Space is a vast and dark place humanity has been thriving to explore, especially over the past two centuries. In these two centuries, due to various reasons, such as competition between nations, and humanity’s virtue to explore & create, a chain of scientific and technological advancements were made, such as Polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon), which also greatly benefited our daily lives. Humanity has managed to explore the core of our solar system, but are there barriers to overcome in future while exploring space, and if there are any, will we ever transform into our fictional dream of an intergalactic civilization?
The Cold War was an age of high tension between major political forces, which onset the arms and space race. Nations made numerous advancements, and what was fiction became a reality. The USSR was the first to send a human being to space, and in 1969, the USA followed by sending a crew to the moon, landing them and bringing them back, which was quote-on-quote unattainable. These accomplishments display we can make significant progress in a short timeline with constant political pressures, overcoming limits set by ourselves.
However, if we are aiming to scale up the level of our exploration, we will eventually have to face various challenges that might be impregnable.
Firstly, to finish exploring our solar system, many planets are yet to be explored entirely. There are also moons on those planets which might sound easy to accomplish, but the journey will take decades because of the vastness of space. Even with the most sustainable and quickest transportation ways, it will take years to travel, maybe decades.
Exploring near solar systems will be much more difficult because of the vaster distances between systems. The closest current solar system is about 4.35 light years away, which translates to 40 trillion kilometres. We will face similar challenges but more exponentially demanding requirements.
Scaling up the scope of the exploration, we are considering exploring the Milky Way – our home galaxy. Parallel problems, but it will require substantial improvement for much greater distances. If we assume that our civilization endures against barriers life will face and our virtue never falls, we will undoubtedly colonize our galaxy.
Theoretically, there is a limit to our exploration of space. Milky Way and tens of known or unknown nearby galaxies, the Local Group, is our maximum potential for exploration. As a consequence of the expansion of the universe, more space emerges. The rate is accelerating every moment, and it is already past the breakpoint at which we will never be able to reach anything besides our Local Group.