OK, you clearly aren't seeing the same movies I'm seeing. In Armagedon (with Bruce Willis), they flew in a space shuttle not too unlike the Challenger used today to replenish the Mir. So I'd say they're doing actual space travel as shown in the movies now.
If you're talking about interstellar flight, that's a mule of a different breed. That will be scifi for a long time. In fact, I can't think of one scifi movie where interstellar flight was featured that used any known science with validated effects. By that I mean their scifi was way more fi than sci.
For example, "warp drive" is pure fantasy. There is no such thing and it's likely there never will be such a thing. The energy needed to create a worm hole or other bend in space is way beyond current or projected technology to create.
By way of example, it takes the gravitational force of a massive galaxy, many times more massive than our own Milky Way, to bend space just a little bit; so as to create gravitational lenses. Bending space into a hole (a torus) would take the force of a billion or more times that. No way Jose.
There is one feasible interstellar design. Using solar sails once a ship is launched into near space, to accelerate the ship gradually up to, maybe, half the speed of light. This is feasible because the impulse F t (force times time) is very very big because time t is very very long (the time the sun shines on the sails). So as the relatively low force of the sun on the sails F pushes on those sails a long time, the momentum of the ship can go from mv to mV, where V >>> v over that time frame.
t would be measured in years, actually decades; so the space ship crew would have to either hibernate or be fully provisioned to endure a round trip of decades...just to fly to our nearest star about 4.3 light years away. (Proxima Centauri). Not exactly what they show us in scifi, but a feasible method for interstellar flight.
|