It is undoubtedly possible for matter to traverse interstellar distances, because after all, that’s how it got here, but for humans or functioning machines, I don’t think impossible is too strong a word.
Try to travel there fast and you have the possibly insurmountable tasks of:
-fuel sources for acceleration and deceleration
-immunity from collision with matter en route (don’t underestimate this one - collision with a speck of dust at 1/10th c is going to make a big bang.
Try to travel there at a more measured pace and you have the possible insurmountable tasks of:
-surviving the journey - or at least having someone survive it.
-maintaining all functions of your conveyance in working order for thousands, probably tens of thousands of years in an incredibly harsh environment, with finite resources and no outside support.
Personally, I think we’ll be lucky if the human race will even still be around 10,000 years from now. Nothing guarantees our survival, or that our race will leave descendents that will be at least as intelligent as we think we are. We may vanish so utterly that we will leave no descendents at all; or our descendents will have more in common with chimpanzees, dolphins or even bears than with us, more concerned with survival and reproduction than with history, art or science.
Say, weren’t the Indonesion Hobbits supposed to have split off from Homo Sapiens, or were they a completely different line?
It doesn’t take much energy if you take it slow. Interstellar space is likely full of comets and the occasional rogue planet/brown dwarf; our distant descendents may travel relatively slowly from one to another, like nomads in a desert. Given time,they will fill the galaxy.
There’s also the possibility of sending a small Von Neumann probe with human DNA information and cultural data; it could be launched for far less energy, and would be expendable; if there is a 30 % chance of surviving the journey, send 3. When they reach a new system, they can replicate like mad, set up infrastructure, then grow some human children and educate them. That’s well beyond what we can do now, but nowhere near as hard as flying through a star.
Why not ? There’s no reason why an advanced culture couldn’t make a ship capable of lasting indefinitely. Advanced robotic/nanotech should allow complete self repair and the ability to make anything it needs; the only limitation will be the need to stop for fuel/raw materials.
Of course we will engineer ourselves, and cyborg ourselves as well. We won’t have much choice; someone will, and then we will need to, in order to compete. If we don’t or can’t, our biological/AI creations will supercede us anyway.
Why ? I see no evidence the possibilities are as limited as you say.
I’m thrilled that you agree with my nomination (you’re obviously a person of evolved intelligence…do you have a silicon-based brain?), but alas, saddened that you don’t like me as much as you could.
I chose the million-year mark specifically to strip down to the bear essentials those endeavors/ideas/principals that have the best chance of ultimate survivability in the existence of our species (ex. Michael Jordan may still be a household name in the year 100,000, but not in the year 1,000,000 I’m just kidding).
If the crocodile can survive (essentially unchanged) for the better part of 250 million years, with evolutionary stressors*, I believe that we humans can survive, relatively unchanged, for 1 million years *without *evolutionary stressors.
*(I don’t know if evolutionary stressor is a valid biological term. I use it to mean those conditions that a species must endure that often lead to quick adaptation (i.e. ice ages, competition for food etc.)
BTW: I like your timeline, but you forgot to include the Scott Peterson trial after “man leaves earth”. :smack:
Except that those technologies don’t exist in any kind of form like you’re proposing; perhaps they will never exist in such form; perhaps it’s even impossible for them to exist in such form.
These debates always go the same way; the ‘oh, of course it’s possible’ side just waves away the problems by asserting that the folks in the future will just solve those problems.
Nanotechnology looks set to be interesting, but the experts are all saying that it’s going to be more along the lines of interesting paint than complete self-repairing machines and medical nanobot swarms. You’re proposing what is essentially a closed system functioning at near 100% efficiency for tens of thousands of years; if you don’t see any reason why that should be a problem, it’s because you’re not looking.
No, I’m simply going by analogy with the nearest modern equivalent : life. Individual living things may or not be inherently mortal, but living systems seem to have no such limit; Earth’s biosphere has lasted for billions of years.
Experts or not, I doubt they are right, since that seems to contradict things we know exist. If cells can cooperate, why not nanomachines ? If flesh can self-repair, why not nanotech material ? Really, a lot of the anti-nanotech crowd seem to be pushing for a rebirth of vitalism.
Not closed; I proposed a slow vessel/collection of vessels that stop periodically to gather resources. Given that earth has lasted billions of years without much more input than sunlight, I don’t think a few thousand is too much to ask.
