What Zagadka said. E=mc[sup]2[/sup] and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.
Well, I wouldn’t. Not if my whole life depended on a plastic dome that’s being pelted by meteors. Not to mention Martian terrorists and teenage crackheads who want to blow it up just for fun.
That’s fine by me as long as you pay for it yourself. I’ll pay for my navel gazing, and you pay for your sky pie. Fair enough?
Here we combine the Utopian/Dystopian and Sci-Fi literature.
I, not for a hair of a second, believe in a utopian space existence. While the people who go there at first may be technically smart and handpicked, it wouldn’t last for long before some conflicts arose. The second it stops being a laboratory and starts becoming a habitat, the blissful utopia ends. Humans tend to work very well together until a certain population point, then the bliss stops.
Even in your example of the colonization of the Americas, the settlers weren’t necessarily any smarter or well-fit to live - just luckier. They brought with them all of their behavior and prejudices and other vices. In any case, the comparison of colonizing Mars and Virginia is a rather asinine one. The only similarities are that they have the word “colonization” and are/were far away.
For that matter, those technically very intelligent people aren’t guaranteed to be the wisest people - they may make poor administrators and leaders. Or they may be people like Uzi who just want to get away from them barbarians, which I can almost guarantee will lead to someone hating someone else up there.
And lastly, that isn’t what Uzi said at all - he specifically said there are “too many people living on this planet still living in the dark ages” - not “we can have a better culture on Mars.”
You don’t mine Mars. You mine the asteroid belt. There is enough iron and nickel in one small asteroid to provide all of Earth’s needs for a decade. Solar smelting means none of the pollutants reach the earth.
The thing all you “feed the people” adherants don’t realize is that the only way to save everybody is to make everybody rich. You can’t save the poor by bankrupting the rich - the rich won’t stand for it. As a member of Western Civilization you are, by definition, rich. To bring everyone up to our level will require massive amounts of cheap resources. Where are these resources to be found? Space, that’s where.
Lib, Einstein’s little law is all well and good, but it isn’t the end all of science, not by a long shot. Quantum theory is already poking some rather interesting little holes in it. Hawking has come up with all sorts of twists and turns that make relativity…quaint, at the very least. If you want to dive into your navel and ignore the future, so be it. The rest of us will give our children the stars.
Fixating on Mars is a waste of time. Explore it, yes. Terraforming is a ways away. Right now the key is getting off this rock and establishing a permanent presence in space for Mankind.
As for shipping costs, there was a time when miners in California shipped their laundry to China to have it done. Use brings down the costs, and gravity is free. I don’t fear the heat death of the Universe, but to just accept the end without fighting is idiotic. Always fight, never surrender. The stars hold the answers, and we will get there!
I never said a space-based society would be utopian, Zagadka, only that the average level of knowledge and literacy and sophistication would be higher than it is in any earth-based society at present. And that is an improvement, isn’t it? And I’m not thinking of this in eugenic terms, I’m not assuming the space colonists would be innately, biologically “superior” – only that their level of education, etc., would be superior and that would set the tone for their culture – a culture where ignorance and stupidity would be highly unusual and remarkable.
And please bear in mind that what Uzi said is perfectly true: There are too many people on this planet living in the Dark Ages. Some of them live in Saudi Arabia, and some of them live in Israel, and some of them live in the United States.
I think that the assumption that the cream of the human crop would be the first ones to colonize another planet is highly erroneous. If history has shown us anything it’s that it would be the poor and ignorant (the people with less to lose) that would be the majority of the people colonizing a new planet and doing the hard, dirty work that’s going to be required in setting up a new colony on another world.
LAWS? I guess a quote for you would be, “Everything that can be learned has been learned”. Why do physicists even bother doing research anymore? One wonders.
That’s right: Because if we ever get to Mars we will lose all knowledge of what materials are required to erect buildings. :rolleyes:
Noble idea. How’s that working for you so far? Are you planning to get them all jobs, too? It is only after a country becomes wealthy that population growth starts to fall and not over extend the already limited resources.
Take Yemen where I work. GDP growth is half the rate of population growth. People are getting poorer. Once the oil runs out - and it will here sooner than later - 90% of the countries revenue will be gone. Water is running out. Sana’a the capitol may be without useable water in as little as 10 years. What do you think will happen then? No, I’m not suggesting you let them die. What I am suggesting is that instead of feeding them try to teach them that it would be better to raise one child well than raise 6 poorly. Unfortunately, I don’t know how long you’d last teaching birth control in this country. Better just to feed them and let the inevitable war thin them out, I guess. :dubious:
Yes, I belong to a superior culture. One that thinks that science is the answer, not prostrating oneself before empty idols. One that says I am not allowed to kill someone just because they don’t believe in what I believe in. See BrainGlutton’s post. He is more eloquent than I.
