing it; to date there have been a few people who have studied intergalactic travel in a serious manner.[1][2][3]
The difficulties of intergalactic travel Colossal distances
Due to the size of the distances involved any serious attempt to travel between galaxies would require methods of propulsion far beyond what is currently thought possible in order to bring a large craft close to the speed of light. Speed-of-light limit
According to the current understanding of physics, an object within space-time cannot exceed the speed of light,[4] which means an attempt to travel to any other galaxy would be a journey of millions of earth years via conventional flight. One-way trip
As the length of time needed to go even to the Milky Way's nearest neighboring galaxy is so astronomically vast, trips to any other galaxy would likely exceed a modern-day human lifespan by extreme orders of magnitude. Any such journey would mean that humans boarding such a spaceship from Earth would not only never be able to return to Earth alive, but would also never live to see the arrival of the spaceship at its destination. One solution could be a generation spaceship, but this idea in itself poses technical (and ethical) problems of its own. Possible methods Way stations — intergalactic stars
Space between the galaxies is not empty but contains intergalactic stars. One study suggests that at least 0.05% of all stars are such "rogue stars".[5] A more recent study suggests that half of all stars are intergalactic.[6][7] Planets orbiting such stars, or their natural satellites, could be used as way stations for travel between galaxies in an "island hopping"-like fashion. Extreme long-duration voyages
Voyages to other galaxies at sub-light speeds would require voyage times anywhere from hundreds of thousands to many millions of years. To date only one design such as this has ever been made.[1]
The main problem is engineering a ship that would be functional for geological periods of time. Such an instrument has never been built or even designed before with anything approaching this degree of durability. The ship could be made of parts that last this long; or perhaps the ship would have the ability to maintain and repair itself, and manufacture its own components; or some combination of these. Perhaps it would be run by an artificial intelligence, programmed to maintain the ship and its passengers, while piloting it to its remote destination. Hypervelocity stars
Theorized in 1988,[8] and observed in 2005,[9] there are stars moving faster than the escape velocity of the Milky Way, and are traveling out into intergalactic space.[10] There are several theories for their existence. One of the mechanisms would be that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way ejects stars from the galaxy at a rate of about one every hundred thousand years. Another theorized mechanism might be a supernova explosion in a binary system.[11]
These stars travel at speeds up to about 3,000 km/second. However, recently (November 2014) stars going up to a significant fraction of the speed of light have been postulated, based on numerical methods.[12] Called Semi-Relativistic Hypervelocity Stars by the authors, these would be ejected by mergers of supermassive black holes in colliding galaxies. And, the authors think, will be detectable by forthcoming telescopes.[13]
These could be used by entering into an orbit around them and waiting.[14][15] Stellar engines
Another proposal is to artificially propel a star in the direction of another galaxy.[16][17] Time dilation
While it takes light approximately 2.54 million years to traverse the gulf of space between Earth and, for instance, the Andromeda Galaxy, it would take a much shorter amount of time from the point of view of a traveler at close to the speed of light due to the effects of time dilation; the time experienced by the traveler depending both on velocity (anything less than the speed of light) and distance traveled (length contraction). Intergalactic travel for humans is therefore possible, in theory, from the point of view of the traveller.[18] Possible faster-than-light methods
The Alcubierre drive is a highly hypothetical concept that is able to impulse a spacecraft to speeds faster than light. (The spaceship itself would not move faster than light, but the space around it would.) This could in theory allow practical intergalactic travel. There is no known way to create the space-distorting wave this concept needs to work, but the metrics of the equations comply with relativity and the limit of light speed.[19]The other possibility is travel via a traversable wormhole. See also Spaceflight portal
Galaxies in fiction Galaxy Intergalactic dust Intergalactic space Interstellar travel Spaceflight Uploaded astronaut
Burruss, Robert Page; Colwell, J. (September–October 1987). "Intergalactic Travel: The Long Voyage From Home". The Futurist 21 (5): 29–33. Fogg, Martyn (November 1988). "The Feasibility of Intergalactic Colonisation and its Relevance to SETI". Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 41 (11): 491–496. Armstrong, Stuart; Sandberg, Anders. "Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox" (PDF). Future of Humanity Institute, Philosophy Department, Oxford University. "Star Trek's Warp Drive: Not Impossible". space.com. 6 May 2009. Teyssier, Maureen; et al. (10 December 2009). "Wandering Stars: An Origin of Escaped Populations". The Astrophysical Journal Letters 707 (1). arXiv:0911.0927. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/707/1/L22. "Caltech rocket experiment finds surprising cosmic light". phys.org. 6 November 2014. Retrieved 10 November 2014. Zemcov, Michael; et al. (7 November 2014). "On the origin of near-infrared extragalactic background light anisotropy". Science 346 (6210): 732-735. arXiv:1411.1411. doi:10.1126/science.1258168. Hills, J. G. (1988). "Hyper-velocity and tidal stars from binaries disrupted by a massive Galactic black hole". Nature 331 (6158): 687–689. Bibcode:1988Natur.331..687H. doi:10.1038/331687a0. Brown, Warren R.; Geller, Margaret J.; Kenyon, Scott J.; Kurtz, Michael J. (2005). "Discovery of an Unbound Hypervelocity Star in the Milky Way Halo". Astrophysical Journal 622 (1): L33–L36. arXiv:astro-ph/0501177. Bibcode:2005ApJ...622L..33B. doi:10.1086/429378. "The Hyper Velocity Star Project: The stars". The Hyper-Velocity Star Project. 6 September 2009. Retrieved 20 September 2014. Watzke, Megan (28 November 2007). "Chandra discovers cosmic cannonball". Newswise. Guillochon, James; Loeb, Abraham (18 Nov 2014). "The Fastest Unbound Stars in the Universe". arXiv:1411.5022. Guillochon, James; Loeb, Abraham (18 Nov 2014). "Observational Cosmology With Semi-Relativistic Stars". arXiv:1411.5030v1. Villard, Ray (24 May 2010). "The Great Escape: Intergalactic Travel is Possible". Discovery News. Retrieved October 2010. Gilster, Paul (26 June 2014). "Intergalactic Travel via Hypervelocity Stars". centauri-dreams.org. Retrieved 16 September 2014. Gilster, Paul (27 June 2014). "Stars as Stellar Engines". centauri-dreams.org. Retrieved 16 September 2014. Gilster, Paul (30 June 2014). "Building the Bowl of Heaven". centauri-dreams.org. Retrieved 16 September 2014. Gilster, Paul (25 June 2014). "Sagan's Andromeda Crossing". centauri-dreams.org. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
Alcubierre, Miguel (1994). "The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity". Classical and Quantum Gravity 11 (5): L73–L77. arXiv:gr-qc/0009013. Bibcode:1994CQGra..11L..73A. doi:10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/001.
Between small galaxies, which are the majority of galaxies, distances are typically a few hundred thousand light-years. Between large galaxies like the Milky Way and M31, they are typically a few million light-years.
Space Encyclopedia
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/" All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
- The A.V. Club
- The Takeout
- The Inventory
The Futuristic Technology That Could Enable Interstellar Travel
Technically savvy scientists and engineers have put much effort into conceiving far-future technologies that might make possible near- light-speed travel. You can learn a lot about their ideas by browsing the web. It will take many centuries for humans to make any of those ideas real, I think. But they do convince me that ultra-advanced civilizations are likely to travel between the stars at a tenth the speed of light or faster.
Here are three far-out examples of near-light-speed propulsion that intrigue me.
This post has been excerpted from The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne, available now on Amazon and Barnes and Noble .
Thermonuclear Fusion
Thermonuclear fusion is the most conventional of the three ideas. R&D to develop controlled-fusion power plants on Earth was initiated in the 1950s, and full success will not come until the 2050s. A full century of R&D! That's a realistic measure of the difficulties.
And what will fusion power plants in 2050 mean for spacecraft propulsion by fusion? The most practical designs may achieve 100 kilometers per second, and conceivably 300 kilometers per second by the end of this century. A whole new approach to harnessing fusion will be required for reaching near light speed.
