Also people traveled all over the world for many centuries without using one bit of fuel. Sailing ships explored and colonized the entire earth.
It is not at all unreasonable to think similar opportunities for propulsion may exist in space.
It is not at all unreasonable to think similar opportunities for propulsion may exist in space.
All that you say is true. I didn't think there was any wind in space. All there is to space is gravitational pull or lack of it. It's nothingness. The MAIN problem is the absolutely unbelievable distances. ONE lousy light year is, written out, 5,878,499,810,000 miles – 1 light year in miles.
Astronomy doesn't even use miles; they use parsecs.
Example: 1 parsec (3.3 light-years). Take the ONE light year and multiply. Distances are just too great. And, according to the astronomers our galaxy is EXPANDING and thus the distances are getting greater.
Google: This list contains all known stars and brown dwarfs at a distance of up to 5 parsecs (16.3 light-years) from the Solar System, ordered by increasing distance. In addition to the Solar System, there are another 55 stellar systems currently known lying within this distance. These systems contain a total of 56 hydrogen-fusing stars (of which 46 are red dwarfs), 14 brown dwarfs, and 4 white dwarfs. Despite the relative proximity of these objects to the Earth, only nine of them have an apparent magnitude less than 6.5, which means only about 13% of these objects can be observed with the naked eye.
Besides the Sun, only three are first-magnitude stars: Alpha Centauri, Sirius, and Procyon. All of these objects are located in the Local Bubble, a region within the Orion–Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Bottom line: we do not have the components on earth to travel that far. Our life spans are too short, so we would have to travel hibernating for THOUSANDS of years. Our bodies just don't last that long, even in stasis.
Also bottom line: what we have on earth is what's out there. There are NO other elements but what's on our very generic periodic chart of the elements that you looked at in chemistry class. Just can't be done with what we have and there is nothing different out there in the way of elements.
Scientists have combined frozen, boiled and baked (just kidding on the last one) every known element and any possible combination to get to some kind of "new fuel." The fuels we've used to escape earth and go to the moon were tested and found to be great. But, as was said, the NEAREST stars, totally uninhabitable for us, are too far away for our fuels...and that is all there is in existence. We couldn't build a big enough ship to carry us out there and return to earth.
DISTANCE...that tiny little word.
One lousy little light year is almost 6 trillion miles. Hah, Carl Sagan would have had a field day with that: BILLIONS AND BILLIONS!!
One sci-fi answer was to mind travel. Maybe our minds can go distances where our bodies, ships and supplies cannot.