Getting people accross interstellar distances may not be feasable, but I susspect seeding devices (machines capable of producing organic chemicals and simple nucleaic acids) could be produced that have reasonably high chance of surving thousands of years of space travel. Targetting them to reach another planet would be very hard, but if they could make use of stellar energy when they get within another solar system then they may be able to aim themselves by careful accumulation of energy and using it to achieve an orbit round the other star. I don’t see anything insurmountable in producing such interstellar devices with at least a few percentage chance of successful opperation.
If a way of ‘freezing’ human life into a totally innert state is possible, then even human interstellar travel may be possible. Once out of the solar system there is very little for a space ship to interact with, and it could potentially go completely innert until coming within range of another star from which energy for reactivation could potentially be drawn.
Anyway, as technology increases the ability to record all previously existant data will become available. I think we are close to being able to record every published written word in current computer systems. I doubt it will be too long until we reach the point of easily having all written material (published or not) on a single storage device, from then on there may be no reason to delete anything permanently ever again. What would be the limit would be the interest of our decendants in viewing or using this information. Possibly with machines integrating directly with the Human brain all this information would be in a sence known to everyone. What would be left is whether anyone would pay attention to any of the information from 997000 years ago?
Cultural things will be so far removed from the current that such things a music or theatre will probably be of no interest to far future people. Pictures and Sculprtue may still have resonance in the same way cave painings still have resonance today. Probably the sources of phylisophical ideas especially with relationship to the mind will be interesting to those future humans whom I predict will become ever more creatures of the mind themselves. So I susspect **René Descartes[?B] “I think therefore I am” will never be a forgotten name and idea, unless future humans discover an earlier proponent of that same idea, in which case that person will remain remembered into the future.
Though in writing this I am forced to concede that the very ideas of ‘names’ and ‘people as individuals’ may become meaningless to future humans. In which case the idea that people were individual from one another in their anciaent past may become forgotten to all but the most active historical thinkers whom may well argue about such a concept of individual minds being realisitic, or those early humans with individual minds being any more than advanced writing animals.
As an analogy, let’s consider a chimpanzee in Africa ~1,000,000 years ago. I’ll anthropomorphize him a little and imagine that he is proud of the rudimentary tool skills he has learned: sticking thin twigs into termite holes to extract a tasty meal, and beating branches against the ground to intimidate his rivals. He certainly has not seen any other species of animal manipulate the environment as deftly as he does, and he considers himself and his kind to be very bright indeed – apes extraordinaire. He cannot imagine anything brighter than himself. His potential seemingly knows no bounds. One night, exhausted after a long session of hot monkey love, he looks skyward and sights a bird in flight overhead. He then focuses on the moon – and he contemplates. He thinks to himself,* if I can manipulate these twigs and branches into tools that I can use here in the forest, maybe someday my descendants will fashion some sort of flying machine out of those same twigs and branches and fly up to that big ball in the sky.* And, so, a million years go by. The date: July 20 1969. Was our little chimp prescient? Did his descendants get to the moon? No, they are still dirty little chimps sticking sticks in termite holes. The only difference is that they are now doing so mostly in zoos. The animals that put them in zoos are the ones who made it to the moon.
My point? We humans think that we are the best and the brightest things going. We view our technological achievements as being extraordinarily special – special in absolute universal ways. If today we can putter back and forth to the moon, what’s to stop us from puttering another 4 or 5 light years to the next star system? Or, for that matter, why not take a Sunday afternoon jaunt 2.5 million light-years to the next galaxy? We can’t do it because we are not physically, intellectually or technologically in a league that can hope to make that type of journey now or for a long time into the future. One million years is simply not enough time to expect evolution, genetic engineering or anything else to transform us into a super-intellectual race of inter-galactic traveling silicon-based bionic beings (for that we need at least 1,000,001 years). We have high hopes, but we’re really just smart chimps who dress well.
I agree completely with the many posters who reckon a million years is far too long to talk about meaningfully. I also think we won’t be recognisably human by then, but it won’t be due to evolution by natural selection. It’ll be due to genetic engineering in the first instance, then probably computational advances - we’ll all be a hive mind with a planet sized computer as the substrate!
So to address the OP, the people who’ll be remembered, if any, will be the head of the first space elevator contruction project (who might be Bradley Edwards), or possibly the prez of the US at the time the construction occurs. And, whoever is the first human to successfully transfer their consciousness to another computing substrate. (That’s hopefully going to be MEEEEE! But I’d better put the bong down first)
Just to chuck my oar in on the “through the sun” bit (did you get that comparison from one of my past posts on Faster-Than-Light travel, Mange? You might have got it off someone else of course, but it’s always truly heartening to see someone else using the little sketch or quip you conceived.)