A simple calculation shows fusion's possibility: When two deuterium (heavy hydrogen) atoms are fused to form a helium atom, 0.0064 (nearly 1 percent) of their rest mass gets converted into energy. If this were all transformed to kinetic energy (energy of motion) of the helium atom, the atom would move at about one-tenth the speed of light.1 This suggests that, if we could convert all the fusion energy of deuterium fuel into ordered motion of a spacecraft, we could achieve a spacecraft speed of roughly 1/10 the speed of light—and somewhat higher if we are clever.
In 1968 Freeman Dyson, a brilliant physicist for whom I have great respect, described and analyzed a crude propulsion system that, in the hands of a sufficiently advanced civilization, could achieve this.
Thermonuclear bombs ("hydrogen bombs") are detonated just behind a hemispherical shock absorber that is 20 kilometers in diameter. The bomb debris pushes the ship forward, achieving, in Dyson's most optimistic estimate, a speed one-thirtieth that of light. A less crude design could do somewhat better. In 1968 Dyson estimated that such a propulsion system would not be practical any sooner than the late twenty-second century, 150 years from now. I think that's overly optimistic.
Laser Beam and Light Sail
In 1962 Robert Forward, another physicist whom I respect, wrote a short article in a popular magazine about a spacecraft with a sail, pushed by a distant, focused laser beam (Forward 1962). In a 1984 technical article, he made this concept more sophisticated and precise.
An array of solar-powered lasers in space or on the Moon generates a laser beam with 7.2 terawatts of power (about twice the total power consumption of the United States in 2014!). This beam is focused, by a Fresnel lens 1000 kilometers in diameter. It is focused onto a distant sail, 100 kilometers in diameter and weighing about 1000 metric tons, that is attached to a less massive spacecraft. (The beam direction must be accurate to about a millionth of an arcsecond.) The beam's light pressure pushes the sail and spacecraft up to about a fifth the speed of light halfway through a forty-year trip to Proxima Centauri. A modification of this scheme then slows the ship down during the second half of the trip, so it arrives at its destination with a speed low enough to rendezvous with a planet. (Can you figure out how the slow down is achieved?)
Forward, like Dyson, imagined his scheme practical in the twenty-second century. When I look at the technical challenges, I think longer.
Gravitational Slingshots in a Black-Hole Binary
My third example is my own wild—very wild!—variant of an idea due to Dyson (1963).
Suppose you want to fly across much of the universe (not just inter- stellar travel, but intergalactic travel) at near light speed in a few years of your own life. You can do so with the aid of two black holes that are orbiting each other, a black-hole binary . They must be in a highly elliptical orbit and must be large enough that their tidal forces do not destroy your ship.
Using chemical or nuclear fuel, you navigate your ship into an orbit that comes close to one of the black holes: a so-called zoom-whirl orbit (pictured above). Your ship zooms close to the hole, whirls around it a few times, and then, when the hole is traveling nearly directly toward its companion, the ship zooms out, crosses over to the companion hole, and slides into a whirl around it. If the two holes are still headed toward each other, the whirl is brief: you zoom back toward the first hole. If the holes are no longer headed toward each other, the whirl is much longer; you must park yourself in orbit around the second hole until the holes are again headed toward each other, and then launch back toward the first hole. In this way, always traveling between holes only when the holes are approaching each other, your ship gets boosted to higher and higher speeds, approaching as close as you wish to the speed of light if the binary is sufficiently elliptical.
It is a remarkable fact that you only need a small amount of rocket fuel to control how long you linger around each hole. The key is to navigate onto the hole's critical orbit, and there perform your con- trolled whirl. I discuss the critical orbit in Chapter 27. For now, suffice it to say that this is a highly unstable orbit. It is rather like riding a motorcycle around a very smooth volcano rim. If you balance deli- cately, you can stay on the rim as long as you want. When you wish to leave, a slight turn of the bike's front wheel will send you careening off the rim. When you want to leave the critical orbit, a slight rocket thrust will enable centrifugal forces to take over and send your ship careen- ing toward the other black hole.
Once you are as close to the speed of light as you wish, you can launch yourself off a critical orbit toward your target galaxy in the distant universe.
The trip may be long; as much as 10 billion light-years' distance. But when you move at near light speed, your time flows far more slowly than on Earth. If you are close enough to light speed, you can make it to your target in a few years or less, as measured by you— slowing down with the aid of a highly elliptical black-hole binary at your target, if you can find one!
You can return home by the same method. But your homecoming may not be pleasant. Billions of years will have passed at home, while you have aged only a few years. Imagine what you find.
These types of slingshots could provide a means for spreading a civilization across the great reaches of intergalactic space. The princi- pal obstacle (perhaps insurmountable!) is finding, or making, the needed black hole binaries. The launch binary might not be a problem if you are a sufficiently advanced civilization, but the slow-down binary is another matter.
What happens to you if there is no slow-down binary, or there is one, but your aim is bad and you miss it? This is a tricky question because of the expansion of the universe. Think about it.
As exciting as these three far-future propulsion systems may seem, they truly are far future. Using twenty-first-century technology, we are stuck with thousands of years to reach other solar systems. The only hope (an exceedingly faint hope) for faster interstellar travel, in the event of an earthly disaster, is a wormhole like that in Interstellar, or some other extreme form of spacetime warp.
Adapted from The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne. Copyright © 2014 by Kip Thorne. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Answers to 6 Important Questions on Intergalactic Travel
Intergalactic travel is fascinating and sci-fi on steroids. So buckle up, as we dive into 6 thought-provoking questions on this wild topic.
Let’s be real, just getting to Mars is a huge challenge for us humans, and our solar system is just a speck compared to the vastness of our galaxy, the Milky Way. As the brilliant Douglas Adams once put it:
“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”
Just think about this: on August 20, 1977, NASA launched Voyager 2, which is still one of the fastest human-made objects ever created. It zips along at a jaw-dropping speed of 34,500 miles per hour.
The image below is an artistic rendition of Voyager 2’s distance traveled as of December 2018. The x-axis measures in Astronomical Units (AU), where 1 AU is the distance from the Sun to Earth, or about 93 million miles. The mind-boggling part? Voyager 2 still hasn’t left our solar system after 43 years of travel!
Now, keep that Voyager 2 image in your mind. We’re going to kick things up a notch and explore the intergalactic scale in the next section.
#1 What are the biggest challenges of intergalactic travel?
There’s no shortage of hurdles when it comes to intergalactic travel. Here’s a quick rundown:
- Insane distances between galaxies
- Spacecraft durability against the harsh elements of space
- Limited propulsion technology
- Not enough energy to travel crazy far distances
Of these challenges, the travel distance is probably the hardest to wrap our heads around. The table below lists some mind-bending distances to give you a sense of the scale we’re dealing with:
Our primitive brains just can’t grasp these numbers. Even the distance to the Moon is enough to give us a headache. After all, we’re the same species that complains about a 250-mile drive to our favorite camping spot.
The energy needed for the trip is a bit easier to picture. But it’s not as simple as fueling up a spacecraft on Earth and blasting off into the cosmos. Let’s calculate the energy required to travel to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to Earth, as an example.
Energy requirement calculation for a trip to Alpha Centauri
Alpha Centauri is about 4.24 light-years away from Earth. In our sci-fi scenario, let’s assume our spacecraft travels at sub-light speed, making the trip in 25 years.
Important Note: Voyager 2’s speed is 34,500 miles per hour, while the speed of light is 670,600,000 miles per hour. Our fastest human-made object travels at a measly 0.00514% of the speed of light.
At that rate, it would take Voyager 2 just under 85,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri!
First, let’s figure out the speed our rocket needs to travel to make the trip in 100 years.
Now, consider SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy , weighing in at a hefty 1,420,788 kilograms or 1,566 tons. Let’s assume our spacecraft heading to Alpha Centauri is at least 50 times as massive, especially if we’re bringing humans along for the ride. That gives us 1,566 tons x 50 = 78,300 tons.
Our current chemical and ion engines just won’t cut it for galactic road trips. The amount of propellant needed would be way heavier than the spacecraft itself, and we’d be stuck traveling for thousands of extra years.
