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[hbmp88]

I'm puzzled with how spaceships plan to be flying to other stars. Do we no realize that these stars are not staying in place, but actually moving at millions of miles per hour?

If you can explain how this is possible please do.

[Naru523]

We might increase the speed of the spacecraft. Though it might not go fast enough.

[Bla]

They are not moving by millions of miles per hour. The Sun is moving by 247 km/h as it orbits the center of the galaxy, which takes 220 million years.
Also, even at that speed, the gravity will still catch the spaceships/probes and make their speed relative(?) to the star it's near.

I think the only problem is the distance between stars. If a probe could reach just 10% of the speed of light, the fastest velocity molecules can obtain, it would still take 43 years to reach just the nearest star.

[Naru523]

In science fiction movies, they can go to other system by using a wormhole...

But it is fiction.

[hbmp88]

OK so it is like this. Things move according to stationary points around it. I sort of get it now. Even though the Earth may be moving at millions of miles an hour through the universe it is only moving at 6-- something km in our solar system, and if an object in our solar system is motionless it is still moving within our solar system(PRETTY COOL) because gravity makes us move as one. But say you leave the boundaries of our solar system. I guess you become your own mass orbiting the center of the galaxy. Which means starwars is wrong saying jump to hyperspace because we already are. Which means absolutely nothing is every still so when you stop you are actually moving at quadrillions of miles an hour away from the center of our universe, which itself is moving, posibly in a group of other universes, which in another world are atoms, so the group is a molecule, that makes up something, an even bigger universe, which as my sentence will go on forever...

And reverse..................................................
  

Isn't the universe so simple!

[FGFG]

Isn't the universe so simple!

I can explain this to you in a more... accurate way .

In the universe ALL IS RELATIVE, NOTHING IS ABSOLUTE (even time and space). This means that if you are "flying" into the space you can consider the spaceship motionless in relation to its pilot, or moving many kilometers per second in relation to Earth; again, when you are in the car, you can still say that it is the world that is moving under you, and not your car over it (when you launch a ball in the air in the car, you don't need to calculate his parabole in relation to the Earth, to catch it again). We find easier to consider Earth orbiting the Sun because the other planets, with this reference system, will follow simplier orbits. However it isn't wrong to consider the Earth at the centre of the Universe! Simply all the other planets, moons, stars, galaxies, ecc. will follow EXTREMELY complicated paths (this is way they took so many time to explain the planets' orbits. Someone, a day, discovered that putting the Sun at the centre everything resultes clear).
Assuming that all is relative, we can't find a "centre of the Universe", as all the points of it can be considered "centres".
(I hope it is clear ).

This is a very important point of the Einstain's "Relativity" (...what a strange name...). With this principle he descovered some very important rules. (e.g. the space-time dilatation)


About the Interstellar travel: (i have the vice of going off topic quite often...)
Most of the sci-fi "engines" have been explained teoretically AFTER their invention (e.g. The Star-Trek warp and the hyperspace) but every time, they need A LOT of energy to work. The warp, for example, needs the energy that the Sun produce in its whole live to work a few hours (don't remeber where i heard this, probably on Discovery channel... probably wrong...).

We will reach stars firstly with robots (as we are doing with Mars now) and then when (and "IF"!) the time to reach them will be short enough (less than some months, maybe 2 years). Otherwise we can freeze ourselves and de-freeze at the end, but in this period (could be a century for relatively distant stars) the technology on Earth will have done enormous progresses...). It would be a problem even communication! If we don't find a way to win the light speed we will need 4 years receve news from Earth, and 8 for a reply (imagine to post something here and receive the reply 8 years later... quite daunting...)

[hbmp88]

Yeah I tried talking about the separate relations but it was a mess in my post.