Do you think humanity will ever become a interstellar civilization?

In My Humble Opinion
41

For me the biggest question isn’t whether humanity will ever discover technology to reasonably permit the in-person exploration or colonization of exoplanets—which as I said above I deem unlikely unless what we know about physics is way wrong, or way more incomplete than is suggested by current knowledge—but why we would do so. I mean, we don’t know of a single thing in the universe, not even theoretically, that travels fast than light. Our best mathematical models for the universe simply don’t permit it.

But never mind that, what is our motivation for attempting something so stupendously expensive and perilous? Ok, a generation ship. Many hundreds of years to even reach the nearest stars. The slightest thing going wrong would destroy everything. WHY would we try it?

“Spirit of adventure,” “spirit of inquiry,” or something like that: insufficient. It would require a really damn good reason to spend the stupendous resources, time, and energy to design and construct all that would be needed to send people safely to other stars. Space exploration is well satisfied with probes these days. It’s hard to really believe that sending a human even to Mars is all that necessary right now (though I think it might be in the near future, as we continue to trash our home planet). Is it really vital to human interests and knowledge to have someone look at Neptune with their own eyes? Or a comet? Or another star?

I suppose it is conceivable that at some very distant time in the future, the extraordinary and abundant resources of this solar system will have been exploited and consumed, and that humanity might be pushed by necessity to reach outwards. How far in the future would that be? How many millennia? Are humans likely to survive as a species for that long? Would those people be recognizable as human to us in the first place? Barring the discovery of incredibly cheap energy sources—something way beyond fusion reactors—the idea of sending even a probe to the stars seems very, very remote, let alone sending people.

I totally understand that we would want to. I want to! But wanting to and finding the motivation to put it together are totally different. This is not like sailing west expecting to reach India. It’s many, many, many orders of magnitude more challenging than that.

Maybe we’ll survive long enough for the necessity to be real, but it is really hard to believe, if you think about.

That is, barring some incredible discovery that permits cheap FTL travel But how likely is that? … It doesn’t look good.

42

Nope.

Nothing is 100% efficient and deterioration fundamental property of the universe.

43

He didn’t say 100% efficiency was necessary, though. In fact, he specifically mentioned being able to scavenger interstellar particles. As long as you can collect particles faster than you lose, and as long as you have systems like nanotech and nuclear fusion, you can replace your losses.

Alternatively, if you keep the losses low enough, you just bring enough supplies to get you safely to your destination.

44

Of course. This is a relatively trivial task for an advanced civilization to accomplish in a few hundred thousand years or less. The technology is already almost there to begin doing this even. You biological organisms and your silly applications of skepticism!

45

I think becoming an interstellar civilization is a virtual guarantee. As for a timeline on it, though, that’s difficult to say. It’d definitely not be in the next century, barring some major breakthroughs, but it would also certainly be before we’re unrecognizably human. I’d probably guess somewhere around 500-1000 years from now.

Sure, there’s arguments about it not being economically feasible, and I’d tend to agree, given today’s climate, but that won’t be the case forever. At some point, a need will arise, or our curiousity will get the best of us, and we’ll make it happen. After all, there was no real NEED to go to the moon, other than to prove we’re better than the Russians. I do suspect that we’ll need to solve some of the more pressing issues here at home first.

I also don’t think FTL is a limiting factor, just the ability to travel at some significant fraction of it. I alsos suspect that even before we can reach a significant fraction, once we can get a probe to another star roughly within a lifetime, we’ll do it. Our closest neighbor is about 4 LY away, so I don’t see why we wouldn’t start trying to send an unmanned mission out there as soon as we can hit, say, 0.05c. As our technology improves, we’ll send more and more probes out, and eventually we’ll find a habitable planet and someone will want to make it happen.

I’m also not even sure that we need any sort of generational ships or hibernation technology. I can’t imagine that in the next 500-1000 years we don’t have vastly improved biological and genetic engineering technology. Couldn’t we create an “ark” of sorts, completely run by machines but carrying significant genetic material and knowledge so as to recreate a breeding population and educate them?

