The Dangers of Space Travel Something was proved beyond a doubt today and it was the existence of black holes. A photo was taken of one. There are no telescopes powerful enough to get a good picture of one, so many radio telescopes were linked together into something called the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. While we cannot see the hole itself, we can see the material swirling around it which is super-heated. For years scientists have talked about the existence of black holes, but this is the first time we have got a picture of one. Since the gravity in a black hole is so strong no light escapes it, so we only see what is going into it. The material swirls around it before being sucked in. It is said this black hole is 18.5 billion times the mass of our sun. One of the problems we have with space and what it contains is we are newbies, meaning we have just started to explore space in a very primitive way. We haven’t even made it to another solar system. There are so many theories about what lies ahead of us and so many surprises waiting for us, there is no way to know what we don’t know. That sounds crazy doesn’t it? One of the things I always wondered about was the physics of things. Just because something works one way in our solar system or maybe even in our galaxy, will we find things work different in other solar systems or galaxies? Maybe there are no other solar systems or galaxies, this is not my idea, but some scientists believe the rest of the universe is a hologram. I will never believe this, but there is no denying they do. What happens when we get to what we believe is a star and it isn’t there, do we agree with these guys or do we chalk it up to gravitational lensing? In case you don’t know what I am talking about here is what gravitational lensing is. It is light from a distant object in the universe which is bent making the object appear to be in different places at the same time to an observer. In 2008 the NASA Hubble Space Telescope captured a picture of a group of five star-like images of a single object. If in the future we plan a trip to a distant star system we have to make sure it really exists and we are not heading for something which isn’t there. Another problem for future space flights might be the force of gravity. We could very easily head somewhere in the future not knowing there is a strong gravity force in our path. Can you imagine we take our puny spacecraft and head to a distant planet in another solar system and encounter a very strong gravitational force? We would be trapped. Gravity forces in space can be so strong they can rip the atoms out of our bodies and dissolve us. It is hard for us to imagine something with this much power but it exists, and we would probably never be able to construct any type of craft which could counter this force and escape it. Gravity can be such a destructive force on so many levels. Since I mentioned the photo of the black hole proving they exist, I would like to ask a question, but no one really knows the answer, but I will ask it anyway. Could there be a black hole in an isolated area of space without what is known as an event horizon, that is the material swirling around it, because nothing is close enough to it to get sucked in? I ask this question because if that exists, or there is no event horizon for some other unknown reason, we might travel too near one of these and that would also be the end of us and our craft. There are so many hazards out there we know about and probably way more we have no idea exist. We know all sorts of radiation of many different strengths exist and some are so powerful they can travel thousands of light years and God help us if we get into their way whether we are on a spaceship or our planet just happen to be in the path. There are powerful Gama rays, X-Rays and many other types of radiation, but is there a type of radiation we will find which we have no idea exists? I can’t say we can eliminate the idea, because we just don’t know. Perhaps we don’t have the devices yet to discover it. It just might turn out travel outside our own solar system will be so dangerous we may not be able to take up manned space flight. We know there is some sort of unknown force in space which pulls on our probes when we launch them. We have no idea what it is or why it is. It might have something to do with the fact the expansion of the universe is speeding up and some scientists believe there is some unknown force pulling on it. On the other hand, maybe not and there is some other reason for the speedup. We are living in a puzzle, and that puzzle is the universe. Getting back to the rules of physics and how things work here and in our solar system, we believe they work the same everywhere and that there is a sort of universal rule to how things work. Someone once said we might find up is down and down is up. That is a over simplification of what we might find, but I am sure you get the idea. We might fly to another galaxy some day and find our spaceship is being pushed away, because the thrust pushing it forward doesn’t work the same there and it is pushing us backwards. We might get to a planet only to find we can’t land on it because we cannot figure out the physics there and therefore don’t know how to land our craft. So far, I have not mentioned the fact intelligent life might exist which doesn’t want us to leave our solar system, because they believe we could be a threat to the rest of the intelligent life out there. This scenario has been brought up many times and there could be some merit to this. You do have to wonder how an intelligent alien race would think about us. With all the nukes and armies on this planet and all the wars going on I wouldn’t be surprised if we weren’t wanted, would you?
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