No, and I’m not sure how you got all that from a couple quotes. Hell, I couldn’t begin to count the number of stories I’ve read about generation ships with inhabitants that have forgotten what the journey was all about.
I find it astonishing that people feel the confidence to make definitive statements about the entire future of our species. We can say with confidence that we aren’t going to the stars in the next 100 years, sure. But in 1000 years? Neanderthals could probably make better predictions about modern humans than modern humans can make about what we will be in 1000 years. If we haven’t wiped ourselves out, technology will have advanced to a point where it’s surely unlikely that we will exist in anything resembling our current physical form. Most of the current physical constraints may not be relevant; our perspective on time may be so different that a journey of thousands or even millions of years may be something we can contemplate.
Yes, Internet forums do tend to bring out the asshole in people. Internet tribalism occurs over many subjects. Just when I think I might obsess too much on a particular subject, I can see I’m an amateur compared to most forum hacks. You think this thread is bad, check out the ones in the Pit.
Maybe IT people are getting too much of a hard-on about AI and speculating beyond reason, but that happens for every technological jump, like when cars replaced buggies. The AI speculations you see online are sci-fi wankery, not atheist mythology. Atheists by definition don’t have mythology. Not all sci-fi wankers are atheists, and not all atheists are sci-fi wankers.
Why are you conflating ftl drives, which are impossible according to our current understanding of physics, with non-ftl drives which aren’t. It’s an engineering thing. We can’t do it now, but compare a cruise ship to the Santa Maria. We might come a long way in 500 years.
“sci-fi” wankery has been around longer than “sci-fi.” Consider the psychic stuff in the late 19th century and all the rays and vibrations and energies people came up with.
Within science fiction AI is a plot device - allowing one to consider the implications, or to add characters. It is also far easier to write a character interacting with an intelligent computer than a real one.
If you want real wankery, try the singularity, which in 2001 (the year, not the movie) was supposed to arrive in 2023 or so.
In 1985, the Singularity was supposed to arrive around 2001 or so…
Oh yeah! That’s why I don’t mind being involuntarily retired so much.
I think this thread shows how different Americans and Europeans are, think and feel (generalising just a bit). Of course there is an atheist mythology - I know because I am an atheist (and it is wrong - too: I don’t swallow it). Well. Of course we will never make it to the stars. Would be nice, but will never happen because physics. Science Ficiton is fun, but false. So what? And so on.
BTW: That is the reason I come here. I learn. A lot. From you.
Nice.
Thank you.
tell that to the Mormons.
There’s a lot of empirical evidence for the existence of meetings.
On one hand, sci-fi from the 30s era onwards has greatly popularized the idea of human colonization of myriad other planets, which got another big boost from Star Trek and its variants. So a concept has developed in the public perception centering on an idea that in the short term – a handful of decades – would have little to no scientific purpose compared to robotics, poses monumental engineering challenges and costs to say the least, and in general offers virtually nothing in return. And that mythology has been further fueled by a completely inappropriate analogy with early ocean explorations and the discovery of the New World. No, space is not like oceans, and other planets – even in this solar system – are not like other continents. And exoplanets in other star systems are far beyond the reach of any technology we could realistically even conceive of.
On the other hand, it’s wise to be deeply skeptical of any prognostications that contain the words “ever” or “never”. Because the span of time that such words cover is very long indeed. I believe humans WILL eventually settle on other planets, probably not in this solar system, but such humans and their culture and technology would probably not be recognizable to us.
According to this atheist bible I have here, we will never colonize other planets because absent FTL travel or tesseracts or something along those lines the process of making giant colony ships will result in us adapting ourselves to live, not on exoplanets, but on colony ships. Getting to a different solar system is a massively long and time-consuming undertaking, but getting ourselves onto a permanent space colony can happen right in our own backyard. And there is a LOT of space in our solar system’s backyard to stick colony ships and space stations in. Even if the sun expands and consumes the polluted ruin of earth, it’ll still be a great source of solar energy. Why would we leave that behind?
Even supposing we develop the ability to make colony ships that can be made self-sustaining enough to keep a society on them humming for hundreds of years of travel through the dark emptiness of interstellar space, why would we end the trip by driving the ship into a gravity well?
My apologies if this seems misplaced or malicious; I’ve just come from the sea-lioning discussion and hope not to be doing just that.
But, like others above, I didn’t realize atheists had any kind of a unified perspective, much less a shared mythology. UY Scuti says it better later; it’s just a lack of belief in the divine.
Is there something to suggest atheists are answering some kind of question (expressed or implied) with “We’ll just go to other planets.” ? I could see that, sort of. Some religious models posit the end-of-the-line as some kind of paradise or torture-ville; as empty nothingness or union with divinity; that eventually their deity would intervene and save the faithful. I imagine they could seem inclined to believe that the non-religious paradigm for the end-of-times would be a science/engineering (non-faith) -based solution like moving to another planet.