I also suspect that with some of the crises that we’re currently facing, we’ll essentially be forced to come up with some of the necessary technologies along the way. For instance, with climate change, as it becomes more and more of an issue, might we not be forced to learn about methods to manipulate climate and weather patterns? As resources become more scarce, will we not have to learn how to purify water and harvest food and other materils more efficiently? These seem to be the first steps toward developing terraforming technology that we would use to take marginally or nearly habitable planets and make them so for our colonies.

The only way I can’t see us ever leaving the solar system is if we go extinct first, due to some as of now unforeseen cataclysmic event, self-inflicted, or perhaps an inability for our technology to keep pace with the damage we’re doing to the ecosystem, or our fundamentally curious nature can be assuaged in other ways. Even then, on a long enough time line, despite plentify resources, we will eventually run out, or the sun will enter another stage of its lifecycle. So I’m loathe to say never.

46

“Ever”? Well, that’s a long time.

Even so, I’m leaning toward “no.” Even if E.T., Spock, Jor-El and Chewbacca are really out there, they’re so far away we’ll never meet them or even communicate with them.

47

Actually, cro-magnon were modern Homo sapiens sapiens.

48

[quote=“nevadaexile, post:6, topic:685031”]

[ol]
[li]There are enough resources within our own solar system to last humanity forever[/ol][/li][/QUOTE]

Living a 2014 lifestyle, maybe. There were enough resources in Africa to last us forever, too.

49

Money-wise, not a chance looking from the present.
Physically it would be very difficult at best. Long term space travel is not conducive to humans.

50

I agree. That’s why I postulated the advanced tech to repair equipment and replenish resources, right there in the text you quoted.

Although I may have been a little off in calling the transmutation of other elements into oxygen as “advanced tech”, since according the Wikipedia entry I linked to it turns out two guys were turning nitrogen into oxygen back in 1911… :smiley:

And my apologies for the snarky “Nope” that you appropriately threw back in my face. I was in a mood this morning I guess…

51

There are several such needs, including asteroids, which we will probably see coming. But in that case there would have to be so many that we couldn’t divert them all. No telling how much advance notice we will get, but I hope technology progresses enough to where we can go somewhere.

52

I should hope so! Think of that real estate out there without Wal-Marts, McDonald’ses or Churches of a demonination only slightly different from those ignorant ideologues down the street, those cretins!

53

Quote:
Originally Posted by nevadaexile View Post
There are enough resources within our own solar system to last humanity forever

Completely different scenarios.

The resources of a single continent on Earth are insignificant when compared to the resources of seven other planets (including 4 gas giants), dozens of moons (some which are clearly composed of frozen liquid water), countless comets and asteroids and an Oort Cloud full planetoids and other assorted “goodies.” Harvesting even a fraction of those could support a population three times greater than our current one; not that humanity will ever grow to that size.

With an almost endless supply of material to harvest, why would humanity expand beyond our solar system when doing as such wouldn’t provide us with a benefit within the lifespans of a half a dozen or more generations?

54

Definately - but it is 500-1000 years out.

Even travelling at .1c will get you to the nearest stars. There are 50 star systems within 16 light years, or only 160 years of travel at that speed.

I think if we don’t eventually move on humanity won’t survive. Near earth supernova, bioterrorism, full out nuclear wars and other events could make our solar system a difficult place to be even if at some point people live on space stations.

But if we last long enough to put our ‘eggs’ in multiple baskets across many star systems humanity, in various evolved forms, will essentially last forever.

55

I think it’ll happen, whether it makes rational sense or not. It probably won’t be a government or corporate entity that does it, though. It’ll be some mad bastard with more money than sense and a hard-on for outer space that does it.

Does anyone think that if someone like Bill Gates or Richard Branson could build his own personal generation ship to explore another solar system right now, he wouldn’t do it? Of course he would, and he wouldn’t have too much trouble finding enough people out of the six billion plus on this planet to crew it. As things stand right now, it’s an impossible thing to be funded by just one government, let alone just one person. But in, say, a thousand years, when the colonization and exploitation of the entire solar system is in full swing? How much money would Bill Gates’ future equivalent have in an economy that size? When the richest man alive owns one fifth of the planet Jupiter, would building and launching his own interstellar spacecraft really be all that far out his reach?

56

I think we’re ignoring the difference between mere interstellar colonization, which most people are addressing, and an interstellar civilization, which is what the OP asked. The latter would require a lot more cohesiveness than is possible without FTL, IMO.

