In this thread I came up with a bad-ass solution to the problem of a sudden, impending extinction-level-event in the near future- here’s a slightly modified version that I think works here:
Seedships. They can take their time- it doesn’t matter if it takes hundreds of thousands of years to get there, if that’s the only safe speed to travel between the stars. One big problem with spaceships is all the mass for people and life-support- food, air, water, recycling, etc. So we eliminate that. Load up automated ships with genetic material (and life forms that can be frozen or otherwise suspended, like seeds, bacteria, embryos, etc)- and send them out on their way towards various star systems that may have earthlike planets. Then the robot ships land on a world with some water and whatnot, and start an accelerated “evolution” program- first seed the soil and atmosphere with microorganisms. After a few years (or dozens or hundreds or even thousands more- there’s no hurry), when the soil and atmosphere is at a certain level, the robots start planting the plant seeds, along with defrosted bee and ant embryos, and work their way up the tree of life- when the conditions are ok for the next “level” of seeding, create and release those animals (fish into the ocean, insects/amphibians/reptiles on land, etc). Sort of simulate the biological history of Earth, thus creating a new ecosystem in the time frame of perhaps tens of thousands of years- as weird and different as it undoubtedly will be, as the released life adapts to a new environment. The robots can stop at the point that the baby animals need a mama to take care of them (so no birds and mammals, probably). And the final step will be fertilizing the stored human eggs with the stored human sperm (or defrosting the human embryos), growing them in an artificial womb (perhaps cloned from frozen tissue), and having soft, furry robot mamas (perhaps with projected human faces) feed the babies formula, talk baby talk, and play them videos from the ancient human culture to teach them language and human interaction.
And so after the thousands of years or however long, the first humans in millenia will awaken to a new (and undoubtedly much stranger) Earth, to frolic and build a new civilization, and experience new and weird psychoses brought about by having been raised by furry robot mamas.
Interstellar?!? Too easy. I predict commuter intergalactic space travel soon, and it will be with an internal combustion engine. It’s just a matter of balancing horsepower and g-force.
Colonizing Mars is a reasonable step on the way to any ‘manned’ (in any sense) missions beyond the system. We may “have the technology” in a drawing-board sense, but as with all explorations, I’m sure we’ll learn a lot more by actually going and doing it.
So while NASA isn’t working on interstellar objectives directly, nor promising them, as far as I’ve heard, the in-system targets are still progress on that long road. Neil deGrasse Tyson is not wrong to say that funding NASA now makes sense for our distant-future species objectives.
But it is true that, to justify NASA funding now to most people, the argument that it will help us address the present and near-future problems of Earth (which I believe is also valid) is the more compelling angle.
Been gone, what, 35 years? Its signals take 17 hours to reach Earth, so it’ll be roughly a light day away at 50 years into its mission. That’ll put it a light year away in only 18,500 years.
OK, just go faster, get there sooner. No brainer. Until you get to where you’re going and need to stop.
Devil’s advocate: it’s a little harder in this case because we are fighting basic, universal laws of physics, not just an arbitrary technological barrier.
I would argue that “ensuring that the entire human civilization and/or species isn’t wiped out by a nuclear war, pandemic, or natural disaster of a global scale that we can’t possibly foresee or prevent” is among those “earth-bound problems”.
What is a tool but a way for a Human to outwit or exploit a physical law for the time period needed?
ETA: that sounds way too simplistic on a second read. My point is that we have developed tools along the way - and the tools shape how we look at the world, like microscopes and industrial robots and radar and computers, cell phones, etc. Who’s to say what tools we’ll create in the future and how they will enable us to change how we look at currently-insurmountable problems?
You weren’t arguing it’s impossible, you were arguing it’s impractical. I agree warp drive is too tentative to count on yet, but I don’t think it’s a priori ruled out.
No, it turns a dust grain which was heading towards your ship into a cloud of plasma, most of which is moving away from your ship.
Assuming most of the relative velocity is due to the forward velocity of the ship, debris isn’t going to be moving laterally fast enough to evade the shielding and still hit the ship.
1-5% of the speed of light is doable with foreseeable nuclear propulsion systems, without an unworkable mass ratio and without needing fancy tricks like antimatter or ramscooping. Again, engineers have been well aware of the interstellar debris problem from the beginning and they don’t seem to think it’s insurmountable.
Even a purely space-based society might want to move out of the solar system just to get away from everyone else. And a potentially terraformable planet would still offer some advantages from the beginning. Just having an atmosphere of approximately Terran temperature and pressure would mean radiation protection, liquid water at its surface and needing only respiration gear to go outside- a garden spot by space standards.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but I’ve got to agree with the OP. Speculation about warp drives and wormholes and whatnot is fantasy, and given our current understanding of physics they’re pretty much on par with the teleportation spells in a Harry Potter book.
Even sending an unmanned probe to the closest star (4 LY away) would be a daunting task. Using any remotely-feasible propulsion system, our probe would take many decades, perhaps centuries, to get there. Just sending back data would take 4 years. Any kind of real-time control is absolutely impossible. It would take 4 years to become aware of any situation, and another 4 years to send a command back to the probe, and yet another 4 years to see if your command was executed properly. The upshot is, your probe would need to be completely autonomous, able to act without human contact. So, you’d better hope you were able to forsee all possible contingencies when you programmed it. And lets hope the probe doesn’t malfunction, and wind up wasting the time and money of generations of people who were hoping to learn from it.