I wouldn’t think that would be true. Trained specialists utilizing the latest robotics would probably be more the norm. What good is a person who only knows how to wield a shovel when someone with a Bobcat would be far more useful and cost efficient. He’d also have to know how to fix his equipment, so would have to be trained in mechanics and electronic control systems. I doubt you’d find anyone without a degree in something or other for many years after the first colonists arrive.
Wow. Since you honestly don’t seem to get this, I’ll take a moment to explain it. It isn’t a matter of something yet to learn or discover — it is a mathematical equation. Now, I reckon you fancy yourself as someone who is chiding the ancient Greek geometrists for refusing to concede that there can be a square root of minus 1 since no one had yet discovered complex numbers. But that is not the case here. You are chiding the ancient Greek geometrists for declaring that the square of the length of the hypoteneuse of a flat-plane triangle will always be the sum of the squares of the other two sides. A[sup]2[/sup] = B[sup]2[/sup] + C[sup]2[/sup] has been proved. Just as E = mc[sup]2[/sup] has been proved. There is nothing to discover about it. Nothing to learn. It’s just a logical proof. Expecting A[sup]2[/sup] to equal something else, or expecting E to equal something else if you try it enough times would be evidence of insanity.
Speaking only for myself, that’s not what I’m after, and I don’t think it is a noble idea at all. I think leaving peaceful honest people alone to pursue their own happiness in their own way is a noble idea. And for me, that includes not subsidizing your Star Trek wet dreams.
Sure - in a *flat-plane * triangle. Put that triangle on a sphere, and the rules change. Lib, how do you know the rules aren’t different somewhere else, or under extreme conditions? You don’t. But you are willing to stick your head in the sand and rot. The rest of us aren’t.
While you’re pursuing your own happiness, stay off the subsidized roads. In fact, don’t use anything paid for by taxes. That way you can stay ideologically pure.
I’m willing to bet your ancient Greeks knew nothing of E=mc[sup]2[sup]. Yet if we were to use your logic they would have thought they had learned everything there is to know about mathematics and gone out to feed the world. Luckily someone thought differently between then and now.
In 100 years from now will someone have thought up other ‘logical proofs’ as yet undreamed of by the ancient Greeks and Einstein himself? I’m willing to bet that they will. And what this will mean to us is indeterminite because we don’t know what those ideas will be. Maybe it could mean nothing, or it maybe could mean travel to the stars.
At which point those of us who want to leave for the ‘final frontier’ can, and the rest of the idillic, peace loving luddittes can live in their bucolic paradise surrounded by their brethern, the stone age barbarians. I wish you long lives and happiness knowing that you’d be likely to have neither. Until then you’ll have to put up with us Quixotic types who want to drag mankind out of the muck even though most continue to resist wanting to remain wallowing in their ignorance.
Ugh, must sleep, starting to ramble. :o
Bear in mind that, although of course it would help immensely, we don’t need faster-than-light travel to visit or colonize the stars. If we could just crack the nut of a constant-boost drive, one that could accelerate/decelerate the ship constantly even across interstellar distances, then the relativistic time-dilation effect would make it possible for a spaceship to reach the nearer stars in only a year or two of perceived shipboard time. In Robert Heinlein’s classic SF novel, a race with a drive like that (the “wormfaces,” or, as they called themselves, “The Only People”) managed to reach Earth from Alpha Centauri.
Sorry, that Heinlein novel was, Have Space Suit, Will Travel.
I never said that everything that can be learned has been learned. I said that there are certain natural laws that have been observed. Which law do you propose to being broken?
The ancient Greeks did not know how to calculate gravity. It still worked for them. The modern West figured out how to calculate gravity. They still can’t ignore it.
What current building method will we use to construct an airtight pressurized hemisphere several miles wide?
IOt’d be fine, if not for people like you pouring money into making TIE Fighters.
About 94% of them, yes, I don’t see why not.
I forget… is it GOOD science that ignores and mocks e=mc^2?
Newsflash, spuddy. Most people don’t believe that. You let a few extremists bias you against billions of people - that makes you a prejudiced asshat, not a scientist, and it certainly doesn’t make you part of a “superior culture.”
I know this is quite off-topic, but every time I picture a mind-starved reanimated zombie stumbling around shouting “BRAINS!”, I get an uncontrollable fit of the giggles.
Well, of course they will. But they won’t contradict Pythagoras or Einstein. That’s why they call it “logic”.
I’m afraid that train left the station long ago.
Is that a deliberate misrepresentation of my position, or did you just miss the part where I wrote that space travel might be possible “if it turns out that the universe is not uniformly the same everywhere and does not ‘obey’ the same physical laws everywhere”? What’s the point of posting responses if you’re going to ignore them?