57

Certainly we will become a solar system civilization, and I dream of the day we will travel freely between the planets. There are dozens of worlds to explore, infinite riches to enjoy and plenty of danger and thrill to satisfy the most die-hard souls. Plenty of fun for everybody, and after the party’s over we can return to Mother Earth, breathe some fresh air and smell the flowers.

Going beyond? The Alcubierre Driveis currently the only theoretically/mathematically valid FTL travel mechanism that is consistent with Relativity. Nobody knows if the equations, though consistent with GR, make sense in the physical world, or how to go about building a drive with it. Assuming we build one, and can make enough antimatter to fuel it, we could be on our way to the stars.

But it is far, far into the future even if possible, which it does not seem to be.

Interesting reading. I like the website Centauri Dreams which discusses in great depth interstellar travel topics. I cannot tell how accurate the science is, though.

58

I know that decades of science fiction stories, television shows, and movies make it seem like “generation ships” are a technically plausiable solution to travelling between stars, but even setting aside the issue of the kind of infeasibly ginormous amount of propellant mass or effective exhaust velocity (“just” 0.1 c is still about five orders of magnitude faster than the greatest velocity relative to the Sun of any spacecraft in existence) the problems of maintaining a closed environment for periods exceeding a century, building propulsion and habitat systems which can operate for those durations without major refurbishment or resupply, producing enough energy to power this flying city while still eliminating all of the waste heat from both the internal power requirements and the propulsion system, and maintaining political authority what is effectively an independent state cut off from the rest of humanity across multiple generations are all major issues that are well beyond our prior experience with any existing systems. The fundamental sustainability, maintenance, thermodynamic, and sociopolitical problems are so large and vastly outside of any historical experience that it is difficult to really assess just how difficult they actually are, and what would be required to develop plausible solutions.

All that being said, I do think humanity will spread across the solar system and eventually to interstellar space. They won’t be wearing spandex outfits and zapping each other with “phasers”, and in fact they probably won’t look much like us at all. However, while there will certainly be an “automated” element to exploration (just as the vast majority of space exploration to date has been done by robotic probes, landers, and rovers), I think we will find that future space exploration and exploitation efforts will incorporate or emulate organic living elements to the point of actually adapting organisms to survival in space conditions versus trying to create Earth-like conditions in space at great difficulty and expense. We may eventually see people modified to survive in vacuum, protected against radiation, and using internal systems to support basic respiration and recycle resources completely independent of a spacecraft habitat module.

While this is also the stuff of science fiction and we have only very limited notions of how to make this practicable, it is the more plausible avenue just based on being more robust and adaptable to various space conditions compared with making giant air-filled spaces with masses of radiation shielding and the delicate thermal and pressure conditions necessary to keep a “human” crew safe and alive. We are evolved for life on the surface of this planet, hence why it seems to friendly to us (but not other organisms, like fish or anaerobic organisms); if we really want to inhabit space, it makes sense to reengineer ourselves into a form that is comfortable in space rather than trying to make the rest of the universe resemble our one unlikely planet.

Stranger

59

Since we are talking wild futuristic ideas: if the brain is the sum total of our identity and conscious experience, maybe the brain in a vat is the best approach. Integrate one or more large human brains to the ship’s systems. The ship becomes the body of the “crew”. These “humans” “experience” space travel. It would be far easier to nourish and protect brains in vats than embodied humans.

At the destination, we unleash the stem cells held in cryo to assemble flesh-and-blood humans.

60

All this talk about solving technology problems - FTL, generation ships, etc. IS the “spirit of exploration” - getting “over there” is not what we will end up doing.

While any eventual elegant technology solution “could” make colonizing distant solar systems possible, whenever we send people, us humans, on this sojourn will inherently have our DNA tagging along. Let’s not forget it is in our makeup to be prone to jealousy, violence, emotions, greed, etc. All the things that cause problems on our current home would be baggage on any camping trip elsewhere, and would likely become reality over there, too.

IMHO we ought to focus on learning how to live together on what we have available to us today without butchering one another or the environment to oblivion - which is more likely to happen prior to solving the great technology problems of space travel. However, solving the human condition problems is not as fun or sexy as discovery of new technology.