Space Travel Forever

There are many times I wonder if humans will really ever visit space. By space I mean outside the Sun's atmosphere, which reaches out beyond the Earth. We travel in the tiniest amounts relative to the vastness of interstellar space. And we have never been even close to there.

We have unmanned probes -- Voyagers 1 and 2 which may someday reach beyond the bow shock of our solar system. And they have been traveling for decades. It is unlikely that any humans would be patient enough to travel that far with nothing to do but wait and wait and wait -- for nothing whatsoever. They would die before they got out beyond the Oort Cloud, or at least be immensely feeble and riddled with cosmic radiation.

But, lets pretend that we actually make some kind of device that can shield humans from any radiation, travel at sub-light-speed but still at relativistic speeds. Then what? We could travel for many more decades, raising a family aboard some tiny microcosm of our home, only to float endlessly toward unknown emptiness, perhaps passing by some star many generations later, and finding nobody home.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, aliens have decided to come out of the closet. They admit they've been visiting us for thousands of our years. And worst of all, they do not come from another planet in spaceships traveling across the galaxy like the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria. They merely cross the dimensional planes that separate us, by use of some kind of gravity warping machine or whatever.

We then must bid our brave generations of Space Travelers out beyond the Oort Cloud a final electronic goodbye, or perhaps a message that implores them to turn about, to return home. Please come back, to the only home there will ever be, forever.

In our science fiction books there have been marvelous machines imagined, designed and specified to quite extensive detail. But similar to the beautifully crafted Victorian Time Machine of H.G. Wells, none of them can really work that way. Perhaps I am wrong, which my imagination wishes to be so. Perhaps the physics of multidimensional travel  is nearly equivalent. To travel beyond our own 4D environment to some other plane would be no less grand and no less distant than traveling through empty space forever.

But, if aliens came to greet us from such planes of existence, they could at least guide us toward a worthwhile goal, and not just let us grope in the dark. Yet that must be exactly what the aliens did, for who knows how long, before hitting just the right combination to locate our living planet. To them, or at least to the first ones who accomplished such a feat, it must have been far grander than winning the lottery.