#2 Why even travel beyond the Milky Way to new galaxies?
Christopher Columbus once said,
“You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
That urge to explore is in our blood. We’re natural-born adventurers, and that’s not changing anytime soon. But besides just exploring, there are other reasons to pack our bags for intergalactic travel:
- The Sun running out of hydrogen fuel and making the earth inhabitable
- Resource gathering
- Hedging against a potential doomsday on Earth (e.g. asteroid impact)
- Discovering alien life
I know how farfetched intergalactic travel may sound, but those who quickly dismiss the pursuit only need to flip through history. Hundreds of millions of years ago, sea organisms looked at dry land in awe. I bet the idea of living on land seemed impossible then, just like deep space travel does now.
And hey, even intelligent machines would share our reasons for intergalactic travel. In fact, they have even more reason to look beyond Earth. Why would a machine made of nuts and bolts stay in a corroding environment on Earth?…
#3 What type of spacecraft would make intergalactic travel possible?
Picture this: a spacecraft that can withstand the brutal conditions of outer space, zipping through the cosmos at mind-blowing speeds. Sounds like a dream, right? Well, the key to making this dream a reality lies in developing a propulsion system that can really pack a punch. Today’s technology has its limitations, but here are some exciting ideas scientists have proposed for the future:
Antimatter rocket
Think of antimatter as rocket fuel on steroids. According to NASA ,
“While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy).”
So, what’s stopping us from using this incredible fuel right now? Firstly, it’s insanely expensive and scarce. You won’t find antimatter mines nestled in mountain ranges, that’s for sure.
Secondly, when matter and antimatter react, they generate a bunch of destructive high-energy particles. These particles not only wreak havoc on the crew and equipment but are also difficult to control. This means you can’t just use the released energy to steer your exhaust. And if that wasn’t enough, storing antimatter demands massive magnetic fields.
Bussard Ramjet
Imagine using the ionized hydrogen found in space for thrust. Picture a magnetic scoop made of electromagnetic fields that gathers ionized hydrogen. A nuclear fusion reactor would then consume the hydrogen to power a spacecraft, meaning the ship wouldn’t have to lug reactant mass from Earth.
This could be a game-changer since it would significantly reduce a spacecraft’s total mass. However, it comes with its own set of engineering challenges.
The hydrogen collector would have to be ginormous to capture enough hydrogen. But even then, the magnetic scoop could theoretically create drag, possibly negating any generated thrust. And who knows how much hydrogen is actually floating around between galaxies?
A solar sail is an attractive option because you don’t need to carry your reaction mass with you. Like the Bussard Ramjet, you’d collect it from space, utilizing the radiation from stars for propulsion. The spacecraft’s reflective sails would capture light’s momentum, propelling it forward.
The catch? The sails would have to be miles wide. While this idea might work wonders for interstellar travel, intergalactic travel is a different story. In the vast emptiness of space, stars would be mere specks in the distance.
Nuclear Pulse
Imagine detonating nuclear pellets behind a spacecraft, propelling it forward with each explosion. Sounds thrilling, right?
By now, you’ve probably noticed the common theme among these propulsion options: reaction mass is the limiting factor. So, the logical approach is to create a reactionless drive, eliminating the need to exchange momentum with a reaction mass to accelerate your spacecraft.
Important Note: Hitting the brakes is just as tricky as speeding up when you’re zipping around at sub-light speeds. Slowing down as you approach your destination is a challenge all on its own.
Oh, and don’t forget about space dust and atoms. Contrary to popular belief, the space between stars and galaxies isn’t totally empty. Tiny dust particles and atoms are scattered everywhere. When these little guys smack into a spacecraft, they cause local heating, which can lead to evaporation and altered material properties.
Those bigger dust particles? They can straight-up annihilate a spacecraft. To dodge this cosmic dust storm, we’ll need some seriously advanced energy shields and a sleek, slimmed-down spacecraft to minimize the exposed surface area.
#4 Is intergalactic travel possible for humans?
As for us humans, well, we’re basically just bags of meat, so the journey isn’t exactly practical. But hey, never say never, right? If we ever make that trip, we’ll probably look nothing like we do today.
We might rework our DNA and ditch a lot of what makes us human – our meaty bodies, reproductive organs, physical senses, and all that jazz. Only then might we have a glimmer of hope for intergalactic travel.
Honestly, it’s not too far-fetched. Just a century ago, who would’ve guessed we’d have the world’s info in our back pockets? The same goes for human biological progression. We’re becoming more machine-like every year, boosting our intelligence and physical abilities.
So, while I can’t picture intergalactic travel with our current human biology, the future might be a whole different ball game. Technology is rapidly outpacing the slow crawl of biological evolution.
#5 Is intergalactic travel possible for machines?
The big edge we humans have over machines is versatility. But looking far into the future, machines could very well match – and surpass – our versatility without the hefty price tag of keeping a human alive in space. Even a cyborg, half human half machine, would be costly.
Machines have a much better shot at making this seemingly impossible trip. And honestly, it doesn’t sound all that far-fetched when compared to a human journey. Just picture a future with Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) calling the shots. These ASIs could make decisions in real time without any pesky biological limitations.
Plus, communication signals take ages to travel across vast distances. For our neighbor, Mars, radio signals take 5 to 20 minutes. But ASI wouldn’t need to chat with Earth to make the trip a success.
#6 How will advanced physics and technology affect the pursuit of intergalactic travel?
As we unravel the mysteries of physics, our hunger for space travel will only grow. We’ll discover mind-blowing things about how the universe works, fueling our curiosity about what lies beyond our solar system.
But just to play devil’s advocate, maybe exploration will lose its appeal once we reach a certain level of intelligence. We might be able to ditch the physical world and live in a fully digital one where we can do anything we want.
This digital world could be teeny-tiny, like the size of a strawberry. So why bother with risky, resource-intensive explorations?…
Important Note: Our current understanding of physics clashes with the idea of successful intergalactic travel. We’re still learning how physics really works in the grand scheme of the universe.
Our grasp of physics has evolved tremendously in just a few centuries. So who knows what we’ll learn in the next 1,000 years, let alone 10 million?
Intergalactic travel feels like something out of a wild sci-fi movie. Even Star Trek steered clear of these insane distances, keeping their ships within one galaxy. But what happens when our understanding of the universe leaps forward?
Stephen Hawking once famously said,
“I don’t think the human race will survive the next 1,000 years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.”
This thought keeps me tossing and turning at night, y’know? Intergalactic travel is both absolutely captivating and makes my brain hurt just thinking about it. At the same time, the cosmos is the ultimate way to keep yourself grounded . I believe this with all my heart. Nothing else can even come close to stirring up the same feelings inside me.
Sure, I know that intergalactic travel might be millions of years away, if I’m being optimistic. I mean, just getting to the nearest star feels like climbing Mount Everest blindfolded. But who knows, maybe some far-out sci-fi idea will one day become reality. Warp drives, teleportation…hey, we’re allowed to dream, right?
Do you think intergalactic travel is ever possible for us humans? What gets you all fired up about intergalactic travel? What do you reckon is the biggest challenge with this mind-bending adventure?
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Author Bio: Koosha started Engineer Calcs in 2019 to help people better understand the engineering and construction industry, and to discuss various science and engineering-related topics to make people think. He has been working in the engineering and tech industry in California for well over 15 years now and is a licensed professional electrical engineer, and also has various entrepreneurial pursuits.
Koosha has an extensive background in the design and specification of electrical systems with areas of expertise including power generation, transmission, distribution, instrumentation and controls, and water distribution and pumping as well as alternative energy (wind, solar, geothermal, and storage).
Koosha is most interested in engineering innovations, the cosmos, sports, fitness, and our history and future.
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Cosmic Expansion: The ‘Horizon’ for Intergalactic Travel
Baseball players know that a ball going up will eventually come down. But their experience is limited to speeds of up to 106 miles per hour – the Guinness World Record for the fastest baseball pitch in history, or 122 miles per hour for the hardest hit ball. Translated to metric units, this corresponds to a maximum speed of 0.055 kilometers per second.
