The Final Frontier
Everything we see is older than it seems. The face you see in your bathroom mirror from a foot away is a couple of nanoseconds older than it appears – the approximate time it takes the light reflected from your face onto the mirror and then back into your eyes to travel the distance of one foot in each direction. The further the distance, the greater the age disparity between object and reflected image viewed.
Two recently discovered earth-like exoplanets are estimated to be 470 and 1,100 light years away. This means that the light from them reaching earth now left them (and shows how they looked) 470 and 1,100 years ago – ancient, obsolete, historical light, in other words.
The true current conditions on the surfaces of these exoplanets and the solar system they are part of are surely unknown and unknowable in the context our earthly time frame, are they not?
A journey planned to travel to them from earth (assuming the technology and journey time issues are somehow resolved) could result in the vessel arriving to find dead stars; or planets in very different orbits after a catastrophic impact from a supersized meteor; or planets devoid of atmospheres due to stilled cores having disrupted the magnetic fields that keep their atmospheres from being stripped away.
Fantastical technological solutions such as folding space-time to hyper-abbreviate the journey would not solve the problem of how human beings would go about planning interstellar or intergalactic journeys over vast distances, based on only ancient, obsolete historical data, that is potentially irrelevant by hundreds or thousands of years.
Even if some new type of physics were to come up with a method of hyper-accelerating light from these exoplanets through a fold in space-time to reduce the extent of the obsolescence of the information conveyed from them, the spatial element of the problem would be solved but what about the time paradoxes created by folding time?
The time differential between the immediate locality of the point of origin and that of the point of reception of the light would not have changed. A vessel’s crew entering the fold would arrive on the other side at a point in time before they had been born – meaning they could not have been alive to start the journey in the first place. Similarly, a probe sent through the fold to send data back to earth would arrive on the other side at a point in time before the technology existed to have conceived, designed, manufactured and launched it.
What about the causation paradoxes?
In order to create a usable passageway through a fold between two points in space time, the technology to open and close the fold needs to be deployed at both ends. In other words, in order for the very first human or alien attempt to even be possible to open a fold in space time at the departure point, enter it and emerge at a different point in space
time, a prior journey would already have to have been made at some point in the past in order to deploy the technology required to open and close the fold at the destination end.
Is there any solution to these seemingly imponderable distance, time and causation paradoxes?
Or will any future manned deep space journey to a distant solar system or remote galaxy simply have to remain a (probably one way) blind stab in the dark, using a type of physics yet to be discovered and relying on fortuitously compatible alien technology at each end, the operability of which is unpredictable due to age, to make such a journey viable?
Without answers to these questions, no detailed planning or even an iota of certainty of outcome can surely be possible, because every scintilla of our information about intergalactic and interstellar space will always have come to us carried by ancient, obsolete, historical light.
M.S.T.B. (MSc, PhD)