Brian MulderAstronomy 248
Term Paper

Interstellar Space Travel: What does it hold for the future?
Is space travel possible? This seems to be the question that everyone is wondering. If you take a look at the media it’s been all over the place. All sorts of movies depict space travel as easy as riding a bike. All you have to do is hop in your space cruiser, kick it in to hyper drive and boom! You are now visiting your friends on the other side of the galaxy, only a few ten thousand light-years away. If space travel is in fact that easy in the future (even though it won’t be, not for a long, long time anyways), I believe that we may be asking the wrong question. We can say that space travel will be possible, and it is possible at the moment, but only to an extent. The real question should be, what are we looking for in the universe? Why should we pursue the rest of our universe? It’s not like we even think about space travel because we believe some green ugly aliens may be out there, as portrayed by the media. I believe what we should be concerned with is why would humans pursue space travel, how would it be possible, and when would it be possible?

The future. Why else would we want to pursue interstellar travel? The truth is, our future will eventually depend on it. There is of course a tremendous deal of knowledge we could gain exploring our infinitesimal universe. Therein lies the next major reason for exploring the universe, exploration. Well you could say that is the reasons humans study any sort of science, to understand the unknown, but we won’t get into that. Humans are curious in nature, and we’ve used science to explain things and understand. Looking at our geological past we can infer that eventually humans need to get off this earth. "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," Harry Kloor said....
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