A ball moving at a speed that is 200 times faster above the Earth’s atmosphere would escape the chains of Earth’s gravitational pull and never come back. This escape speed of 11 kilometers per second is a prerequisite for deep space missions within the solar system. Going beyond the solar system requires a higher launch speed. In order for a spacecraft to reach interstellar space from Earth’s orbit, it must obtain a speed of 42 kilometers per second relative to the Sun.
These speeds apply also in reverse. Meteors arrive at the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed exceeding 11 kilometers per second. Any interstellar object, like `Oumuamua , would arrive at the Earth’s distance from the Sun with a speed above 42 kilometers per second. As a result, interstellar meteors are faster than solar system meteors. The fact that two interstellar meteors, IM1 and IM2 , maintained their integrity down to the lower atmosphere implies that they are tougher than all other 271 space rocks in NASA’s CNEOS catalog of fireballs, as I had shown in a paper with my student, Amir Siraj.
But what is the required launch speed for travel beyond the Milky Way galaxy? The fastest bound stars in the neighborhood of the Sun were measured most reliably by ESA’s Gaia satellite, implying that the escape speed from the Milky Way is 500 kilometers per second . This is about thirty times faster than the speed of our latest interstellar probe, New Horizons , relative to the Sun.
As of now, humanity never attempted to launch a spacecraft that could escape from the Milky Way galaxy, but in the future, it might. Naively, one would expect such a spacecraft to reach farther intergalactic destinations over longer periods of travel time. However, this naïve expectation is not realized because of the expansion of the Universe.
Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the recession speed of distant galaxies is proportional to their distance from us. The local proportionality constant between recession speed and distance is called the Hubble constant . It is measured to have a value of about 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec , where a megaparsec is a distance unit equal to 3.3 million light years.
By reversing in our mind the cosmic history back in time, we realize that all matter overlapped and reached an infinite density at a single time in our past, called the Big Bang . The period that elapsed since the Big Bang is roughly the distance of the receding galaxies divided by their cosmic recession speed, namely the inverse of the Hubble constant. Taking the ratio of a megaparsec to 70 kilometers per second gives a cosmic age of 14 billion years. Remarkably, this is within 2% of the precise age determination of 13.8 billion years based on Planck satellite data of the cosmic microwave background.
In order for a spacecraft to catch up with a distant galaxy, it must move faster than the recession speed of that galaxy. But given the accelerated expansion of the Universe, the task is even more daunting. The best current measurements suggest that the cosmic expansion will be exponential in the future. This implies that irrespective of how fast we launch and how long we wait, a spacecraft would never catch up with galaxies beyond a certain distance from us. This is because distant galaxies will eventually be separated from us faster than light as a result of accelerated cosmic expansion.
Based on a simple general-relativistic calculation I performed this morning, a spacecraft launched out of our galaxy at some speed could only reach a galaxy that is currently receding from us at a cosmic speed of less than half the spacecraft’s speed. This introduces the concept of a cosmic horizon for any launch speed, akin to prison walls for our travel ambitions.
What would be the realistic expectations for future propulsion schemes that do better than chemical rockets? As I showed in a paper with my former postdoc, Manasvi Lingam, an ambitious space program could use light sails or electric sails to exceed the escape speed from the Milky Way. A spacecraft moving a hundred times faster than the speed of the five chemical rockets we sent so far to interstellar space could reach intergalactic space with a speed of 1000 kilometers per second, a third of a percent of the speed of light. At that speed, it could catch up with galaxies that are currently within 20 million light years or about seven megaparsecs away from us. But this spacecraft will never catch up with galaxies farther away, irrespective of how long we wait.
Why Is the United Kingdom So Far Behind on UAP Policy?
The center of the nearest cluster of galaxies, the Virgo cluster , is 65 million light years away. Reaching beyond this distance requires spacecraft that move faster than a percent of the speed of light or 3,000 kilometers per second. Humanity’s most ambitious space travel initiative: Starshot – which I have the privilege of leading , aims to reach a speed that is an order of magnitude larger, above a tenth of the speed of light. This initiative envisions shining a powerful 100 giga-Watt laser for a few minutes on a meter-size, gram-mass light sail. A Starshot probe could reach galaxies that are an order of magnitude farther than the Virgo cluster but still two orders of magnitude shorter than the distance to the last scattering surface of the cosmic microwave background.
The cosmic horizon for intergalactic travel will include fewer destinations in our future because distant galaxies will keep accelerating away from us. We need to get our act together quickly if we wish to reach them. As I had shown in a 2001 paper , once the Universe will age by a factor of ten – even a spacecraft moving at the speed of light will not be able to catch up with any galaxy beyond our own .
Personally, I am not troubled by the limitation imposed on intergalactic travel through accelerated cosmic expansion. The more I age, the more I enjoy privacy, silence, and freedom. The farther we get from the jets of extragalactic gamma-ray bursts and the burning fire of quasars , the more we can focus on cultivating good relationships with our immediate cosmic neighbors in the Milky Way galaxy. We should be nice to them because they are the only ones that will stay with us in our common cabin for billions of years to come. Escaping into the darkness of intergalactic space makes little sense, given the accelerated cosmic expansion.
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s – Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011-2020). He chairs the advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot project, and is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors onScience and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “ Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth ” and a co-author of the textbook “ Life in the Cosmos ”, both published in 2021. His new book, titled “ Interstellar ”, is scheduled for publication in August 2023.
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John Goldsmith on scientific misconduct and the Lilienfeld study (An oldie but still relevant today)
Background to the Lilienfeld study and the “Moscow signal”:
In the early 1960s it was discovered that from 1953 the Soviets had been beaming highly focused microwaves directly into the US Embassy in Moscow at an estimated power density that ranged from .005 mW/cm2 to .018 mW/cm2.112 Averaged measurements determined that although the intensity reaching the Embassy was approximately 500 times less than the US standard for occupational exposure, it was twice the highest limit allowed in the Soviet standard.This created a quandary for the US, for if they truly believed their thermally-based 10 mW/cm2 standard was safe they could hardly conclude that the level of microwaves at their Embassy was undermining the health of the Embassy staff. Concerns were raised about the purpose of irradiation of the Embassy. Was it eavesdropping or a more sinister attack on the health of the employees? An initial study was done on the Moscow personnel in 1967 that examined a group of 43 workers, (37 exposed and 7 not exposed). They were tested for abnormalities in chromosomes and 20 out of the 37 were above the normal range among the exposed, compared to 2/7 among the non-exposed. In the final report the scientists urged a repeat and follow-up study which was clinically indicated for 18 persons, but was not undertaken by the end of the contract period, June 30, 1969. The evidence of chromosome changes was strong enough to have triggered clinical guidelines that would have recommended ceasing reproductive activity until the condition had improved. At a Superpower summit in June 1967 the irradiation of the Moscow Embassy was the subject of a confidential exchange between US President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Prime Minister Alexi Kosygin. Johnson asked that the Soviet Union stop irradiating its Moscow Embassy with microwaves and harming the health of American citizens. In 1966 a covert study, called Project Pandora, was commenced to study the possible effects on health from the microwave irradiation of the Moscow Embassy staff, who were not told the true reason for the investigation. In a related study, Project Bizarre, a primate was exposed to microwaves at half that permitted by the US standard. The findings of this study concluded, “[t]here is no question that penetration of the central nervous system has been achieved, either directly or indirectly into that portion of the brain concerned with the changes in work functions”�.
