Will humans ever make it beyond our solar system in anything less than a suicide mission?
Would it count as “suicide” if you died from old age, possibly leaving offspring to continue the journey?
No
While it would be a suicide mission with current technology, there does seem to be a path forward that isn’t suicidal. There are ongoing experiments and research projects to develop materially closed ecological systems with the long term goal being long-term survival in space.
Biosphere 2 is an ongoing research center for just this purpose.
Keep in mind that 100 years ago we were all driving around in Model T Fords and the like. While technology may not continue to increase as the rate that it has over the last century, things that we think of as being silly will likely be possible and maybe even commonplace in a few hundred years.
More of a IMHO question than one that has a factual answer.
Maybe, after substantial colonization of this solar system, and extensive robotic missions to other systems using technology not currently available. A great leap in propulsion is needed first. Just the communication issues involved with the C speed limit are going to mean that even the robotic craft we send out will be essentially throwing money away never, or practically never, to be heard from again.
Will we ever build multi-generational Rama type habitats and head on out using technology as currently imagined, I don’t think so. Why? Because it will take a really long time to ever hear from any robotics we send out first. That info will be needed before we commit. And the resources needed would be huge and not spent without a reasonable chance of success. However that success might be measured.
Now if there are found to be cosmic ‘stepping stones,’ like finding a habitable place in the Centauri system. But when do you go and when do you wait for the technology to get better first? Good short story by A. E. van Vogt, *Far Centaurus *that examines this question.
But who knows what the next tech advances will be capable of. Reconstituting freeze dried people, clone replication with memories intact, leave it up to the robots to create new people when the destination is reached with frozen sperm and eggs?
In the end it comes down to the intersection of resources needed and thhe expectation of success.
While IMHO it is not literally impossible under the laws of physics for humans to develop the level of technology to build functional generation (many, many, generations) ships, I do not think it would ever be anything that wasn’t very expensive and very dangerous. And (again, IMHO) I think it is far more likely that our advanced civilization will collapse catastrophically and never rise to the same height again than become interstellar, or even interplanetary beyond the most rudimentary level.
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Eh, it requires some speculation, but I think it can be answered factually by stating current technology and showing current trends.
That said, I think allowing more speculation and opinion will be better for this thread, so let’s go ahead and move it to IMHO (from GQ).
What makes you think we’ll be able to build starships but not have some means of avoiding death from old age? (whether it be better medicine, the ability to grow replacement bodies, or computer uploads)
I mean if you think about it, any universe where people have built multiple kiloton starships in space, loaded to the gills with fusion devices (which would only get you to a couple % of the speed of light, best case) or a working pulse fusion engine…but don’t have a treatment for the biggest danger to every single one of our existences and everyone who is alive after us…is ridiculous. (or the best method of all - more than half the mass of the ship is antimatter and it’s somehow not going to explode via fantastically advanced technology)
Might as well call it science fantasy, it’s not science fiction. Such a starship would require hundreds or thousands of trillions of dollars in present day dollars to make (and it wouldn’t get much cheaper in the future, per say, the economy would just expand to be able to afford it)…all thrown away on a mission that won’t see results for centuries.
While if someone solves the old age problem, not only does whoever paid for the solution get the benefit and not have to die, but it would mean that the crew of the starship would personally be around in a few centuries to see the results.
It would mean that the financial backers of the starship would personally be alive for the results, whether they were waiting back in our solar system for a broadcast with the data or a passenger on the ship itself.
So viewed that way, the pre-requisite technology before interstellar travel is anything more than a napkin drawing is so form of life extension that removes the cap on total lifespan.
Because biology makes rocket science look like tic-tac-toe.
Compared to a starship? Are you serious? You’re talking about a machine that would cost as much as the entire GDP of the entire world for decades, that must survive for centuries with no more help from Earth, and without biological immortality or computer uploads, has to be big enough to raise and train entire generations onboard.
In any case, you probably wouldn’t solve biology. You’d build AI, either totally artificially or by preserving biology and stealing it’s firmware, essentially.
Short answer: No. The distances are so vast, the scale so far outside the human existence that it would require some kind of breakthrough in our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe to make it happen. No way are we going to rocket around the cosmos. Someday, if we learn how to fold time…
Yes. An organism is a Rube Goldberg device far more complicated than a interstellar generation ship.
(And I include under “biology” the closed ecosystem needed in that generation ship.
I agree, but I don’t see any reason why the fundamental laws of operation for synapses cannot be deduced with probes near each type of synapse, in operation, to reverse engineer the mathematical model it uses.