I suppose you think that my ancestors taken as slaves should have jumped off their ships since they didn’t pay for the trip. Why don’t you stop taxing me first, and then I’ll use my own roads.
Yes, as a matter of fact I did miss that. My apologies for any misrepresentation this might have caused. :smack:
Well, since the Internet was fathered by governmental research, paid for by tax money, you should leave the Web forever. Ghu forbid you actually have to contribute to the general welfare of society. I actually agree with a lot of the Libertarian position, and I am registered Libertarian, but the lunatic fringes are just as deluded as the far right and far left. You can’t undo history, and American society will never be run the way Libertarians want. But this is another argument, for another thread. Here, we are debating the benefits and costs of space, and we need to stay focused on that. Brainglutton, sorry for the hijack.
Gah. I can’t even code right today. My bad.
It was my understanding that Einstein did NOT prove you cannot go faster than light; he only proved you can’t go EXACTLY the speed of light. Perhaps some method will be found to reach FTL without having to go through that barrier. I wouldn’t say FTL is impossible, just beyond our present capabilites and perhaps our present imagination.
Also, regarding racial survival, I wonder how many threats to humanity are created by colonization? When you splinter off into different societies, you get different cultures who want to kill each other. Imagine the cold war on galactic scale, with technologies so advanced we can barely imagine them. How long until one society spits out a future bin-Laden who creates, say, self-replicating ward-drive enabled robots designed to seek out and destroy all life, like in many works of science fiction? Hell, it doesn’t even to happen on purpose.
Guys. Guys. Supraluminal flight is not gonna happen any time soon, if at all. There is nothing that anyone has been able to come up with to build wormholes or warp drives that does not require the existence of “exotic matter”. Thing is, unless we are very mistaken, exotic matter doesn’t exist. It might be possible to make some, or approximate it using negative energy, but, according to various physics luminaries like Kip Thorne, that would require that you convert a planetary mass approximately the size of Jupiter into pure energy, and then, by some unknown mechanism, create a ring of negative energy/mass around the “throat” of either a natural or artificial wormhole, just as it forms and before it can collapse into a singularity, and use this to prop open an aperture roughly a meter across. Oh, and you have to do this on both ends.
Right now, the jury is still out as to weather or not this is even allowed. Current research into quantum gravity may preclude such contraptions. However, even semi-classical analysis now suggests that because the wormholes create space-like paths in time (and time-like paths in space), it allows photons to pass through wormholes and meet up with themselves, such that even a single photon feeds back on itself and rapidly approaches infinite energy. This will fry anything in the vicinity and destroy the wormhole in the process.
There is the Alcubierre Warp Drive, but it creates some serious difficulties with causality, and again, without a quantum gravity theory, we don’t even know for sure if there is a speed limit on how fast a chunk of space can move. Some conjecture that the causality issues indicate that there is some kind of universal speed limit, set at C, or else the laws of physics as we know them would simply break down. The conjecture also imposes a ban on time travel. Again, this is because you wind up running into weird situations where effects can precede causes, and that just makes no sense. The only possible out is if the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum gravity is accurate, but that’s a big gigantic if. Even then, you just put yourself on a different timeline. You don’t go back into your old timeline, you go bawards into another one which has a future unlike the present of your original timeline. Hence there’s no causality issue if you go back in time and kill your father. In one timeline, you exist until you jump to the next one, in which you will never be born. Causality is preseved, then, only by something truly, mind-bogglingly weird.
Getting from point A to B on a path that is effectively supraluminal (be it in a warp bubble, or through a wormhole) can cause serious haywire with one of the basic tenets of physics, which is that causes precede effects. When you say “oh, but we might not know all the laws”, you have to remember how spectacularly bizarre the possibilities are if we truly do prove to be wrong about the laws. And, so far, nothing we have ever observed gives the slightest indication that we haven’t understood the basic idea that nothing ever goes faster than c correctly. Rather the opposite. True, some quantum systems (entangled systems) are connectected somehow such that doing something over here has an instant effect over there no matter what the separation, but these phenomena are useless for travel, or even transmission of information. This has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt, not just in theory, but by experiment (namely, the Aspect Experiment). Every particle physicist can tell you what happens when you accellerate even things as big as gold nuclei up to close to c: Their momentum (read: mass) increases exponentially, proving beyond all doubt that relativity is 100% correct. There might be miniscule differences in c over cosmic distances due to the granularity of space (if its quantized), when you compare high-energy and low-energy photons, but so what? You’re talking differences of like an atomic width caused over paths that extend over the breadth of the visible universe. Even the exceptions to relativity so far proposed are minute beyond our ability to measure currently.
Again, don’t count on supraluminal travel. It’s highly likely it’s a complete impossibility.