A haematologic study by J & S Tonascia in 1976 found highly significant differences between Moscow Embassy employees and other foreign service staff (control group). White blood cell counts were much higher in the Moscow staff as well as several other significant changes noted over time. These results were never published, but obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. At this time there was a US Congressional radiation inquiry underway and the Department of Defense (DoD) was arguing that the US RF/MW Standard was already strict enough. They argued that there was no scientific evidence for the Soviet Standard being set at a level one thousand times lower than the US standard. The Moscow Embassy employees and dependants were studied for possible health effects of microwave irradiation by a team from John Hopkins University, under the direction of epidemiologist Professor Abraham Lilienfeld. Dr Lilienfeld noted that the study group was quite small and that the follow-up time too short to generally identify significant health effects such as cancer. He recommended that continued health status surveillance should be carried out, but this was not done. The incidence of sickness and death were compared with employees & dependents in other Eastern European embassies, and with the average US rates. The incidence of multiple-site cancers was far more frequent in the Moscow Embassy group than in any other population studied. It was noted that while multiple-site cancers are characteristic of older populations, the Moscow Embassy group was relatively young. According to Goldsmith, concerns of the John Hopkins team were “downgraded”� by the state department and the wording of the team report altered to lessen its impact. Lilienfeld strongly recommended that additional follow up studies be undertaken since the latency periods for some types of cancer had been insufficient for cancer to occur, if indeed it were to result from microwave exposure. Nevertheless, according to Goldsmith, the overall findings were consistent with excess cancer incidence both in the Moscow Embassy cohort and in the other Eastern European embassy personnel.Data on exposure and occurrence of some cases of cancer were withheld from Professor Lilienfeld until after his report was completed and it was too late to include in the results. Reviews of the work done by contract investigators were interpreted as inconclusive because the State Department had failed to complete the necessary follow-up work which was recommended by the Lilienfeld team.
From The Procrustean Approach , pp. 105 – 107
*******************************************************
From Iris Atzmon, June 1, 2012:
Where the trail leads… Ethical problems arising when the trail of professional work lead to evidence of cover-up of serious risk and mis-representation of scientific judgement concerning human exposures to radar
– Prof. John R. Goldsmith, M.D., M.P.H.
Epidemiology and Health Services Evaluation Unit, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, 84105 Beer-Sheva, Israel Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 5 (1995), 92-4. Introduction
Professional interaction over fifteen years between myself, an epidemiologist, and a lawyer started in 1974, when we were both in Washington, evaluating environmental health problems. The lawyer, recently disappointed with the outcome of a case which hinged on the testimony of an epidemiologist, began a dialogue about the criteria for use of probabilities in the scientific and judicial system. We agreed on the importance of making clear these differences, and he documented them in an article.
These differences can be misused in both legal and scientific procedures, under circumstances in which the failure to demonstrate conventional statistical significance (scientifically) is erroneously interpreted as meaning that preventing exposure would not be a reasonable public health measure.
When the lawyer started his private practice he sought expert epidemiological advice in the case of foreign service workers with cancer who had been exposed to microwave radiation in the US Embassy in Moscow.
The trail then led to a major investigation of health risks of Embassy staff by a leading U.S. epidemiologist. The report of this study was said to be negative but actually had some disturbing findings. The trail took a sharp turn when the lawyer provided me copies of documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which indicated persistent cover-up and deliberate distortions of views of highly regarded scientists with respect to risks from these exposures. A published report on personnel risks from radar exposure in the U.S. Navy diluted the experience of increased leukemia in an exposed group with the low rates in a less exposed group, bringing down likelihood of a significant result and concluding that no effect occurred.
The ethical issues concern whether a scientist who inadvertently finds this evidence should disclose it, in light of security considerations among other matters. The trail, in this presentation, ends with an application of the legal use of probability in interpreting epidemiological evidence on the central scientific issue, the possible health risks from microwave radiation.
For the full paper: http://www.eubios.info/EJ54/EJ54H.htm
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Futuristic technology reveals secrets in ancient Vesuvius Scrolls
Ancient time capsules
“Human civilization,” says classicist Richard Janko, “is a very fragile thing.”
He should know. For nearly 40 years, U-M’s Gerald F. Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies has relied on his scholarly insights, nearly infinite patience, and sharp eyesight to decipher the charred and brittle Vesuvius Scrolls, a process now being sped up by AI and three-dimensional CT (computed tomography) scans.
Early excavators in Herculaneum threw away many of the blackened lumps. Others unspooled the delicate relics but damaged them in the process. Only 270 survive untouched. Tens of thousands more scrolls, probably including lost masterpieces of literature, history, and philosophy, may still be entombed in Piso’s unexcavated personal library.
An eye for antiquities
Professor Janko has spent 40 years seeking to decipher the Vesuvius Scrolls. (Image courtesy of Richard Janko.)
Today, Janko is a juror for the prestigious Vesuvius Challenge. This annual contest (so far, $1 million has been awarded) spurs computer scientists to hone their skill at virtually unwrapping papyri and teasing out black letter shapes of ink from black backgrounds.
Antiquities have always been a part of Janko’s life. He was born in a 350-year-old thatch-roofed stone cottage in the village of Weston Underwood, two hours north of London. Walking in nearby fields as a child, he sometimes found shards of Roman-era pottery.
His youthful fascination with all things ancient got an early boost from two local men. One lent him books about ancient Greece. Like many of Janko’s classicist teachers, he had operated behind enemy lines in Greece for British intelligence during World War II. The other, a retired military colonel, gave him Greek and Latin books he had tossed in his garden shed, rolling them out in a wheelbarrow full of unwanted moldy texts.
“I was terribly happy to be given those books,” Janko recalls. “I knew from an early age that I wanted to study Greek, and I never wavered in that. Of course, deciding what you want to do when you’re very young gives you more time to get good at it.”
Fascinated by Philodemus
Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus was a Roman senator whose villa was destroyed by the volcano known as Mount Vesuvius. Philodemus was his in-house scholar. (Image: Wikipedia.)
Janko won his role as a Vesuvius judge thanks, among other things, to his books on Philodemus. “He was a controversialist whose writings continually quote and try to rebut works by his adversaries. In doing that, of course, he preserved their work, which otherwise would have been lost. He’s an exciting source from which to learn more about other early thinkers,” says Janko.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Janko earned his PhD at Cambridge. Before coming to the University of Michigan in 2002 and serving as his department’s chair from 2002-07, he held professorships at Columbia, UCLA, and the University of London.
“Richard is a consummate scholar of ancient Greek civilization, ranging from the Mycenean Bronze Age down to Greek culture in the early Roman Empire,” says U-M professor emeritus Bruce W. Frier, the John and Teresa D’Arms Distinguished University Professor of Classics and Roman Law. According to Frier, Janko’s “painstaking attention to detail” and “broad, new, and often startling insights” have made him one of the top scholars in his field.
Classicists hailed Janko’s 2001 translation of the Derveni papyrus, the oldest surviving European book dating to 340 BC and a commentary on the cult of Orpheus. “It’s as if Stephen Hawking or Einstein took the book of Genesis and interpreted the account of the world’s creation in terms of molecules and particles,” says Janko. “It must have caused a real scandal because you don’t do that to a religious text.”
Janko teaches courses in the ancient Greek world, Hellenistic Greek literature and papyri, and Homer and the Trojan War.
“I’m still struck by how many of my students became interested in the classics because of the Greek myths. They have immense power,” he says. (Classical Studies remain popular at Michigan. Sixty percent of all undergraduates take at least one such course, according to Janko, though the number of students majoring in Classics has fallen.)
So much to be done
Janko began studying Philodemus and the scrolls in 1985, after publication of his controversial book.
Janko’s study of Philodemus and the scrolls began in 1985, following the publication of his controversial book Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II. It contended that one of the Greek philosopher’s treatises was not lost but is summarized in a medieval manuscript. (The plot of the best-selling 1983 novel The Name of the Rose and the 1986 Sean Connery movie of the same name concerns that same book.)
By chance, Janko’s Aristotle book led him to the National Library in Naples, where the Vesuvius scroll fragments are kept.
“I saw a little article by an Italian scholar complaining that nobody had noticed his 1955 article about a papyrus from Herculaneum in which Philodemus rebutted Aristotle’s poetics. That led me to an article from 1909 where a German scholar also complained that nobody had noticed his 1865 article about this papyrus, so I decided I’d better go and look at it,” he says. “When I got there, I was astonished at how much research on the scrolls remained to be done.”
Toilsome work conquers everything
Mount Vesuvius rises above the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. (Image: Encyclopedia Britannica.)