This basic idea of reverse engineering an unknown math function from I/O and a little bit of knowledge is solid, bedrock level science. Once you know the math function for each individual synapse type in an entire brain, you then have the ability to design a computer large enough to run your model in real time.
This will work. It already has shown some suspiciously good results with models that are a tiny fraction of the complexity of the real brain. See Deep mind, Spaun, and others.
A hybrid intelligence - essentially an AI that uses a simplified neural model based on a once living person - would be able to survive an interstellar journey, easy.
Who says it has to be a starship, and who says it has to be a mission? If it turns out we can mine asteroids and turn them into cities, I see no reason why those cities can’t be built further and further out until they’re officially not in our solar system anymore. The Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, and interstellar space are looking like there’s quite a bit of material out there, all the way to the next solar system.
That also avoids the question of whether we should just go, or wait 'til the technology improves. No reason to wait for anything when you’re already slowly migrating outwards anyway.
You guys know my rap by now: space is for robots. The great difficulty in manned space exploration isn’t the distances or the inability to get very close to light speed. It’s keeping our bags of protoplasm we call our ‘bodies’ supplied with air, water, and food, and kept safe from radiation and vacuum, for the time it takes to get to whatever destination we aim for outside the Terran biosphere.
But ‘ever’ is a long time. And I may live long enough to see our astronomers develop a complete list of potential Earth-like planets within, say, 50 light years. And my grandchildren may live to see us send unmanned probes out to them all.
No telling how long it’ll take them to get there, of course. If they can ‘only’ go 0.05c (only 9000 miles per second!) it’ll take a thousand years for the probes to reach the most distant candidates on that list. (The good news is, it’ll only take 50 years after that for us to get the info on what the probes have found.)
And maybe after another couple centuries, we’ll have figured out how to send probes out at 0.1c, so that we can send out probes that arrive before the first wave of probes do.
One way or another, IF the human race continues to be technologically advanced between now and A.D. 3000, we should have a pretty good idea by then of what planets within 50 light-years are genuinely habitable. And we should also be at a point where creation of a generation ship isn’t going to kill the world’s economy, either.
So maybe we send out a generation ship in A.D. 3100 to a planet orbiting a star 30 light-years away. Maybe we can only propel something that massive at 0.02c so it takes 1500 years to get there. So maybe before 5000 A.D. we’ll have a foothold on a planet in another solar system.
Or maybe that scale turns out to be improbably fast, and we can’t manage it until 10,000 A.D. Or maybe we have a nuclear war, and have to reconstitute civilization, and then we have another, and it never happens.
You are discounting the scenario of “we invent artificial intelligence that gradually replaces all human jobs on earth”. Eventually, pools of AIs improve other AIs and bootstrap the technology to near theoretical limits. These new inheritors of the earth and the solar system then use their vast resources - since they have no need for any human comforts, they can work tirelessly day and night to mine the astronomical bodies and build vast structures - to build starships closer to actual technical limitations. We can guess now that would be a vehicle that carries a lot of antimatter, and is insanely fast - half the speed of light.
And the ship has enough stuff onboard to recreate the civilization that sent it. That’s the predicted outcome supported best by our observations. Unfortunately, it does not involve us fragile sacks of meat in any way.
You’re right - I am discounting that scenario. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but IMHO ‘true AI’ is as much of a fairy tale as mermaids or unicorns.
I think that there will be less performance difference between computers today and computers 200 (or 2000) years from now than there is difference between computers today and computers 20 years ago. We are at the physical limit of what silicon can do. There may be “true AIs”, but each one will be a room full of server racks, not something that can walk around (or fit within the power budget of a spaceship.)
And humans “uploading” into computers is an even sillier space fantasy.
I don’t mean to be the turd in the punchbowl, but we are not going anywhere until we resolve some of our more immediate earthbound problems. At the rate we’re going, we may not make it another couple of centuries, and that does not seem like enough time to develop the requisite technology, much less solve our inherited savagery. I cannot imagine a shipload of humans being able to get along for the rest of their lives without butchering one another. We’ve been oh so successful in that regard here, where there is more room, (checks forum) IMHO.
If we waited around for the lunkheads among us to keep up, we’d never make any progress. It sounds like the old “we should feed the poor first” argument traditionally used whenever the topic of NASA funding comes up. No, we don’t have to wait or solve all our problems first. We (well some of our descendants) can just leave all those problems behind.