Getting to the stars

Factual Questions
21

The path to the stars proposed is the actual path to the stars.

Do everything you need to do to have a chance to actually get someone there first.

That will be about a thousand years. Or perhaps longer.

It will include building and maintaining population centers in space. That is just one major step. It includes a half billion other smaller steps. It will have social, and military, and scientific consequences, both foreseen, and unforeseen. It has to come first, because we need to know that multi-generational populations can survive in space. There is no other way to know that, than to do it.

It will include creating multiple methods of communicating, and transferring material among the population centers. It will include multiple methods of transferring people among them as well. These populations will either have, or will develop politics. It doesn’t matter what sort of scientific wizardry gets them there, once there are more than three of them, they will need to settle differences among themselves, and soon, differences with earthbound authorities.

A crew has to be independent to have any sort of chance of reaching a multi-generational goal. There has to be all the things we have discussed before, and a successful and peaceful revolution among the space born. Without it, no one is going anywhere. No one expected to die aboard ship when colonizing the “New World.” Not even penal colonists will board a ship that does not expect to arrive anywhere with them alive.

If you have an independent population, born in space, and always expecting to live in space, the matter is different. But the Earthbound will never be able to rule them. They must be physically independent of Earth, or the plan cannot succeed. If they are independent of Earth, they will not consider themselves to be colonists of Earth. No authority can reach them. It’s the definition of the event. Go where no man has gone before. (And where damn few will ever go at all.) Earth’s billions will continue to teem. They will consider the colonists irrelevant long before they reach their destination. Leaving at all is the point of no return. But it will take the concerted and sustained effort of a significant majority of those same teeming billions to make it happen.

However daunting the physical factors of the trip seem, they are trivial compared to the social factors. No one on Earth ever gets to benefit from the trip in any non philosophical manner. Even assuring the survival of the race is purely philosophical, from the point of view of the many billions who are not going to be saved, and for most of that time, everyone will know that they are not now, nor ever will be among the elect.

The revolution in space mentioned above is a minor happening compared to the revolution needed on the home world.

Tris

“We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.” ~ Abigail Adams (1774) ~

22

Well I wouldn’t want to get into something that has a 99.9% chance of exploding. :eek:

Using today’s technology to reach another star system with a live crew? Impossible. Not like one out of a billion impossible, but completely impossible.

Since faster than light travel is nothing more than some interesting artifacts of some relativity and quantum mechanics equations, that idea is out.

That means we would have to create some kind of self-contained habitat capable of supporting life for probably a thousand years or more as it slowly drifts towards some distant star. Do you know of any complex machine that can run for a thousand years? How big does this ship need to be to contain 1000 years worth of replacement parts?

Which of course begs the question, what do the colonists do when they get there?

23

I’m not sure how this can be a GQ; it seems inevitable that it will turn into pretty much a clone of the GD thread that spawned it, but I’ll say this:

If some ‘free energy’ technology can be perfected, or even something that permits us to completely convert matter into energy, then two birds are potentially killed with one stone; obviously one of these is the issue of energy to sustain life support and other shipboard systems, but the other is propulsion - if energy budget is not a pressing concern, then something like a circular particle accelerator could be used to provide thrust - the advantage of this method would be that the propellant is thrown away at the maximum possible velocity, achieving the maximum thrust per unit mass of that finite supply of propellant

24

Go to XenoDisneyworld?

Stranger

25

Well, if you can convert matter directly into energy, then you might as well dispense with mass propellent entirely and use high energy photons as your propellent. With the highest possible exhaust velocity (c there’s no theoretical limit to how fast you can go; plus, it makes a dandy weapon should you be attacked by large, cat-like aliens en route. Just make sure you don’t wave the exhaust around an occuped planet.

This, of course, is beyond highly speculative. Converting mass particles into energy as anything like a going concern is far past conceivable technology.

Stranger

26

What do you mean, weapon? I already told you they had absolutely no weapons at all on board!

Seriously, efficient matter to energy conversion is a lot more plausible than an FTL drive (I know of three different ways to do it), but you’re correct that it’s far past conceivable technology. It’s quite likely that we would actually need interstellar travel in the first place to develop any of those three technologies: At least two and possibly all three require the use of small black holes, and it may be that the only way to get those is to go out into the Universe and find them.