It took Janko about seven years to write each of his Philodemus books, the third of which was published in 2020. Early on, he deciphered shards of scrolls by tilting them at an angle in sunlight and squinting. After that, he faced the maddening challenge of putting words and letters together from a jigsaw array of fragments. The task became easier in the 1990s when the library purchased modern binocular microscopes and introduced infrared digital photography.
This odyssey of reconstruction might have defeated a lesser scholar. In a paper on the arduous process, Janko wrote “As Vergil feelingly put it, ‘labor omnia vincit improbus.’ [Ed. Note: ‘Toilsome work conquers everything.’] Only when clad in an armament of unremitting effort and the magic of numbers, harnessing fire-breathing bulls and facing down armed skeletons left and right, can one plough the field of these papyri and reap their harvest of new texts.”
Janko admits that sometimes, even he runs out of patience. When he gets frustrated, he walks in the woods or fields. “If the problem seems insoluble, I drop it for a year or two and then try again,” he says.
Janko believes future digs at the villa may exhume lost works of unparalleled value, such as histories, plays by Aeschylus and Euripides, works by the Greek poet Sappho, and epic poems on the Trojan War that fill in the gaps between the Iliad and the Odyssey . Wealthy Romans often had libraries containing 40,000 scrolls or more. Piso’s villa boasted a tiered semicircular room resembling a lecture hall, and only one of its multiple stories has been investigated. It has plenty of room for a significant library.
Early Christian documents are unlikely to be found at the villa. Few additions appear to have been made to Philodemus’ library after his death in about 35 BC. Even by 79 AD, Christianity had hardly penetrated Italy, according to Janko.
Assembly line
Thanks to new technology, the Vesuvius Scrolls are finally giving up their secrets. (Image courtesy of Richard Janko.)
The rolled-up scrolls are finally giving up their secrets to new technologies because of the Vesuvius Challenge. But each papyrus has hundreds of layers. Because oven-hot gases and mud burned, crushed, and distorted them, they are never flat and must be manually reassembled one layer at a time.
Janko believes computer scientists will soon find a way to automate processing and organize the layers. Plus, with greater use of portable CT scanners and more communication between scholars and computer scientists on how to recognize ink, new texts and translations will appear at an increasingly swift pace.
Janko predicts that four of Philodemus’ remaining 270 scrolls will be read and translated this year.
He hopes the pace of the work picks up even more. After all, Vesuvius is an active volcano.
“That particular spot has been covered with molten lava several times since the AD 79 eruption. Vesuvius is quiet for now,” Janko says. But past experience teaches that it’s never quiet indefinitely.”
Karl Stone - 1957, 1959
I just finished reading the article, “The Race to Decode an Ancient Scroll, How scientists, gamers and Silicon Valley solved a centuries-old mystery – and changed papyrology forever,” by Tomas Weber, featured in the Scientific American April 2024 issue. Fantastic work employing, combining and creating modern technology to read these priceless ancient scrolls. AI hold so much promise when used to further knowledge in many diverse fields. But we must catch up with controlling it with legal boundaries to avoid its misuse.
David Krause - 1962, 1986
Very interesting article. Great knowing that fields of study like this are still being actively pursued at UM
Marvin Atkins - 1961 (Ph.D.)
Bravo! Certainly agree with your comment. I’ll probably switch part of my contribution to the Classics area and cut College of Engineering. Or, as a true Wolverine might say, give both of them a raise! Marv
Sushil Birla - 1997
I found this inter-disciplinary research very fascinating and inspiring. (Historically, academia have been “silo-ed”). The international collaboration is also inspiring and encouraging. Breaking down traditional barriers across nations and academic disciplines will lead us into a better civilization. This dimension of the story is even more exciting than the deciphering of the damaged scrolls.
Joellen Killion - 1970
As a Classics major, I am delighted to know that there is great hope of unraveling the mysteries of the Vesuvius treasures.
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March 25, 2024
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Why warnings are being issued ahead of next month's total solar eclipse
by Avery Newmark, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As next month approaches, anticipation for the 2024 total solar eclipse has set in. The eclipse, which will take place April 8, will be visible from Mexico through Canada, casting a brief moment when day momentarily turns to night.
Many describe it as not just awe-inspiring but possibly even spiritual, though it comes with its own set of risks.
April's eclipse is expected to surpass the 2017 event in several ways. Notably, the totality's shadow will be double the width, making it more accessible for viewers in various states. Additionally, the duration of totality—the period the moon completely obscures the sun—will extend to more than 4 minutes at many sites, nearly double the length of the last event.
"And I think even more importantly, 2024 passes over a much bigger population," Ernie Wright, who works in NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, told Vox. "More than twice as many people actually live in the path and don't have to go anywhere to see it."
If you're lucky enough to be in the U.S. path of the eclipse—stretching from Kerrville, Texas, to Houlton, Maine—you're in for a treat. But for those in smaller towns along the way, while you're set for some pretty cool and intimate views, brace yourselves for a bit of a challenge.
With lots of eclipse chasers heading your way, emergency officials are saying it's smart to stock up on food, water gas and other basics. These places, which are often not the easiest to get to or have a ton of resources, could become jam-packed, with the chance of hitting some serious traffic and putting a strain on what's available locally.
"The millions of people drawn to locations along the eclipse path taxed limited transportation facilities, and traffic congestion was intense in many locations," Jonathan Upchurch, transportation engineering consultant, explained in Transportation Research News, IFLScience reported.
"Across the country, Interstate highways near the path of totality experienced traffic congestion shortly after the eclipse, with longer-than-normal travel times on Interstate highways. For example, travel from Casper, Wyoming, to Denver, Colorado—normally a 4-hour trip—took 10 hours or more," Upchurch continued. "Traffic congestion on rural Interstate routes lasted for up to 13 hours after the eclipse."
So, grab your eclipse glasses, choose wisely when picking a site and plan accordingly. This is the last total solar eclipse visible in the lower 48 states until 2044, NASA reported.
2024 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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Using 'time travel' to think about technology from the perspective of future generations
The world approaches an environmental tipping point, and our decisions now regarding energy, resources, and the environment will have profound consequences for the future. Despite this, most sustainable thought tends to be limited to the viewpoint of current generations.
In a study published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change , researchers from Osaka University have revealed that adopting the perspective of "imaginary future generations" (IFGs) can yield fascinating insights into long-term social and technological trends.
The researchers organized a series of four workshops at Osaka University, with participants drawn from the faculty and student body of the Graduate School of Engineering. The workshops discussed the state of future society and manufacturing in general, and also looked at one technology in particular: hydrothermally produced porous glass. During the workshops, the participants were asked to think about this technology from the perspective of IFGs, to imagine how this technology might be adopted in the future and to assess its future potentiality.
"We chose hydrothermally produced porous glass for the case study because of the generational trade-offs involved," says lead author of the study Keishiro Hara. "Porous glass is incredibly useful as either a filter for removing impurities or an insulator for buildings. Also, it can be recycled into new porous glass more or less indefinitely. The problem is that making it takes a lot of energy -- both to pulverize waste glass and to heat water to very high temperatures. There's a striking trade-off between costs now and gains in the future."
In the workshops, the participants first looked at issues involving society and manufacturing from the perspective of the present and were then asked to imagine themselves in the shoes of their counterparts in 2040.
"The future the participants imagined was quite different from the future as seen from the perspective of the current generation," explains Toshihiro Tanaka, senior author. "Most groups described a future in which sustainability has become a central concern for society. Meanwhile, advances in renewal energy mean that energy is abundant, as are resources, as frontiers such as the moon and deep ocean are opened to exploration. In this context, hydrothermally produced porous glass comes into its own as a sustainable way to recycle glass, and the energy needed to produce it is readily available."
The participants were surveyed between workshops and asked to rank indicators related to the future potentiality of the technology. Interestingly, these rankings looked quite different after the workshops in which the participants were asked to take on the perspective of "imaginary future generations."
"We noticed that when the "imaginary future generations" method, which has been proven to be effective in facilitating long-term thinking, was adopted, participants perceived the feasibility of this technology differently, and their adoption scenarios changed accordingly," says Hara.
