Boooo, I say! Booo!!
Only new technology can solve the problems afflicting the human condition.
Also, like you say, discovery is sexy.
Only if government or private sector can allow cheap access to space.Has of now it is cost prohibitive.
A space elevator or nuclear fission is most likely the way but the technology is beyond today’s technology.
A space launch loop may be other way of cheap access to space.Once in space you can use ion or plasma to get to nearest stars.The small very small thrust but very fuel efficient that last long time.You still need generation crew or use of sleep hibernation pods if warp drive is not is not possible.
But if they do not find cheap access to space than hardly any thing beyond LEO would be practical.
I don’t think people will get to mars in the next 50 years if at all other than may be sticking American flag and saying high and goodbye like what happen to moon.Just too costly.
Well, if the choice is, “will humanity figure out how to stomp space into submission” or " will humanity learn to live in peace within its means," I’m betting on stomping space into submission.
Hmm, let’s see. “Interstellar” means “existing between two or more stars”. I just don’t see how all of human civilization could do that - even if every star from every show decided to have a threesome every night, forever. The numbers just don’t add up.
The human “condition” of being a bunch of dumbass assholes has historically been a pretty strong incentive to find some other place to colonize.
My half-serious answer to the OP is “probably no”, even assuming it were even physically possible to travel to another star within a human lifetime (more on generational ships later). Statistically, every Stephen Hawking requires the birth of millions upon millions of people of mediocre intelligence, not to mention an assortment of emotional and behavioral issues. Which means for every dollar we spend on researching things like cold fusion, flying cars, and interstellar travel that could improve humanity, we have to spend like ten on keeping millions of morons from stabbing each other to death in a Walmart parking lot trying to get a cheap flat screen on Black Friday so they can catch the finale of Real Housewives.
To travel to another star system IMHO would require FTL travel, as opposed to some generational ship that could get there in thousands of years. The industrial revolution is only a couple hundred years old. Which means we have zero experience in building machines or systems more complex than a Roman aqueduct or Egyptian pyramid that will last hundreds of years. Let alone ones that can support humans in the most unforgiving and hostile environment for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
There is also the thermodynamic problems with any kind of “generation ship”; to wit, that you have to build a system that generates enough power to provide for everything we get for free from the sun, from growing crops and providing illumination and warmth, to replicating the hydrologic cycle, powering all of the systems that provide support and recycling of resources, and oh-by-the-way also propel this ginormous flying city at even a small fraction of the speed of light, which is still several orders of magnitude faster than any spacecraft mankind has launched to date; and yet, you also have to be able to reject all of the waste heat via radiation (the only mechanism for heat transfer that can occur in vacuum) lest your habitat rapidly overheat and kill everyone aboard, which would require radiating surfaces the size of a small moon. “Generation Arks” are about as plausible as warp drive or hyperspace, e.g. making one workable would require technology we don’t have and do not even know how to develop from existing systems.
Stranger
If Albert Einstein was right, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This will place a limitation on interstellar transportation. If a future generation locates a planet with liquid water it might be possible to colonize that planet, but transpiration back and forth will be limited. It will be possible to send radio messages back and forth, but even these will take many years, decades, or even centuries.
There are theoretical ways to get around Einstein’s theories. For example the Alcubierre drive that bends the space in front and behind the ship (similar to a “warp” drive). Technically the ship is traveling slower than light within the bubble while the bubble moves faster than light. While mathematically possible, the problem is that it requires “exotic matter” like negative mass which we don’t even know if exists. There are other problems too. Like Hawking radiation cooking the inhabitants, inability to send information to stop or control the ship, and the ship sending out a shockwave of charged particles that would destroy anything in its path.
No, for two reasons.
The distances are so vast it is beyond comprehension of us all. Second, we will not get anywhere near a reasonable fraction of light speed with any resource and have control of the craft.
I bet FTL travel or communications is impossible. Given that, we won’t ever have an interstellar society. The “lock step” thing is an amusing and ingenious idea, but I think it’s pretty obvious that there would never be sufficient incentive for a big enough sector of society to waste vast spans time intentionally.
Furthermore, while I’m generally an optimist, I worry about the instability of technology and the fact that it increasingly gives more destructive power to smaller groups of people at lower cost. I fear it’s quite likely that it might be possible for someone to “go postal” in the not-too-distant future, and wipe out all of humanity, if it’s all still located on or dependent on Earth. (I think we’ll be dependent on Earth for quite a while, simply for the usual economic reasons. I’m willing to be wrong on that!)
I doubt we’ll last terribly long as a species that’s recognizably human, but that’s a bit beside the point. In any case, if we do indeed develop a transportable package of “humanity” (or whatever it becomes), then human-derived intelligent life might have a chance at an astronomically long life. It comes down to relative probabilities and costs: how much does it cost to make a seed pod, how many seed pods survive to find am exploitable system, how many of those prosper enough to make more seed pods, and how many seed pods on average can they make, given the cost? I can certainly imagine a scenario where the outcome is positive growth over an astronomically long time, but I doubt it would involve DNA.
