Nitpick, I said -10th century person, so I’m talking about 3,000 years ago. Big problem: I’m saying that that person was completely unqualified to discuss what our limits would be, and that we’re only slightly better qualified to discuss what the limits will be on someone operating 999,900 years from now.
I’m doing neither, I think: I’m specifically saying that analogies fall down here, because we don’t know what the far-flung future will hold. We can imagine things (what if our control over our own body becomes such that a journey of 10,000 years becomes no more remarkable than today a journey of 10,000 miles is, for example?) but we can’t know exactly what it will entail, and it’s a bit presumptuous to make announcements about the future.
Our understanding of far-flung limits may be excellent. But it may be completely off. It’s too early to say :).
Are we really debating with a pizza guy on the state of technological advancement a hundred millennia from now? It’s not like his pronouncement is going to be set in stone to be discovered by space monkeys.
I think you grossly underestimate the engineering challenges of space by several orders of magnitude. It’s more like should we design more efficient ships vs digging a tunnel from New York to Hong Kong (like the one in the Total Recall remake).
A single asteroid may hold more metals than have been mined on Earth in the history of mankind. However, the economic and engineering challenges of getting at it makes it more worthwhile just figuring out how to dig deeper into the Earth.
No matter how badly we fuck up Earth’s environment, it will never be as hostile and unforgiving as an environment in space.
Askthepizzaguy, you still haven’t addressed my idea. What do you think? It’s relatively cheap (in comparison, of course), and bypasses many of the problems from other ideas.
Well, we are in a position to be very biased towards what we think we can accomplish due to the rush of new technology from the information age.
But here’s the issue- science doesn’t create things that are impossible. It allows us to understand what is possible.
And we currently have an understanding of physics which is much closer to the truth than ever before. We’re not going to one day discover, oh, gravity doesn’t really exist.
To put it in chess terms- we’ve developed the ability to analyze the game board 100 moves into the future. It just takes us a while. But we will never, ever develop the ability to make rooks move diagonally without changing the rules of chess.
Now we can better understand the rules of physics, but we can’t change them.
We’re looking at the curve of our knowledge and going, wow. Isn’t that astounding. But never, ever, will we ever have any abilities which are impossible.
We are still stuck on the chess board. We might find ways of developing our bishop more optimally. But it will never become a queen.
That’s what I am saying. No amount of science or technology, even 100,000 years into the future, avoids the fact that we have to deal with the matter and energy present in our immediate vicinity. And there are limits to that.
And we would have had to grossly and completely bungle everything we understand about physics to create the kinds of things people talk about as solutions. Warp drives and wormholes.
One can say, well, there was a time when we didn’t understand algebra. A time when we didn’t understand calculus. And if we showed a caveman our math, they wouldn’t be able to comprehend it.
True. But math is a discovery, not an invention. The math was always there, we just didn’t understand it. Now we comprehend advanced math.
Physics was always there, we just didn’t understand it. Now we do, to a very large degree. The things we don’t understand, scientists are now stating with confidence, they don’t affect the larger world. Talking about things like undiscovered particles, for example. They might have mass, but they don’t interact with normal matter. They might have force, but the forces are too small and the other forces are several trillion times more important.
It’s very much like saying, well, we haven’t solved the game of chess completely, but I can prove that you cannot force a checkmate within 20 moves against a competent opponent who plays flawlessly.
We are reaching that level of understanding, where future discoveries won’t change what we already understand. Like math.
Nowhere in the future will we discover that 2 is actually 3. Math won’t change like that.
Nowhere in the future will we discover that the speed of light is actually 3 miles per hour. Or that the energy contained inside an atom is the same as the energy contained inside the sun.
There are limits to what we can discover, and they aren’t imposed on us by MY lack of imagination. But by the universe itself.
And we would have had to completely and totally not understood the rules of chess to come up with most of these proposed solutions.
Meanwhile I propose a solution that uses our current technology, or a not-improbable leap forward which is human stasis, and it would work according to everything we know about physics.
I would love to hear how it’s not a solution, or that it’s an over-reach. Particularly, how is my solution more of a reach than predicting that one day, we will be able to ignore the laws of physics and just warp places instantly. I think my solution works within the laws we understand, and is infinitely more likely to be the actual solution than wild predictive speculation about the nigh-magical properties future humans will have due to the sweet magic of science.
No, I think our modern physicists are not about to be proven to be barely formed apes by the physicists that come after them.
They will be hailed as geniuses that were way, way ahead of the rest of humanity’s development.
10th century man didn’t understand the rules of chess, so to speak. We do.
Those rules don’t bend just because we’re developing technology rapidly. The technology is filling the space that is possible. It won’t ever fill the space that is impossible.
