The other day I was so fortunate to be a passenger in a very fancy and expensive car. It had all the nice extra packages such as leather seats and a built-in GPS navigation system. While I was playing with the GPS system I had a thought. How will we navigate in space?

I know this is a very futuristic topic but I'm sure it's one that needs to be addressed very soon (well, soon as in "we're all dooomed... in 5 million years" soon). How will we navigate in space? Let's say that we would implement a GPS-like system were we have markers spread throughout the galaxy and we could just triangulate our position that way. But what if we are outside our galaxy? Aren't the markers moving along with the galaxy and thus would be constantly on the move away/to us?

For that matter, are the markers really in a fixed spot? What's a fixed spot in space? Is there such a thing as complete stop in space? We could say that an object is at a complete stop in regards to the Earth but the galaxy it's in is moving at a very high speed. Very much like Prof. Farnsworth's spaceship in Futurama. The engines don't move the spaceship, the engines move the universe around the spaceship.

It's possible that we will simply use the same method that the Deep Impact spacecraft used. We simply locate our target destination and move in that direction, fine tuning our trajectory, until we are there. That method wouldn't help us if we got lost though but it would get us to our destination.

Food for thought.

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