9 Science Facts That Will Ruin Your Day

6. We'll Probably Never Explore The Galaxy

When we imagine the future, we usually picture humans zooming around the galaxy, colonising far-distant worlds and generally living it up as a space-faring species.

However, given the sheer scale and size of of space there's actually a pretty real chance that we'll just never get out of this poxy solar system of ours. The nearest star to us, proxima centauri, is a mere four light years away. Sounds doable until you realise that, even in the fastest craft humankind has ever produced, it would still take 19,000 years to reach.

There are options such as generation ships, or even embryo ships, but even then we have to take into consideration something called "wait calculation". This basically means that, due to the vast timescales involved, if humans sent off a ship of frozen embryos towards proxima centauri now, we'd probably invent something that could overtake it in the intervening years, wasting precious time and resources.

Expert calculate that the very soonest we might be able to leave our solar system is 1,104 years, and there are some who think that it is improbable that we will ever leave the solar system.