I think that’s the worst footing you could have.
Thing about our knowledge, the more we know, the less the stuff we know changes.
Sure, when we didn’t understand what the New World was, theories abound and it changed and changed. Then we settled the New World.
Now what we know about it changes only very slightly. We aren’t going to discover that we actually reached the West Indes.
You predict because our knowledge has changed rapidly, that it will continue.
But I observe that it changes rapidly until we have a good idea of what it is, and then it will never ever change again.
That is why the hubris is on the part of those who anticipate we have no limits because we’ve had a second Renaissance of knowledge growth. That’s completely wrong, and I feel very confident in saying that. And I don’t think it is hubris to suggest that we have limits.
I think it’s fair to conclude, if most star systems form in a similar fashion, that you’re going to find an Oort-Cloud-style cloud around just about every star system, and the total mass of such isn’t huge, but it is several planets and it is scattered everywhere.
You’ve impressed me with your grasp of the subject matter, but thinking our star system is **unique **in that there’s a bunch of debris around it just seems nutty to me.
You’re right, the shielding is probably the weakest prediction I could make.
But I am keeping in mind the extreme amounts of energy it takes to form a field far enough out from the ship to move the object in question in time- and the extreme amounts of energy it would take to accelerate such a mass so quickly.
We’re traveling at a distance that far exceeds the size of the Earth every second. We’re going to project a field out that far, and move a 10 kilogram rock several hundred meters to the side, within a single second?
Technology might not be the hurdle there, but the energy required is. It takes an extreme amount of force to do that. You might as well just obliterate it with vastly powerful laser. And if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to generate such a laser pulse for thousands of years. And it’s got to nuke pretty large rocks instantly.
I am suggesting you could force matter directly into energy and you’d still have difficulties generating so much energy for thousands of years.
We’ve only discussed going to Alpha Centauri, a mere 4 light years away. In truth, we might find the nearest habitable globe is 1000 light years away. There are limits to the kinds of fields we can produce for a thousand years (and that’s light speed travel, which is just ridiculous to expect).
If it takes the mass energy of the Moon, we won’t be going. We’re not going to be taking the Moon with us on this voyage.
And we agree on that much.
This seems reasonable.
Well, I didn’t say they were impossible. I just suggested that there will be limits on how fast we can move before it becomes prohibitively dangerous and reckless.
For reference, and yes I know it’s wikipedia, but let’s get over that.
It’s only a few planets worth of mass. But it’s several trillion small objects.
We have not guessed the mass of the galaxy so exactly that we can suggest there aren’t several additional planets’ worth of mass surrounding each star system. Hell, we can barely detect planet sized objects at this range, and we have only a wild guess as to the total mass of each star system. We can say that on average, they will weigh X.
You can be off by the amount of an entire star with margins of error that high.
There’s asteroid and comet debris around just about every star, and they could extend out more than a light year in some cases. Our cloud can’t be unique or you’d have to explain why our little star out of the quadrillions in the heavens is the only one with star dust around it.
I bet you’ll find star systems with ten times more dust, and a much larger distance from the star.
Anyway, this is all dismissed because the objects are spaced far apart, so your odds are good that you won’t hit any.
And those odds are great until you play the odds and lose.
And anyhoo- Even if you could guarantee that outside the boundaries of these clouds, there’s no denser gasses or debris, which you cannot (THAT is hubris) just using Centauri as an example, the Oort cloud is 1 light year, or 1/4th of the total journey.
Another cloud around that star system at the same distance is another light year.
So fully HALF of our journey, minimum, is within dust clouds and debris fields.
We’re not gonna travel at light speed through that.
And that’s the easiest journey we can make. We try traveling 1,000 light years away instead of four, and we might pass through several other stellar debris fields that extend out further than we predict, further than 1 light year, and we have to go the long way around, not in a straight line, or risk hitting the debris.
Even if you write off the truly interstellar space as being debris-free which it is not, you can’t write off the stellar debris fields like the Oort cloud as being unique to our star system, not a risk, and let’s just plow straight on through to the other side. And since a vast portion of our journey is going to be within these fields (at least one escape, and one entrance, not counting other fields we might pass near on our voyage) it matters.
Matter matters. Space is big, but there’s matter everywhere we want to go. So there’s going to be a speed limit, I tells ya.
I’ll go full nutter and start ranting about how you kids have no respect for stellar debris in a moment.
I’ll just embrace it at this point. I’ll own that. If I am the guy on the street corner with a shopping cart full of soup cans who hasn’t bathed in years, telling us about how the aliens stole my liver, then so be it.
That will be fun for all. I get to be looney and you get to poke fun at me. Everyone wins.
