I want a ticket on the "Jefferson Starship" if they decide do build one

"Black sails knifing through the pitchblende night
Away from the radioactive landmass madness
From the silver-suited people searching out
Uncontaminated food and shelter on the shores
No glowing metal on our ship of wood only
Free happy crazy people naked in the universe"

The technology already exists and the mechanism is quite simple in structure. Such a machine also slides the layering of time. Not something for the general public.

We are overconstraining the problem if we insist that any interstellar mission must be completed within one human lifetime. Humans have been known to complete projects that span many generations, though not often. Some cathedrals and other large monuments, for example, took that long to build.

Of course, when the final goal of a large project is so far in the future, fewer people are willing to come forward and contribute money to its construction, but there would be some. When the cost of a relatively slow-moving, unmanned interstellar probe becomes small enough to be supported by a few idealistic philanthropists, that's probably when they will be launched. With any luck, images of distant planets and moons will then be beamed back to Earth a few centuries later. Too bad all of us alive today will miss it, but in the long run it's probably inevitable.

We have been funding NASA with hundreds of billions of dollars for work projects (survival of the empire) and we are no further ahead than where we were on Oct, 11, 1966, Apollo 7.

When will we stop playing this make belief game, space race with subordinates, and start doing real science. Americana is a system second to none and we don't need to compete and work with countries decades behind. They will only impede our progress and deplete our resources. The only competition and incentive we need is to keep progressing on our own pace and vision.

We need to get out of this trap of allowing present technology to stagnant our progress, dictate the path to further exploration. We need to be honest with ourselves and identify the limits and make the necessary adjustments to keep going forward. I don't know of a better model than the proven classical scientific analysis, conjecture based of present technology, do the physics, do the experiments and observations, make the adjustments and move on.

All the answers are there in front of our eyes, the universe itself. We are living in positive time, all phenomena in the universe have a positive time direction, (increasing entropy), why? If we formulate a plan, produce a list of questions which answers will lead us towards answering this mystery and we will forever be moving forward. This should be NASA's agenda, pure science research.

I believe NASA is too big for it's own good. The aerospace and space R&D should be done in industry and let NASA focus on pure science research for the betterment of life on Mother Earth.

I can just see the headlines on the london times August 3, 1492, msnbc section, page three, captioned picture of some boob, columbus in fact..."brit boffins baffled by bambozzler C.Columbus,all usuns having a good gaffe, same as the twit french next door, jeez, is the quenn of spain daft or what?"" see ad for our local flat earth society near the inset."

reality check indeed. FIRE THAT PUBLIC SERVANT AND GET SOMEONE WITH SOME VISION!!!!

I like the notion of a NGO doing something long term in R&D, it's a path we've never really explored.

Might be a whole lot more viable to be set up as a "20 year Mars Ship", at least as a target along the way.

Well I see that one question has spawned many diverse opinions, suggestions and such. Indeed there is a lot to consider when undertaking such a project, environmental concerns, monetary concerns, longevity concerns, the practical, the fundamental, etc. The middle east was selected because it is where most of the oil is coming from, and to destroy that area would get the ball rolling so to speak, as did the question in the first place. Solving most of the conflicts, removing impediments to progress and putting a boot the world's butt in one fell swoop, would be the same as killing two birds with one stone. The US has technology that is being hid for many good reasons, many of those reasons are reflected by the above opinions and statements, by many well meaning individuals.

Rocket Science is obviously not going to be the answer. As was calculated in one or two of the above comments, getting the resources from the earth is not going to work. Even if we manage to build the infrastructure to put an industrial space-station in orbit, beyond the moons orbit, and start with accumulating the resources, from our solar system, needed to build spacecraft capable of reaching the outer planets in less time that it has taken the space probes that have been sent already, it will take an effort from a unified people, as in all of humanity. There are just so many people willing to undermine what we already have today, that even thinking of such a possibility is just plain fantasy, and most of those people are in the middle east.

A technology that might actually work is one that would employ a wormhole strategy that would connect two areas of space-time, with the entire ship going through the projected opening. There would not be a need for FTL flight, or huge amounts of fuel-mass, etc. and the actual amount of time used in the travel process would be very small in comparison to current technologies that would take a lot of time and materials. While warp drive sound fun, there still would a lot of time needed to travel to even the nearest star, while travel via a wormhole would be near instantaneous. Current thought on wormholes seem to conclude that it would take the whole energy equivalent of our solar system just to get one to open and be stable long enough to get one ship through it, let alone know where/when the other end is going to be. Again these are the same ' knowledgeable ' individuals which are keeping the rest of us in the dark ages, and controlling what resources that are available, to keep us under their collective thumbs, and the money in their collective pockets.

