Will interstellar travel become a reality? Orientation problem

On a clear April day, I wanted to take a bit of a riff on the near science topic. Fortunately, the current state of my <censored /> and the phase of the moon (the full moon has already passed) seems to allow it. Although nowadays nothing can be 100% sure, and only the inhabitants of the Andromeda constellation can give a full guarantee. That's all, enough offtopic offtopic. Closer to the body.

Post written based on this and this article. I apologize in advance if someone will seem overly pessimistic on the eve of Cosmonautics Day.
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Disclaimer: Everything written below is idle speculation of a philistine who is not related to science. But when did this fact keep amateurs from “scientific” discussions? So I, too, was no exception).

Enough has been written about the prospects for interstellar travel, both in serious literature and frivolous (I mean in science fiction). Those who are interested in this issue - Wikipedia and Google to help. One thing is certain: future star travelers, if they ever appear, will face many difficulties and dangers. This can be read, for example, in this article .

Here I want to consider only one aspect of such travel, to which, I think, very little attention is paid. As you can guess from the title, it will be about orientation . By orientation, I mean determining one’s location in outer space.

Suppose we (in the sense of humanity) already have a means / method of interstellar travel. It doesn't matter what the tool is and how we got it. Although not. Suppose that this is some kind of device of instant teleportation, inherited from the friendly aliens. Suppose we took advantage of this device and teleported <censored /> - knows where. The question arises: how to find out exactly where we hit? Or, more precisely, how to determine where we are relative to the Earth (or any other known object)?

Let us turn to the genre of cine fiction for a concrete example. If you watched the movie “ Stargate ”, then surely remember the episode with the first launch of the Gate and sending a probe to explore the situation on the “other” side. So, on arrival at a foreign territory, the miracle of American technology, among other things, somehow managed to send home in a matter of minutes a lot of information, including information about its exact location. The film even convincingly showed the process of positioning the probe's arrival site on a star chart. There are two legitimate questions:

1. How could the probe determine its location?
2. How could he send this information to Earth in such a short time?

The answer to the second question from the point of view of modern science is obvious: in any way, given the fact that the transfer of information from another star system to the old Earth should take at least four years (actually much more, according to the film, but it was clear It is stated that the other end of the Gates is in another galaxy. There is, of course, the option of using the Gates themselves for this, but as far as I know, they were one-sided in the film).
You probably already thought: and why was he stuck to this unfortunate film, doesn’t it happen that there are few blunders in Hollywood movies? In fact, this is one of my favorite films, and it is more offensive that there is such a blunder in it, though not quite obvious.

So, it turns out that it is impossible to transfer information about your location to Earth in time acceptable to humans. But what about the first and main question: Is it possible, in principle, to determine your location, being far from the Earth?

As far as I can tell, there is no definitive answer to this question. I would say this: in general, no more than yes. However, in particular cases it is quite possible.

As for the method of determining the location, it can be only one - visual-analytical (as I would call it). A simplified version of this method is used in our time - with the orientation of spacecraft (SC). This process looks like this: we remove in parts the image of the starry sky (space), we find on it objects known from Earth observations (stars, constellations) from star catalogs, and thus determine our orientation.

When flying within the solar system, the view of the starry sky from the spacecraft will not differ from that of the Earth (it also does not stand still, but moves with the rest of the planets). Near the star nearest to the sun - Proxima Centauri - this view also does not change much, except that the position and brightness of the stars closest to us will change. And if we move very far, suppose, to the opposite half of the disk of the Milky Way (our galaxy), can we identify there objects familiar to us on Earth?

As is known, most of the objects seen from the Earth with the naked eye belong to the Milky Way, with most of them located by galactic standards very close. Therefore, purely visually, we are likely to observe a completely different starry sky, not like on Earth. All this greatly complicates the analysis, but not enough to make it impossible. Of course, the neighbors in the Galaxy will now turn out to be completely different, unfamiliar stars, and the objects of the Galaxy distant from us, due to its shape, will be almost impossible to see, even with an armed eye. But our galaxy is not the only one in the universe. There are others. The nearest ones can be used for orientation. But this requires high-precision equipment (probably not worse than the Hubble telescope). It will be necessary not to identify the nearest galaxies (this will not be difficult), but to determine the distance to each of them with sufficient accuracy, and thus determine its position in our galaxy relative to the Earth.

So, with the intragalactic movements it seems to have sorted out. And what about traveling to other galaxies? Will we be able to navigate there as well? This is where the biggest problems begin. If for nearby galaxies it is still possible to somehow simulate a possible view of our and neighboring galaxies “from the side”, then for distant ones ... I can’t even imagine what benchmarks you can find there. In short, here I am more inclined to pessimism.
... And if we take into account some of the modern cosmological theories, according to which the observable Universe is only a part of the complete one, then ... the writing of a guidebook on the Universe is postponed .

These are my thoughts on this.
On this, I probably finish. But the topic of the article remains open for discussion. I will be glad to hear other points of view on this problem.

UPDATE:
I admit my wrong with the Stargate movie. As the users of Andreicheg , Elkaz, and others corrected me, according to the film, the probe maintained contact with the Earth through the Gate, which transmitted radio waves in both directions. So both questions on the Gate are removed, although I personally still have doubts on the first question (how could the probe determine its location while being indoors - inside the pyramid?).

The main issue of the article also weakened noticeably: Users of Selmaril , safright , Ocelot and others strongly shaken my skepticism by proposing to use strong sources of radiation, such as pulsars, quasars, radio galaxies, as reference points. This, of course, can greatly facilitate the task of orientation in space.
But for some reason it still seems to me that this problem is much deeper than it seems at first glance. Its root lies in the fact that the distances between objects of the Universe are too large, and the speed of light (radio waves) emission is too small for universal scales. Everything we see in the sky is a reflection of the past of stars, galaxies, etc. If we move a great distance, we must take into account the fact that together with us it shifts in time and the picture of the past is greater, the lower our speed (hmm, an interesting paradox).

But in general, of course, future star travelers will have plenty of problems, and what is considered here is just flowers.
But I, nevertheless, will be extremely happy if I see in my lifetime a refutation of all my doubts in the form of a starship arriving from a long trip :)