Humanity in Space: The Next Few Centuries

I remember a time when robot spaceship weren't exploring the outer reaches of the Solar system. My notion of what's 'obviously impossible' may not be the same as someone who

• Can't remember when the World Wide Web wasn't
• Sees nothing unusual about crisp, clear, live video feeds from reporters in remote parts of the world

Humanity in Space: The Next Few Centuries

Posts discussing what we might see, decades - or centuries - from now:

• "Warp Drive: Silly as Thinking People can Fly"
  (May 17, 2013)
• "Another Step Closer to a Practical Warp Drive: Maybe"
  (November 30, 2012)
• "Antimatter Rocket Motor: Physics, Straightforward; Engineering, Not So Much"
  (October 26, 2012)
• "Time, the Universe, and Space Aliens"
  (April 20, 2012)
  Particularly
  • From Theoretical Physics to Working Spaceships
• "Faster Than the Speed of Light: Maybe"
  (November 25, 2011)
• "Interstellar Travel: Another Look"
  (January 10, 2011)
• "Interstellar Space Probe: Thirty Years Later"
  (May 9, 2010)
• "Warp Speed Kills? Let's Say It's an Engineering Challenge"
  (March 11, 2010)
• "The Incredible Electric Rocket"
  (March 6, 2010)
• "NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts: Time to Re-Start?"
  (August 11, 2009)
• "Warp Drive Might Not Be Stable: Physcisists Take Another look at Alcubierre's Work"
  (June 12, 2009)
• "Warp Drive: Yes, it May Be Possible; But Don't Hold Your Breath"
  (May 7, 2009)
• "Cloud Cities of Venus"
  (July 25, 2008)
• "Serious Discussions of Warp Drive"
  (May 24, 2008)
• "Interstellar Travel: Difficult, yes; Impossible; No - NASA"
  (April 30, 2008)

Posts about more current space-related technology, transportation, military and business developments are listed in:

• "Humanity in Space: The Next Few Decades."

Spaceports, Electric Rockets, and a Warp Drive - Maybe

Not long ago, I ran across an online collection of photos and graphics showing Dubai's remarkable architecture - including a proposed spaceport. The author said, "The UAE Spaceport would be the first spaceport in the world if construction ever gets under way. I'm not joking..." (October 25, 2008)

I don't blame the person who wrote that for not being up to speed. This is an era in which, if you blink - you'll miss something.

I'm a bit of a news junkie, and interested in space exploration and transportation technology, so I'd recently been reading, elsewhere, about America's first commercial spaceport - which was already in operation.

Warp Drive? Let's Take a Short Look at the History of Rockets

A 'warp drive' might be possible: assuming that Miguel Alcubierre's mathematical model for moving a pocket of space-time through the rest of space-time - at any velocity - is a fair approximation of something that would work. To build a working 'warp drive,' 'all' we have to do is figure out how to harness energy on a literally astronomical scale, bend the fabric of space, and do so without killing everybody nearby with the radiation generated.

Sounds like a huge series of tasks - but we've been through something like this before.

It's sort of like where we were about fifty years before the first spaceship were built, when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and others published some interesting - and at the time useless - mathematical models for how we could move objects from one planet to another. Provided we had access to energy sources that hadn't been developed yet.

Or maybe we're in the position of Hero of Alexandria's contemporaries. He developed an aeolipile - a sort of prototype rocket - which remained a useless curiosity for almost two millennia - until steam power was developed independently in another part of the world. (May 7, 2009)