The study suggests that the simple act of putting ourselves in the position of future generations may provide new perspectives on issues of sustainability and technology, helping us to rethink our priorities and set new directions for research and development.
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- Keishiro Hara, Iori Miura, Masanori Suzuki, Toshihiro Tanaka. Assessing future potentiality of technologies from the perspective of “imaginary future generations” – A case study of hydrothermal technology . Technological Forecasting and Social Change , 2024; 202: 123289 DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123289
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Strange & offbeat.
Flying Is Weird Right Now
Is flying less safe? Or are we just paying closer attention?
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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.
Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in seat 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to their seats. We were experiencing what I, a frequent flier, might describe as “intermediate turbulence”—a sustained parade of midair bumps that can be uncomfortable but by no means terrifying.
Generally, I do not fear hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour, but at this moment I felt an unusual pang of uncertainty. The little informational card poking out of the seat-back pocket in front of me started to look ominous—the words Boeing 737-900 positively glared at me as the cabin shook. A few minutes later, once we’d found calm air, I realized that a steady drumbeat of unsettling aviation stories had so thoroughly permeated my news-consumption algorithms that I had developed a phobia of sorts.
More than 100,000 flights take off every day without issue, which means that incidents are treated as newsworthy anomalies. But it sure feels like there have been quite a few anomalies lately. In January, a Japanese coast-guard plane and a Japan Airlines plane collided on the runway, erupting in flames; a few days later, a door blew out on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jet shortly after takeoff. Then, in just the past few weeks:
- A United Airlines flight in Houston heading to its gate rolled off the runway and into the grass.
- Another United flight, en route from Houston to Fort Myers, Florida, made an emergency landing after flames started shooting out of one of its engines.
- Yet another United flight was forced to make an emergency landing when a tire fell off the plane moments after takeoff.
- Still another United flight , this one heading from San Francisco to Mexico, made an emergency landing due to a hydraulic-system failure.
- The National Transportation Safety Board announced that it was investigating a February United flight that had potentially faulty rudder pedals.
- Roughly 50 passengers were injured in New Zealand when pilots lost control of a Boeing plane and it plummeted suddenly.
- A post-landing inspection revealed that an external panel was missing from a Boeing 737-800 plane that had landed in Oregon this past Friday.
United released a statement to passengers suggesting the incidents on its flights were unrelated but also “reminders of the importance of safety.” In that same statement, Scott Kirby, the company’s CEO, said that the incidents “have our attention and have sharpened our focus.”
This is only a partial list of the year’s aeronautical mishaps, which are prodigious: Consider investigations into Alaska Airlines that revealed numerous doors with loose bolts, the Airbus grounded for a faulty door light, or the Delta Boeing whose nose wheel popped off and “rolled down” a hill as the flight prepared to take off.
Read: The carry-on-baggage bubble is about to pop
Many people are wondering: What is going on with airplanes? In January, the booking site Kayak reported that it had seen “a 15-fold increase” in the use of its aircraft filter for Boeing 737 Max planes, suggesting that anxious travelers booking flights were excluding them from their searches. In response to the palpable audience interest, there’s been an uptick in media interest in aviation stories.
Meanwhile, poking fun at Boeing—whose standards and corporate culture have understandably come under scrutiny in the past few years after it was charged with fraud and agreed to pay $2.5 billion in settlements—has become a meme , a way to nervously laugh at the cavalcade of bad news and to gesture at the frustration over corporate greed that seems to put overcharged air travelers at risk. (Boeing responded to the Alaska Airlines door incident by acknowledging that the company “is accountable for what happened,” and pledged to make internal changes. And last week, Executive Vice President Stan Deal sent a message to employees outlining steps the company is taking to improve its planes’ safety and quality, including adding new “layers” of inspection to its manufacturing processes.)
Despite all of this, flying has, in a historical sense at least, never been safer. A statistician at MIT has found that, globally, the odds of a passenger dying on a flight from 2018 to 2022 were 38 times lower than they were 50 years earlier. The National Safety Council found in 2021 that, over the course of a person’s life, the odds of dying as an aircraft passenger in the U.S. “were too small to even calculate.” One aviation-safety consultant recently told NBC News , “There’s not anything unusual about the recent spate of incidents—these kinds of things happen every day in the industry.” A separate industry analyst told Slate in February, “Flying is literally safer than sitting on the ground … I don’t know how I can stress that enough.” That we know so much about every little failure and close call in the skies is, in part, because the system is so thorough and so safe.
So what’s really going on? I suspect it’s a confluence of two distinct factors. The first is that although air safety is getting markedly better over time, the experience of flying is arguably worse than ever. The pandemic had a cascading effect on the business of air travel. One estimate suggests that in the past four years, roughly 10,000 pilots have left the commercial airline industry, as many airlines offered early retirement to employees during the shutdown and pre-vaccine periods, when fewer people were traveling. There are also shortages of mechanics and air traffic controllers.
All of that is now coupled with an increase in passenger volume: In 2023, flight demand crept back up to near pre-pandemic levels, and staffing has not caught up. It is also an especially expensive time to fly . Pile on unruly passengers , system outages , baggage fees, carry-on restrictions, meager drink and snack offerings, and the trials and tribulations of merely coexisting with other travelers who insist on lining up at the gate 72 hours before their zone boards and you have a perfectly combustible situation. Air travel is an impressive daily symphony of logistics, engineering, and physics. It’s also a total grind.
Trust in Boeing declined in recent months, according to consumer surveys, even if consumers still trust the airline industry as a whole . It makes sense that the distrust in Boeing would bleed outward. All conspiracy theories are rooted in some aspect of personal experience, and plenty of information exists out there to confirm one’s deepest suspicions: The New York Times described Boeing’s past safety issues as “ capitalism gone awry ” in 2020, and there is plenty of evidence that the company culture hasn’t changed enough since then. At least two aviation experts (one a former Boeing employee) have publicly stated their concerns about flying in certain Boeing planes. It doesn’t help that Boeing is the subject of an NTSB investigation and is struggling to present the requested evidence in the Alaska door case, or that earlier this month a Boeing whistleblower died by suicide.
Read: What’s gone wrong at Boeing
Then there is the second factor: vibes . Existing online means getting exposed to so much information that it has become quite easy to hear about individual problems, but incredibly difficult to determine their overall scale or relevance. On TikTok, you might be exposed to entire genres of ominous flight videos: “Flight Attendant Horror,'” “Scary Sounding Planes,” “The Scariest Plane.” Even those who are not specifically mainlining these clips may suffer from an algorithmic selection bias: the more interest a person has in the recent plane malfunctions, the more likely that person might be to see more stories and commentary about planes in general. Meanwhile, an uptick in interest in stories about airline mishaps can lead to an increase in coverage of airline mishaps, which has the effect of making more routine issues feel like they’re piling up. Some of that reporting can be downright sensational , and news organizations are now also covering incidents they would have previously ignored .
This distortion—between public perception of an issue (planes are getting less safe!) and the more boring reality (they’re actually very safe)—is exacerbated by the intensity and density of information. It is a modern experience to stumble upon a meme, theory, or narrative and then see it in all of your feeds. Similarly, platforms make it easier for complex, disparate stories to collapse into simpler ways of seeing the world. Air safety slots nicely into this framework and, given the sterling record of the industry, a couple of loose or missing screws on a Boeing jet begins to feel both like a systemic failure and proof of something bigger: a kind of societal decay at the hands of increasing shareholder value.
These are feelings, vibes. They aren’t always accurate, but often that doesn’t matter because they’re so deeply felt. If that word— vibes —feels more prevalent in the lexicon in recent years, perhaps it is because more weird, hard-to-interpret information is available, pushing people toward trusting their gut feelings. Today’s air-travel anxiety sits at the intersection of these vibes, anecdotes, legitimate and troubling news reports, and the algorithmic distortion of the internet, creating a distinctly modern feeling of a large, looming problem, the exact contours of which are difficult to discern.
The vibes are off—this much we know for certain. Everything else is up for debate.