It is amazing how many people will go along with an imaginative ideal just because it fits in some mathematical computation. Subsequently wormholes are just that, mathematical models of science fiction fantasy. Not everything that can be calculated to exist can exist in the dimensional aspection of our universe; or at least it can not exist per popularized media: "Science fiction fans love the possibility of other universes, even more so contemplating the possibility of being able to travel between them through exotic configurations of spacetime, notably wormholes, which are pretty much just black holes with an opening poking through the singularity." Indeed such descriptions suggest that a workable wormhole can be the alternate dimensional bridge between black hole and white hole pairs or the stretching of a singualrity that would allow our SpaceTime to bypass aspects of general, and even special relativity (all very 'Dr Who'ish). However these singularities are not aligned like magnets to allow attraction at one end and repulsion at the other end. Despite the illustrations of black holes to enhance our understanding of their theoretical behavior, there is no one entrance. One needs to consider such illustrations as a conceptual model of a black holes behavior; i.e., the concept is to be abstrated over the entire spherical surface. After all, the overriding precept here is gravitational force. Once you're in a black hole, there is no escape save the dissipated energy of your atoms being reorganized.

While black holes represent a warp in the fabric of SpaceTime, the use of the term warp is meant to be understood as a distortion rather than a hyperspace jump. SpaceTime distortions do not need to go anywhere, they are somewhat self-sufficient in the nature of their being. SpaceTime distortions are dead ends that allow for the transient nature of dimensional transitions in matter. Their very gravitational influence suggests that are not losing matter, but harnessing it to support the integrity of the black hole itself. [Kind of like an immense hurricane in SpaceTime, a black hole is the result of gravitational differences wthat support its condition.]

As a side note, there are no wormholes as well because the very existence of wormholes relies on the pairing of black holes or the pairing of a black hole and a white hole. There is no escape from a black hole (save the lost energy of matter being radiated), so paring black holes is an inept conception of travel. And since information can not be lost or created within an already created universe, the co-existence of a black hole and a while hole pairing imposes a SpaceTime paradox. More of the cosmological nature of the universe can be explored via the book, "The Evolutioning of Creation - Volume 2". http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/8/prweb8743267.htm

To my way of thinking, we are 1000 years behind.  I have to wonder what the world would have been like if the headway and development trajectory started by the Greeks and Romans had continued.

It would be nice to think we would advance culturally as fast as we do technologically.  But sadly we would have ended up with nukes in the hands of who - Vikings?

It occurred to me that someone should ask- WHICH SPEED OF LIGHT? The speed of light has been shown to vary- getting slower as it nears a star and at it's fastest when zipping between galaxies. What happens as one goes from one area- like within a solar system- and then the S-O-L gets bumped up as you exit that solar system. Of course, when one thinks about it, it means that the S-O-L actually encompasses an entire range of speeds from the slowest to the fastest rates.

Won't be 200 years. As soon as we get rid of Iran, North Korea, and most of the Middle East we can start worrying about important things like this. So maybe 40-50 years.

There are two types of space time that need to be discussed here so the average non physicist understands the difference and has a sense of meaning.

The first form of space time is Inert Time Space or ITS. What ITS is is the measureable distance or time, because is not time a measure of distance or length?, between the inert portions of time and space. What I mean by inert is that the variables involved with measuring ITS will never produce a matter/anti-matter reaction or energy nor will such a reaction of matter/anti-matter ever effect ITS to change the change the atomic structure of ITS because ITS does not have any energetic properties to change. ITS is the absolute of nothing being that it can never be effected upon nor effect upon any matter or anti-matter present within a determined area of space time. ITS would have been how the Universe was prior to the Big Bang.

The next form of space time is regular space time where all forms of matter both matter and anti-matter and the reactions between each type of energy can be measured across a defineable distance of time. Regular space would include Dark Matter which is not space itself but is a remnant of the extreme energy that was left over at the beginning of the Big Bang.

Once Dark Matter is understood and calculated into the formula of understanding how light is affected by Dark Matter then we will be able to use Dark Matter to create a new field around a ship that when certain frequencies are sent through the Dark Matter field will repel any and all forms of atoms away from the ship.

Just because an atom cannot be seen does not mean that it cannot create a wall of force against a ship.

Everyone here has probably been swimming before. We all know that the higher that you jump into a pool of water from the more likely you will be killed as the water becomes like a concrete wall.

If you can find the answer to the question of why this occurs then you will have a basic understanding of how traveling at faster than light speed velocities will create a wall of atoms that will crumple our starship.