Or that build themselves from the ones we build …
Right, there’s no economic incentive. But, there was no economic incentive to go to the Moon. There’s really no economic incentive to reproduce in the first place (that is, to create replicating life) – but, once it does happen, the ones that do it the best get the most resources to make more. Despite lack of self-serving incentive, I wouldn’t be TOO surprised to see it happen, because people do silly things.
I don’t think you’re using that term correctly. It refers to computers with a single central processing unit, where the program memory and working (data) memory are the same, so the computer can work on its own program. The latter part matters, but the former part (single central processing unit) doesn’t.
Right: I doubt we’ll ever create a colony ship. If we send any DNA at all (which I doubt) it’d most likely be in compressed format.
Right, but I doubt we (they) would bother sending DNA, unless that happens to be the most efficient and reliable method. Which I suspect is unlikely.
Lots of small seed pods is also a lot more fault-tolerant than one big one, even if the destination is the same for them all. Better yet, use diverse destinations AND multiple pods with the same destination.
The hard part to figure is why this is so important to “us”? But as I said above, once it does become important, if it starts a feedback cycle, it ends up becoming important, because the “galactic ecology” would be dominated by those that do, regardless of the fact that it’s silly. It would become an end in itself. It would not be particularly nice to other life forms.
You think we have a better chance of solving the human condition - a problem we’ve been working on for over a hundred thousand years - then building an interstellar capable craft, which is a problem we’ve been working on for less than a century?
I’m not sure if that’s optimism, or pessimism.
I highly doubt it. I would be thousands of times easier to colonize the bottom of the ocean than low earth orbit, never mind mars. I doubt we will ever do that. I sure hope we do though…
If we assess the state of man’s understanding a century ago to today, one wonders what 1,000 years of uninterrupted technological advance could achieve.
I don’t believe the limits to our interstellar progress lay with currently-held beliefs regarding physics, for these are ever-changing. There are already decades-old experiments showing that information can travel faster than light. The real limit is our capacity as a species to avoid killing ourselves and the environment we need to live and prosper. This is the greater challenge, for manipulating our surroundings to our benefit has always been the gratuitous grace of peaceful contemplation.
The problem with that is constraints. While many other technologies have indeed forged ahead by leaps and bounds, passenger jet tech is essentially the same as it was 50 years ago (with some refinements here and there yes). They tried SST’s, and found that they couldn’t be practicable or profitable (yeah, subsidies aside). Our understanding of various principles may continue improving, but our ability to apply them may very well not.
Yes, I know that I am now sounding like Stranger, but even tho I hate to say it, he’s right.
I suggest you re-evaluate the water pressure at 1/2 mile deep.
If I remember correctly:
0.5 mi x 5280 ft/mi x 64 lbs/cu ft. is about 170 ksf or 1200 psi.
Someone check me maths.
I’d agree with the poster who said we’d be colonizing the bottom of the ocean first.
The water pressure problem is only a problem if we want people to stay at one atmosphere of pressure. Even with modern humans (no genetic engineering) and modern equipment (scuba), there is a record depth dive below 300 meters, and that’s 10 atmospheres of pressure, give or take. You wouldn’t want to live like that permanently (and probably couldn’t even if you tried because of narcosis), but this is already achievable. If you allow for a future with cybernetics, genetic engineering, fancy atmosphere mixes, etc. then I’d say the technological hurdles are not insurmountable.
But maybe that’s crossing too much into the same answers that say humans won’t be going to other stars as humans.
Let’s stick with modern humans breathing air at atmospheric pressure. The Navy’s ADS can already handle depths of 2000 feet ( just over 1/3 of a mile). We can go a lot deeper still: we’ve achieved 35,000 feet (6 miles) in smaller submersibles.
In terms of supporting these suits or submersibles, we have proven technology in nuclear subs that can handle at least 1600 feet (just under 30% of a mile) in the kind of environment in which people can really live. That 30% of a mile figure isn’t even the maximum estimated crush depths, but the depths we’ve proven they can handle.
So, a 1/4 mile deep habitation is already possible; we just need some kind of economic justification to make it worth doing. A full 1/2 mile is beyond our current capabilities, but I don’t think it’s as far beyond those capabilities as traveling to another star.
Every once in awhile someone will say we should colonize Antarctica before we colonize space. The problem with that, besides international treaties protecting it, is that no one really wants to. We’ve already got people signing up for a one-way trip to Mars. I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon, but the interest is there. A lot of people *want *to live in space. The other thing is we really should be trying to preserve as much natural environment as we can, rather than paving it over. Earth is the only place in our part of the universe that has life on it, and I think that’s worth saving. We aren’t going to find a replacement earth.
Maybe in 10,000 years we can make an earth, but it’ll suck if we already destroyed most of the biodiversity that we’d want to put on it.