10 Amazing Sci-Fi Movies Set On Fictional Planets
- Science fiction films often tell stories set on other worlds, allowing for the exploration of new elements, technologies, and species that don't exist on Earth.
- Films like Avatar, Solaris, and Dune take audiences on intergalactic adventures, showcasing rich world-building, complex political systems, and a blend of fantasy and sci-fi elements.
- Planets like Pandora, LV-223, and Orous offer unique settings with interconnected nature, ancient ruins, and intergalactic capital cities, making them intriguing backdrops for sci-fi stories.
Science fiction films often include elements of advanced technology, alien races, and even time travel, but much fewer explore stories that happen on other worlds. Sci-fi is all about exploring a reality just outside of human reach, and because of that, it sometimes guides and leads human innovation, like with technology on Star Trek inspiring communication devices and holographic videos. A much higher-level concept that edges into fantasy territory is exploring stories that are set in distant, fictional worlds .
There are the obvious franchises that explore alien planets like Star Wars , Star Trek , Marvel, and DC, but many other projects take the intergalactic leap to create a story outside of our solar system. From the mega blockbusters like Avatar and Dune , to the much less well-known Pandorum or Jupiter Ascending , several films take sci-fi adventures off-world. Creating a fictional setting also allows for a story to explore a variety of new elements, technologies, species, and knowledge that simply don't exist on Earth just yet, making a perfect setting for ambitious sci-fi stories.
Avatar (2009)
James Cameron does an incredible job building the world of Pandora , and all of the elements that come with it, in his Avatar films. From the landscape to the wildlife and even the plants, Cameron spent a great deal of time with other creatives to bring Pandora to life and explore what that looks like for the native Na'vi. Pandora captured the attention of Earth thanks to a plentiful supply of a rare substance that humans hope to harvest. However, this rich world and all of its living inhabitants fight back against the human threat thanks to the interconnected nature of the planet and its inhabitants.
Related: Avatar: All 15 Na'vi Clans Explained (Cultures, Locations & Inspirations)
Solaris (1972)
Based on the novel by StanisÅaw Lem and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris is the story of scientists exploring an alien planet in the hopes of understanding its unusual nature and the odd events that keep happening on the planet's surface. As it turns out, the planet Solaris itself is a living being trying its best to communicate with the researchers through apparitions and visions created from their memories. The concept is fascinating, and the 1972 adaptation is the most widely praised of several attempts to bring the high-concept sci-fi story to the screen.
Dune (2021)
Frank Herbert's novel, and its many movie adaptations, Dune is about intergalactic rulers and a high-value trade built around the spice of Arrakis is deeply thought-provoking and explores interplanetary relations and the value assigned to assets. The story itself is an incredible mixture of fantasy and sci-fi with rich world-building, complex political systems, and an element of magic and prophecy, all spliced with advanced intergalactic travel, technologies, and science. Arrakis is also an incredibly intriguing planet inhabited by a humanoid race and giant sand worms which appear to refine the deserts into the incredibly powerful spice that is highly sought after.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (2005)
Vogsphere, magrathea, and earth ii.
Strictly speaking, Hitchhiker's Guide does begin on Earth, but early in the story, the planet is blown up to make way for an intergalactic space highway. Arthur Dent and his friends travel to a number of intriguing planets including one populated by an extremely bureaucratic race of Vogons and a planet that houses the universe's most advanced computer capable of answering life's greatest questions, and eventually, a newly formed Earth II. The planets that appear throughout and the story in general are light and comical, which makes sense considering the film is an adaptation of a novel from the hilarious writer, Douglas Adams.
Pandorum (2009)
In a future where the Earth's resources have dwindled, humanity sends a group of 60,000 people on an interstellar ark in the hopes of making a new life on a distant Earth-like planet named Tanis. When a few crew members wake up confused and struggling to remember who they are and what the mission is, the story unfolds to reveal they have reached their destination and things have not gone according to plan. Life on Tanis is not what anyone expected , and as the mystery unfolds, it becomes clear why things are not as they should be. The planet is interesting from what is seen, while the ship and its crew are trapped deep in a shipwreck in the ocean for much of the film.
Prometheus (2012)
Ridley Scott returns to the Alien franchise for this outing, which explores the origins of humankind by exploring a highly advanced race of aliens known as the Engineers . In Prometheus , the exomoon LV-223 appears desolate, with interesting ruins and potential clues about the origin of the species hidden away in dark caverns and deep tunnels beneath the surface. Prometheus does a great job exploring this landscape with Doctor Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), an archaeologist leading the mission.
Related: Alien & Covenant Movie Series Timeline Explained
The Chronicles Of Riddick: Pitch Black (2000)
Vin Diesel stars Riddick , a series following the criminal Riddick who has ultra-sensitive, enhanced eyes. When a ship transporting him and several others crash lands on planet M6-117, they discover the desert planet to be mostly arid and with very little life due to the three suns that orbit the planet and keep it in a constant state of day. Apart from when the planet enters a certain phase in the solar cycle where all light is blocked for an extended period by the surrounding planets and nocturnal creatures emerge to destroy the little life that remains on the planet's surface.
Flash Gordon (1980)
When a tyrannical alien warlord decides to turn his attention towards Earth as his next target, he begins by causing several natural disasters. A quarterback named Flash Gordon and some unlikely allies team up to form a team that boards a small spacecraft to travel out to the planet where the troubles seem to be stemming from. Mongo is a planet under the strict rule of Ming the Merciless , and the planet contains a race of humanoid beings with blue or green blood. Mongo also exists in a state somewhat apart from time and space, which allows Ming to terrorize other planets through his Imperial Vortex.
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Jupiter Ascending begins with Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) as a modest Earthling. However, the story quickly escalates and Jupiter finds herself in the middle of an intergalactic family feud between royals who own some of the most valuable resources throughout the galaxy. Jupiter travels to a number of planets, but the primary location where the story develops is the planet Orous. Orous is the intergalactic capital planet , and it is here that Jupiter is taken to realize her part in the plot and claim her inheritance. Orous is also the birthplace of humankind, as all other planets are simply extensions of the civilization that was born there and traveled outward.
Krull (1983)
On a planet in a distant universe, a terrible enemy known as the Beast and his army of slayers besieges the planet, Krull, and kidnaps Princess Lyssa just before she is due to be married. Krull walks the line between fantasy and sci-fi with an array of magic and kingdoms and the enemy forces powerful spaceships and technologically advanced weapons. Krull itself appears to be a planet full of large open landscapes, magic, and mystery , which quickly descends into turmoil when attacked by the evil forces of the Beast.
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40 facts about elektrostal.
Written by Lanette Mayes
Modified & Updated: 02 Mar 2024
Reviewed by Jessica Corbett
Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.
This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.
So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.
Key Takeaways:
- Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
- With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.
Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”
Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.
Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.
Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.
Boasts a rich industrial heritage.
Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.
Founded in 1916.
The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.
Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.
Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.
Known for its vibrant cultural scene.
Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.
A popular destination for nature lovers.
Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.
Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.
Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.
Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.
Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.
Boasts excellent education facilities.
The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.
A center for scientific research and innovation.
Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy, materials science, and engineering.
Surrounded by picturesque lakes.
The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes, offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.
Well-connected transportation system.
Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.
Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.
Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.
Home to notable architectural landmarks.
Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.
Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.
Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.
Provides a high standard of healthcare.
Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.
Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.
The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.
A hub for sports enthusiasts.
Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.
Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.
Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.
Electric power played a significant role in its early development.
Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.
Boasts a thriving economy.
The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.
Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.
The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.
Popular destination for winter sports.
Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.
Promotes environmental sustainability.
Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.
Home to renowned educational institutions.
Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.
Committed to cultural preservation.
The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.
Hosts an annual International Film Festival.
The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.
Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.
Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.
Offers a range of housing options.
Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.
Home to notable sports teams.
Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.
Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.
Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.
Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.
Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.
Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.
Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.
Commemorates historical events.
The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.
Promotes sports and youth development.
Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.
Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.
Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.
Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.
The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.
Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.
The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.
A city with a bright future.
Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.
In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.
Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?
A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.
Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?
A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.
Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?
A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.
Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?
A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.
Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?
A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.
Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?
A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.
Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?
A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.
Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?
A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.
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Lanette Mayes. Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.