Not with current technology, no. Not logically. But we’re babies at quantum mechanics, which is capable of doing and explaining all kinds of shit that absolutely defies logical thought. Never say never. The only limit we have is “sometime before the sun goes dwarf.” Even if our current level of civilization ends up getting nuked and extinguishing 99% of humanity, that still leaves an unimaginably long time to rebuild and discover new technology.
Nonsense. It’s much more likely we’d be talking about something far smaller and lighter than a human, probably some sort of nanotechnology based universal assembler combined with a computer library which will build everything else. And for a human colony you’d be talking about thousands of humans and all the necessary life support/stasis equipment; you aren’t going to be strapping some naked woman to a rocket and sending her off. And even that hypothetical naked woman would weigh more than something you can probably hold in your hand.
The clones.
Not hard at all. It’s not dodging after all.
So you send redundant copies, and don’t use any defective copies.
Only if your implausible assumptions are taken as a given.
As said, that’s just not true.
So what? If it takes a million years it doesn’t matter; for a slow moving “city ship” the ship is home, not wherever they happen to be headed. Assuming they are even headed any particular direction. Such a replicating fleet would eventually reach other stars because eventually they’ll reach everywhere in the galaxy.
In what way of speaking? Are you talking about a nuclear annihilation? If so, then, well, it’s certainly possible we’ll wipe out a very large chunk of humanity…though I’d imagine there would still be a fair few left. Maybe we’ll cause our own extinction in a few centuries. Definitely a possibility. However, excepting that…
If you aren’t talking about nuclear annihilation, how do you figure? Evolution doesn’t happen that fast.
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Natural evolution, no, not usually. But if our civilization doesn’t collapse there’s no way we won’t modify ourselves far faster than natural evolution works; and there’s the possibility of us being replaced by our own creations as well.
Perhaps. But up till now we’ve mostly been dealing with relatively small and trivial problems in comparisons. Swift travel between stars does not require new tools; it requires entire new sciences. They may exist, but there is no guarantee.
It’s also possible that a sufficiently enormous material culture - one able to capture massive quantities of solar energy and can do pretty much whatever it wants with the materials in this system, could eventually build something practical by sheer time and near-unlimited wealth and resources. Neither seems very likely within even the remotest limits of our science or engineering as it now stands. We are in a much different position even than explorers a few centuries ago. They didn’t have the resources to do what they might want. After all, it took very little time to develop early locomotives, and then cars and planes, once good enough materials and energy sources became available - these concepts were hypothetically known eons ago. It was a (not-so-) simple matter of applying the new resources to the known problem. An engineering challenge.
But now we’re running into limits of the universe themselves, and we have no known ways of working around them. I can see some possibilities, but nothing in any kind of reasonably-foreseeable timeframe. But one never knows what idea may occur, or what new space a developing technology might uncover.
All this discussion - both pro and con - has assumed we’d travel vast distances across space by going through space (except for the wormhole thing, which has been dismissed).
Right. We’re never going to get 100,000 light years away from here by traveling in a ship that traverses 100,000 light years. We need shortcuts
But there are more physical dimensions than the three we observe. Variations on the double-slit experiment imply effects that temporally precede causes. Somehow information travels faster than light.
Even Shatner said years ago that interstellar travel was a pipe dream. The massive distances makes it impossible. Even a Mars mission is being presented as a one way trip.
I’m a big science fiction fan but there’s no getting around reality.
I do think the odds are good that there is life out there somewhere. Simply because of the number of galaxies and planets. It’s hard to imagine there isn’t life. But we’re safely separated by the expanse of space. A good thing because we’d probably start a war with them.
Dude, we’ll be past the singularity at that point. (And I don’t mean the woo version). We (or our creations who take over) will be so smart we can’t even predict what we’d be thinking, let alone what we would discover. We’re talking exponential growths in intelligence here. There’s just no way you can predict that far in advance. Yeah, it’s not going to happen any time soon, but it is definitely pessimistic to say it won’t happen in 100,000 years.
Even if you think FTL travel will never happen, the sleeper ship scenario you gave is entirely based on current or near-future tech. Despite what you were taught on Star Trek, there’s no inherent that reason all devices need regular maintenance. And there’s no reason you couldn’t have maintenance anyways in a generational ship. There’s no reason to think we won’t develop longer lasting materials in a timespan that is longer than recorded history itself.
So, yeah, you’re a pessimist, and, what’s worse, the worst kind of pessimist. You are both unknowingly ignorant about the subject, and, worse, actually get off on trying to dash the hopes of optimists (and even realists). You’re trying to preemptively rub people’s noses in their supposed mistakes. That’d be bad even if you turned out to be right.
Is this a joke? Any device that performs useful work will eventually need maintenance to continue functioning. Perhaps you envision a system with very low maintenance requirements, but to eliminate the need for maintenance in a system as complex as a functioning spacecraft on the timescale necessary to perform interstellar travel? I mean, you might as well just say that wizards will take care of it.