But that would be a religious person’s effort to layer something equivalent to his own paradigm onto the worldview of someone they can’t understand – something like an expanded version of putting words into someone else’s mouth. It would be (borrowing from the thread I just left) another instance of arguing in bad faith – a Straw Man argument.
Perhaps the first sentence above should rephrased:
Michel Mayor has just attacked [COLOR=“DarkRed”][what he purports to believe is] a tenet of atheist mythology[/COLOR]
My atheism doesn’t include any mention of extra-planetary travel. My atheism simply sees religious salvation – particularly dispensationalism – as selfish wishful thinking.
–G!
McCoy: So, this is the probe’s way of saying, “hello” to the people of Earth?
Spock: [looking annoyed] There are other species on earth. Only human arrogance would assume the signal must be meant for mankind.
I would recommend the Arthur C. Clarke essay collection Profiles of the Future, in which he looks back at various poo-pooing “Humans will never-” predictions. Clarke divides such predictions into two categories that he calls “Failures of imagination” and “Failures of Nerve”. Very instructive.
Because that’s where the raw materials are?
Proving that a space colony can be self sufficient before propelling it to another star is a very reasonable scenario. Space colonies and interstellar travel are not mutually exclusive.
I always thought it was incredibly silly to talk about moving people to off-world places to relieve population pressure on Earth.
We are currently adding about 225k per day every day. So you want to hold the Earth’s population growth to 0% by moving them off-world. Do you realize what that means in terms of number of rockets per day, resources, etc.???
For me, space colonies in a realistic sense always comes down to economics and scale.
There will no doubt be small lab-like places here and there. In open space, on the Moon, on Mars, tucked away on asteroids and other small bodies. Often for Scientific research purposes. But they are a net drain economically which means they are not practical to grow to a good-sized city scale.
To get real, functioning well economically, city-scale colonies there has to be a reason for them to be able to fund themselves. This will likely happen someday but we are well away from that.
For the Moon there might be a city here and there mining resources such as metals, ices (and the accompanying gases), etc. People need food but it will have to be intensive hydroponic style stuff. Forget fields under an immense dome.
And even that will take a long, long time. Lots of money spent just to get a bit of a demo habitat going. That’s a really large hurdle to get over.
If you’re in a self-sufficient mobile space colony, you naturally gravitate to the smaller chunks of resources that don’t themselves have much gravity, because it’s way easier than getting stuff up and down a gravity well. But sure, after every planet, asteroid, and comet around Sol has been completely consumed I can see heading out and Independence Daying around from solar system to solar system looking for munchies. How long do you suppose it’ll take to eat Jupiter?
Interstellar travel yes, exoplanets no. Using a planet as anything other than a remote mining base (probably staffed by robots) would near-certainly require you to terraform it first, and why bother? Just mine a bunch of asteroids and build another spaceship instead.
Seeing as exo-planets are being discovered almost on a daily basis, and some of them orbit at the right distance from a star, it is possible that there are planets where life exists. The question is, what sort of life? The options range from amoeba to super-humans. Given the time time that it takes for the latter to involve, the question is whether we will coincide with some some extraterrestrial super-intelligent species. Maybe they died out already, maybe we have to wait a few more eons for them.
And there is the distance issue. Even within our own galaxy, we are talking about distances in light years. Just communicating will take a while, physical travel much longer, even if we do figure out how to travel at a decent fraction of the speed of light. Any future colonists would probably have to spend one generation or more, just getting there, and no guarantee of finding anything to support life once there.
To be realistic, travel to another planet only means Mars, and even the most desolate places on earth look positively inviting by comparison. So it probably won’t ever be much more than a research station / mining operation. Offshoring our surplus population? No way, even if we find a way to travel both rapidly and cheaply through space.
Given that we have gone from the first flight to regular space flights in less than 120 years, it is risky to predict what we will be able to do a century from now, but we will still have only one planet to play with for the foreseeable future.
If we build a really big space telescope, which wouldn’t be that hard once we have space colonies, we should be able to locate exoplanets with reasonable conditions. These would have some sort of life by definition, since you don’t get an oxygen atmosphere otherwise. Whether any of them would be close enough to us for practical travel is another matter.
I maintain that my copy of the atheist bible says that without near-instantaneous interstellar travel humanity will be unable to send colonization-sized ships to other solar systems without making the ships so comfortable that people won’t see any point in disembarking onto a raw, empty world and camping out. Note that these travels might include the people modifying themselves to better live in low gravity and such which makes them unable to comfortably live on planets anyway.