We arguably already have the technology to get to about 0.1c (including a protective ablation plate for interstellar dust particles, but a small rock could indeed be dangerous.) Maintaining the life support of the ship for those decades would not IMO be so absurdly more advanced than current nuclear submarine design. There are then rather easier magnetic deceleration mechanisms for a small ship which detaches from the main ship near the destination. A few resourceful young women with a portable sperm bank/IVF unit might be enough to start a human colony, especially with with a few helpful self-replicating robots around.
I think the main problem is that someone will need to live their entire life cooped up in a spaceship when they have the option of a full and happy life on this beautiful planet, all so that someone else can live somewhere similar. As games of soldiers go, I would most certainly fuck that.
Again, there is a fundamental difference between engineering difficulties in executing a scheme that is compatible with known science (e.g. building a ship that can function for a few hundred years and travel at a few percent of c) and executing a scheme that flatly contradicts known science (e.g. constructing a hull that can survive conditions at the center of the sun) or relies upon a discovery that is not remotely suggested by known science (e.g. a Star Trek "deflector shield).
You are misrepresenting my position. My distinction between “flatly impossible according to known science” and “extremely difficult but not flatly ruled out” is precisely the opposite of such breezy hand-waving.
You are ignoring the speed of scientific progress ( as opposed to natural evolution ), it’s self catalyzing nature, and the fact that once we begin to improve our minds the rate of progress will increase faster and faster. Forget in a million years; well before a thousand, I expect we ( or our creations ) will have learned all physical laws and be as intelligent as physically possible. If it is possible to do something, we will be able to; our only limits will be basic ones like physical laws/energy/time, not ignorance or stupidity.
Earth’s biosphere is a)really bloody huge, and therefore capable of absorbing a bit of abuse, b)stocked with resources that make it look (from the POV of human lifespans) like you can get away with unsustainable rates of consumption and c)supplied with a net input of energy from the sun; If you’re planning to take the Earth and sun with you on this interstellar voyage, we need to talk about your drive system; if you’re planning something that we can more realistically build, your problems of sustainability have not gone away at all.
I don’t mean to argue from authority, but when you say you doubt the experts are right, what is that actually supposed to mean?
Stop where, exactly? Even if there was somewhere convenient to stop, stopping, then starting again is the most expensive and difficult part of interstellar travel.
Do the sums; if you want to get there in a few thousand, you’re talking about a journey that is not at all leisurely and will require a great deal of fuel.
Certainly I remember seeing you use the expression; I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in other media too though; although maybe that was still people who picked it up from you.
In any case, even if interstellar travel were as technically reachable as people are arguing here (and I really think their impression is one based on a far too simplistic skimming of the whole thing), even if we could do it, we won’t.
We won’t because we haven’t got a hope of organising and diverting (indeed sacrificing) the resources.
You’ll just never get a consensus of either public, politicians or nations willing to divert massive funding and massive human, material and energy resources into a project that:
-Will not benefit any human alive on Earth
-We will never know if it succeeded or failed
You made a comparison which stated that we’re just as likely to be able to “travel through the sun” as we are to “travel to the nearest star”.
Most of the retorts were spurred by that outlandish claim, yet you’ve not responded to it. Everyone here will conceed that interstellar space travel is exceedingly difficult, and could definately turn out to be impossible for one of many reasons. However it’s orders of magnitude more likely (probably infinately) than the idea of travelling through the sun which by any reasonable understanding we have now is wholly impossible.
Its a poor comparison, and I think that’s the frame of mind in which those arguing with you are doing so.
If something is actually impossible, in that the problems encountered in attempting it are truly insurmountable in any practical sense of the word, does it actually matter how far the other side of impossible it is?
The ‘fly through the sun’ device gives people the opportunity to intellectually grasp the concept of something being so damned hard, it is actually impossible; the reason this works is that we intuitively grasp what a hostile enviroment is our sun; we don’t feel tempted to plead that somehow the brainy folks of the future will just make it all possible.
What we don’t intuitively grasp is the truly vast distances between stars, the harsh environment that is deep space, the dangers of travelling at such speed that hydrogen atoms become a menace, and the inherent frailty of man and his machines, against the timescales of tens of thousands of years. So we can feel a lot more comfortable pleading that somehow the brainy folks of the future will just make it all possible - don’t ask how they’ll do it, that’s their job, not ours.
So yes, maybe I’m guilty of some kind of exaggeration in my use of the ‘fly through the sun’ thing, however, I believe that those who are arguing that interstellar travel is just the next thing humans will do in some kind of natural progression are guilty of a far greater degree of naive oversimplification