Space is amazingly empty. A few previous posters have done some back of the envelope calculations.
You can get a handle on the probabilities of hitting stuff and the chances how big a big thing you might hit, but I’ve always had the impression it was at least tolerable.
Yeah, near light speed things would be bad, but we ain’t going near that speed anyway. Just fast rocket ship fast. When it comes to hitting stuff, you probably got a lot more things to worry about for a generational ship than hitting stuff.
And think about this. Compared to deep space our solar system is just chock full of shit. How many of our probes have appeared to hit stuff?
I suppose we can sit here and try to imagine the state of science 100, 1000, or 10,000 years from now. Or we could take a look at experiments that people are doing right now to try and determine if FTL travel is possible.
I’m no scientist so I have no idea if anything will come of this, but real scientists are spending real money to do these experiments, so someone must think its worthwhile.
The difference in our knowledge and technology between now and 100 years ago is amazing and it’s growing ever faster. I don’t think we can even begin to imagine what things will be like 100 years from now. The only bet I’d make is that all of our guesses will be too conservative.
You are talking about 100 millennia in the future. A little more than half a millennium ago, leading scientists were sure that the sun revolved around the Earth.
You are correct in that this like warp drives and FTL travel are impossible with our current understanding of physics. Then again, our current understanding of Relativity is only about 100 years old and it isn’t perfect. For example, scientist haven’t unified Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. And AFAIK, scientists really don’t know exactly what gravity is or how it works.
I don’t think you understand how big space is. You can probably head off in any random direction and pass through the entire Milky Way galaxy without coming within 50,000 miles of another object.
Does anyone else find it ironic/funny that one of the best arguments against anything close to Star Trek ever becoming reality is “you canna change the laws of physics”?
Askthepizzaguy, when you talk about 1% SOL being an upper speed limit - I immediately thought “relative to what”?
If my velocity is 1% SOL, relative to the solar system, that says nothing about what it will be relative to anything I might encounter on my voyage. Assuming that I unluckily end up in the exact same 4-dimensional point (time+3 physical dimensions) as something else, there is no way to estimate the intersecting objects relative velocity.
It could be slowly overtaking me, have an exact opposite velocity (that would be bad), or any of a myriad other options. Assuming we’re capable of building something that can survive a multi-decade trip in space, I don’t think collisions are something you need to worry about.
Take Dr. Strangelove’s volume calculations above and factor in that everything is moving. Not only do the two objects have to both end up at X,Y,Z - they have to do so at the exact same t. It’s not impossible, but it’s pretty damn unlikely.
I wish I could find the article I read a while back on the basic impossibility of space battles and space piracy. And that was with the two sides both presumably trying to get close another to each other to engage.
On preview - this is really disjointed - sorry about that.
In the last century, we discovered that, for some senses of the word, matter doesn’t really exist. Solids don’t exist. Not in the way we thought they did. We might very well discover that what we thought gravity was, it isn’t.
As for discovering that our lay understanding of gravity doesn’t exist? Sure. But that lay understanding of gravity is several million years old.
I think putting it in chess terms is exactly the wrong analogy, because chess, like all games, has human-created rules. It only exists inasmuch as humans understand it. The universe isn’t an invented system, it’s a discovered system.
Sure, but that’s a tautology: it’s impossible to do things that it’s impossible to do. I don’t think you’ll get much argument on that. The question is, are we really clear on what’s impossible to do?
If you’re reading me as saying that some day the science of Star Trek will all be proven true, I apologize for my terrible communication skills. That’s not remotely what I’m trying to say. The specific solutions people are imagining now are about as likely to become the actual solutions as Lucian’s account of flying to the moon via wings was. We did get to the moon, just not how someone a couple millennia ago imagined it in a work of fiction.
Again, nobody is speculating about magic. That’s a bit patronizing to suggest. Your solution works just fine, to the best of my (and your) limited knowledge. Nobody is suggesting ignoring the laws of physics. We’re suggesting that it’s too early to say that we understand the laws of physics well enough to say what’ll be possible in 200 years, let alone 100,000 years.
To take a few examples, do you think our knowledge of time is so great that it’ll never change? That our knowledge of dimensionality won’t ever change? That our knowledge of the underlying fabric of space won’t ever change? That our knowledge of quantum entanglement won’t ever change? That our knowledge of field theory won’t ever change? Changes in any of these might affect our views of the issue.
Again, do you think there’s someone in this thread saying we have no limits? Certainly I’ve not said so, and I’m pretty sure I’ve said the opposite. What I’ve said is that you’re not in a position to know what those limits are.
