Who says we even exist?
Not to pick on your ideas… but it’s so easy it is to handwave away a physically impossible constraint, and then focus on consequences. I guess that’s what sci fi is, that’s ok.
I don’t know. It’s easy to give lots of whatabouts. Whatabout warp drive, black holes, freezing our brains? Did you think about THAT, @Scott123? Again it’s not for me to be a downer… but… it’s all just turning out to be fiction. Lots of hype sure, but 48 years after landing on the moon, and humanity can’t currently put a human more than about a tenth of the way there.
Edit: actually we can’t put a human more than about 1/2000th of the distance to the moon.
I do believe a self-sustaining space vessel that can support generations is possible. Ours is travelling through the cosmos at breakneck speed. Its truly amazing when you think about it… we shouldn’t, you know, break it… it does keep us alive.
Have a read of this post, on this great website run (but not updated since 2015) by a physics professor.
One of the prevailing narratives of our time is that we are innovating our way into the future at break-neck speed. It’s just dizzying how quickly the world around us is changing. Technology is this juggernaut that gets ever bigger, ever faster, and all we need to do is hold on for the wild ride into the infinitely cool. Problems get solved faster than we can blink.
But I’m going to claim that this is an old, outdated narrative. I think we have a tendency to latch onto a story of humanity that we find appealing or flattering, and stick with it long past its expiration date. Many readers at this point, in fact, may think that it’s sheer lunacy for me to challenge such an obvious truth about the world we live in.
Heh, I’m not really extrapolating, just saying that there’s always the possibility of discoveries down the line that makes today’s impossibilities suddenly more plausible. A merchant in Renaissance-era Venice would be completely stumped if you asked him how “face-to-face” real-time conversations with people in China would be possible, yet kids do it today without even thinking about it. I mean it’s easy, it just goes over the Internet. Duh!
Everything we know today points to it not being possible, but we’re also prisoners to our understanding of how the universe works. I think it’s the height of arrogance to believe that we have all the answers now.
But a kid watching the Jetsons wouldn’t be so amazed about facetime; in fact they might be disappointed we don’t have flying cars. A person could also say it’s the height of arrogance to assume humanity’s future is “in the stars!” which is essentially an excuse not to take care of our own planet (e.g. allowing resource consumption to continue unchecked).
What’s your point?
It could be. It is interesting though that, for example the more Starshot gets planned the more feasible it seems to be. Oh and this seems like a good excuse to post this again. How to do Interstellar navigation I LOVE this guy :)
Humanity’s future is not in space.
Thank you. This seems such a simple solution, and multiple novels going at least as far back as the 1940’s have had stories about it, and yet it seems to get totally overlooked every time the discussion comes up.
It doesn’t even require light speed for chrissakes!
Granted, it does require other solutions to other problems, but every time somebody says, “Light speed is our biggest barrier to interstellar travel, and it cannot be overcome”, someone mentions generational starships, and it gets completely ignored.
Doesn’t even need to be a starship. A hollowed out comet will do.
Not to mention, once (if) we gain the ability to go faster than light how the hell do we not immediately get destroyed by normal space debris. From what I can tell some sources say 100 tons of meteoroids hit the earth every day. So somehow we are supposed to go faster than 3.00×10⁸ meters per second and be strong enough to deflect the random stuff flying about.
I agree. Good point. But it begs the question, could we detect such generation ships? If so, so many would there have to be out there for us to have a decent chance at detecting one?
If they are using primarily light sails or similar (which seems sensible) and travelling at say, 5% the speed of light* then they would be really hard to detect from distance. Hell there could be tens of thousands of them in this galaxy alone and we wouldn’t know.
*the current target NASA has set for its thinking about unmanned interstellar probes.
There could be tens of billions of them and they’d be impossible to detect. Space is monstrously huge it beggars the imagination. And short of emitting massive amounts of energy (which is unlikely if they’re using light sails) there’s no way to detect them beyond radar range, which is basically the moon.
Anything involving a vat of goo has my endorsement!
Yeah, it would sort of be like growing a chia pet.
Almost all of that was over my head, but I got the basic idea.
A couple of funny moments too. One involving his laser pointer, and the other when he said the arrival time would be Sept. 9, 2092. At 3:00 p.m.
The guy has a very deadpan delivery that heightens those funny moments. When he wasn’t on-screen, I was picturing Stephen Root doing his “Office Space” red stapler character. I enjoyed it. It was understandable, even without any knowledge of the math on display.
It’s not though. It doesn’t work actually. Sorry. In short, the physics and economics don’t really work. It would need to be a small ship so we could accelerate and decelerate it, but it would need to be an enormous ship so it could self sustain. A century long planet-wide Apollo program would be needed to fund it. Oh, and these two problems (the physics of acceleration and deceleration, and the cost)? They are surmountable. In fact they’re trivial, two-bit challenges not even worth writing about, because the real challenges are much harder, probably insurmountable.
