It’s the 22nd century, and mankind has broken through our own stellar eggshell and made our presence felt across the galaxy. That’s the hope of NASA’s Ames Research Center and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, who are collaborating on a $1 million dollar study to help us take out next steps into space. Its purpose is to produce a business model that will allow for the development of technologies needed for transporting human beings to another star system. The initiation of this study is merely step one in a process that will hopefully lead to an interstellar human community. Sustainable business practices are the key, and efforts are already underway to seed the research that will develop the necessary technologies further down the road. One of the main goals of the program is to diversify the organizations involved: “looking at history,” said Dave Neyland, director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, “most significant exploration, like crossing oceans or continents for the first time, was sponsored by patrons or groups outside of government.” Government agencies are subject to oversight committees and the whims of various administrations; and long-term, sustainable efforts are much more difficult for them to shepherd. In contrast; a robust strategy with many different agencies and corporations all working towards the same goal has a higher likelihood of success over longer periods of time.

However, sending a manned spacecraft to another solar system is an incredibly daunting challenge. It will require breakthroughs in propulsion systems, medicine, communications, data management, and energy production. Not only that, but a suitable destination must be found: we don’t want to send our astronauts to a solar system with no planets, or worse: to that damned planet of the apes. However, advances are being made in the field of planet-finding, and experts predict that within the next 10 years we will find a planet similar enough to Earth that it will be worth investigating closer. How we get there, however, is another problem entirely.

Due to the vast distances between star systems, and the relatively slow acceleration of our current spacecraft, it would take longer than a human life-span to reach our neighbors. Even with improved fuel technologies, any spacecraft we create will not be able to go faster than the speed of light, which is still too slow to be practical for interstellar voyages. However, there may be a loop-hole: while matter and energy cannot move through space-time faster than the speed of light, there is no known law of physics preventing space-time itself from doing so and there are tantalizing indications that it can. Immediately following the Big Bang, there was a brief period when many models predict that space-time was accelerating faster than the speed of light. It is well known that all matter and energy warp space-time, which causes gravity, so theoretically it would be possible to create a structure of mass and/or exotic energy that accelerates a “bubble” of space time, with a spacecraft embedded within. Some lab experiments have revealed tantalizing clues that this may in fact be possible: when a gyroscope is placed above rotating, super-cooled rings, it behaves as if it is rotating as well. This indicates that the rotating rings effect the local space-time matrix. In other experiments it has been shown that between two parallel, uncharged metal plates, there is a region of space that seems to have less energy than the surrounding region. Researchers conducting these studies believe this area of “negative energy” could be generated in front of a space time “bubble,” pulling it forward like a vacuum. Whether or not the “bubble” could be accelerated past the speed of light is unknown.

One of the biggest obstacles to these technologies, besides our lack of knowledge, is the huge amount energy required to utilize them. Our current energy production capacity comes nowhere near the amount needed to create a “space-time warp bubble.” Whole new power production technologies will have to be created, not merely more efficient solar panels and cold fusion. Some scientists think that if we learn how to harness dark energy – the force behind the universe’s continual expansion – we could meet the energy requirements of such a spacecraft. But due to the fact that we have no idea what dark energy is or how to research it, these ideas are pure speculation at best.

Diversity is the key to survival for any species. Not just genetic diversity, but diversity of habitat. Author and scientist Harry Kloor related this concept to humans when he said “if we don’t eventually spread out – I’m not saying tomorrow or even 100 years – but if we don’t get off planet it is inevitable that we would go extinct, just like the dinosaurs.” It’s not a matter of if – but when. Eventually, a huge asteroid will smash into the Earth and wipe us out, or climate change will alter the environment to a point that it becomes uninhabitable. Even if we’re lucky enough to survive all of that, eventually the Sun will expand as it converts hydrogen to helium enveloping the Earth, utterly annihilating it. Our only chance for true long-term survival is migration. The more star systems we inhabit, the harder it will be to make us extinct. And if we can develop the ability to travel to other stars, why on Earth shouldn’t we?