Question - what happens when one teen girl gets pregnant on day 9 of this 10,000 year trip and wants to keep her baby? I elect @Giles_Habibula to uh, take it out. And yet, strict population control might be solvable. Problem 1 down. But on day 11 the mechanic decides he wants to paint pictures instead - nope - gotta force him. Personally by now I’d be asking the higher ups if we could turn this thing around. Anyway the real problems, interstellar radiation (everyone would die), heat loss (everyone would die), micro-meteorites (everyone would die), ecological balance from our gut bacteria to the meat we’re bringing along, disease (everyone), social collapse / war (most everyone, then the lack of maintenance would finish the rest), those are the much, much harder problems. Is it ethical anyway, to send dozens or hundreds of generations to prison?
You can do some searching, King Stanley Robinson, a great science fiction author and also an author for Scientific American, here’s a boing boing article.
Anyway, the positive note is that to me at least, we don’t need to go to the stars. Humanity can end, I’m ok with it, you should be too! In fact if we could direct our focus to it, it could be a long drawn out form of slowly declining fertility and increasing happiness in an increasingly natural environment. Evidence is that fertility declines with quality of life anyway. That actually sounds more elegant, to me at least, than the thousand year prison trips to arrive on a miserable ice-world where the survivors eat each other. To make humanity last awhile longer? Why?
Bill Gates, by the way, is in my mind a greater visionary than Elon Musk. We have the tools and means to solve most of the problems on the world, we should invest in disease, quality of life, the environment. Not going to Mars (there’s actually nothing there for us).
Anyway, food for thought at least, have a good weekend.
I meant relatively simple! Compared to faster-than-light travel anyway.
These are problems we can’t solve now but that doesn’t mean they aren’t solvable in the future.
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Okay then…so we have something here that is both completely impossible and doesn’t work, but is at the same time trivial and not even worth discussing.
Anyway, there may well be sociological issues, but that can be dealt with. The same goes for the medical problems that may arise. Hand-waving it away as some kind of pie in the sky fairy tale is kind of ludicrous, actually. Especially since we’re not even just talking about humanity here, but any form of intelligent life, which may not even suffer from the same sociological issues we do.
We already have some idea of how to shield against interstellar radiation, even with our space program in its infancy, so I’m not sure why you would conclude that it makes interstellar travel a non-starter. It’s actually an easier problem to solve with non-relativistic speeds than it is once you get closer to light speed. Even if it were to require both physical and magnetic shielding (and it likely would); that’s hardly something out of the reach of humanity’s grasp.
The nihilistic mindset of wishing for the species to die off instead of flourish elsewhere in the cosmos is a lovely thought, but short-sighted in my opinion. Even if we were to just focus on humanity for a moment; people are complex, but they’re not impossible to understand. We’re still just animals. We have needs, desires, and fears. All of these things are becoming increasingly well understood.
Most people, relatively speaking, already live in a bubble. They stay in that bubble with their comfortably familiar social circle and their comfortably familiar environment 99% of the time, and they are wholly content in that bubble. They have their possessions, their family, their friends, their jobs, and their hobbies. Everything else might as well be white noise. All of these things are easily, and necessarily replicable on such a “generational ship”. And if they want a vacation? Virtual reality is practically here already.
I see a lot of challenges, but I don’t see any roadblocks. And that’s for a civilization that has only begun to understand these things. What will we know 100 years from now? Or 500 years from now? How about an extra-terrestrial civilization that has tens of millions of years of evolution on us?
Personally, I think it’s totally feasible, but I was only mentioning the concept as an “if all else fails” last ditch effort. I actually do think things like genetic / bio engineering and machine intelligence will make it a moot point for us, and I believe that if intelligent life does exist elsewhere, it likely exists in such numbers and with such variety as to make this entire exercise pointless, because we simply do not know what we don’t even know. It would be like one caveman telling another that there’s no way anyone could ever fly, because when I throw this here rock up in the air it keeps falling back down on its own.
And Fermi’s Paradox? It may be a “skeptic’s circle jerk”, but it’s a valid question for all the reasons usually stated, and a far more interesting conversation than the “Of course there’s other life out there! Look how big the Universe is! We just can’t see it!” I often see.
As for the topic of UFOs…there are plenty of interesting videos, and that’s about it. If anybody can look at say, the US military video linked up-thread and say definitively that it’s an alien from another world, all I can say is that your threshold for proof is way, waaay lower than mine. If a super advanced race from another planet is brazen enough to hang around in plain sight of our military, I’m thinking we’d probably have something a bit more solid than a blurry video of a dark blotch in the sky at this point. But I would absolutely love to be convinced otherwise. I want to believe!