If you really want the chess analogy, we can make it: I think you’re like someone who, having learned chess a couple of years ago, thinks he’s found an unbeatable strategy for play and anticipates that it’ll never be beaten. Or maybe you’re like the people in the eighties who confidently predicted that a computer would never be able to beat the best human player in chess. You know a bit about the system, and you extrapolate from the bit that you know some limits on other players in the system, limits that are really an artifact of your own limits rather than of theirs. Those other players do have limits, but you don’t know enough to understand what their limits are.
When you say, “We are not going to do any interstellar space travel,” define “we”. How many years into the future are you looking? I wouldn’t be surprised to see a ship that could travel, say, .02c 100 years from now, even though that still wouldn’t really be fast enough to make it worthwhile (it would take 100 years to get to the nearest star).
Even on Star Trek, they had to fudge things; at the (original) Enterprise’s fastest speed, it would still take decades to get from the Klingon neutral zone to the Romulan one.
It does. They share a center of gravity which is within the sun itself, but the sun wobbles slightly due to the Earth’s pull on it.
But the point is, 100 millennia from now, scientists aren’t going to discover that the sun actually orbits around the Earth in the way you’re talking about.\
That is why I am amazed that people are so impressed with how much our knowledge of the universe has changed.
That’s great, but it’s not going to change again. We’re not going to discover the sun is actually a cube, or made of green cheese, okay? We’ve got a good handle on what the sun is now, and we didn’t then. That’s the difference.
Add 100,000 years, and we will still think of the sun as a star that does not perform a gigantic orbit around the Earth. That’s why you cannot be so amazed at our progress and then project massive changes in the future.
The difference is we had no idea how things worked, and now we have a very very good idea. That’s a change. But there’s a limit to how much things will change.
Science is discovery, not invention. When we’ve actually discovered shit, it** stays discovered.**
When we’ve discovered shit incorrectly, then yeah it will change. Do you think the sun is made out of marshmallows? You could “discover” that and be wrong. But when someone actually discovers that it is not made of marshmallows, that’s never going to change 100,000 years into the future.
So seriously. Comparing our science to that of bronze age guessers is ludicrous.
I know folks think I believe space is the asteroid field from Star Wars. I’m aware there are great distances between objects on average, and that you could pass through the actual asteroid belt and miss everything easily.
My point is that you can pass through the asteroid belt and if you are on course something, and if you’re traveling at 0.1c, you cannot avoid it and you WILL die.
It’s an analogy that works for this purpose. The universe could in fact have been an invented system by the way, just not by us.
The point is, in physics there are rules and constants. In chess there are as well. For that level, the analogy works. And that’s all that is needed to work.
Wrong, wrong wrong. I am not talking strategy, I’m talking about the rules of the game.
I’m saying 1000 or 10000 years ago, using the chess analogy, they weren’t aware that rooks moved like so, or that bishops moved like so, they weren’t aware of the rules of the game. They speculated, and suggested that stuff just moves randomly and anything was possible, in chess terms. Later, we discovered the game had rules.
I’m saying there was a time when we didn’t understand the rules of the game, and started posting strategies on how to win, and we were wrong.
Now, we do understand the rules of the game. At least, the rules of the game that affect us.
Now we can post strategies and we can actually say, hey… that can never work because it is outside of the rules of chess.
You cannot actually promote your bishop to a queen. Therefore we can dismiss any strategy involving such an idea.
And it won’t matter, 100,000 years from now, if the rules of chess (meaning the rules of the universe) never change.
The only way you CAN’T say with confidence that some things are impossible is if the fundamental nature of the universe or its constants are not constant.
Right–but back then, not only didn’t we have a good handle on quantum mechanics, we didn’t even know the right questions to ask about it. I’m not suggesting that we’ll discover that you really can go at light speed if you build your ship out of solid chevre. I’m suggesting that there are entire branches of physics that haven’t even occurred to us yet, in the same way that quantum mechanics hadn’t occurred to anyone in the 19th century yet.
Not true. There are plenty of things we knew in the bronze age that we still know. A tiny list:
-Everything in the air eventually falls toward the earth. We knew a bit about gravity. But we hadn’t imagined rockets yet.
-If you shout, someone a hundred yards away might hear you, but not if they’re ten thousand yards away. We knew a bit about sound waves, but we hadn’t imagined telephone wires yet.
-If you stay underwater for longer than a few minutes, you’ll die. We knew a bit about biology, but we hadn’t imagined submarines yet.
-Everyone eventually dies. We knew a bit about human lifespans, but we hadn’t invented immortality gene-splicers yet.
Since the bronze age, gravity hasn’t disappeared, sound hasn’t changed its functions, and human lungs haven’t significantly evolved. The universe has stayed the same. What’s changed is the technology we apply to that universe.
In some cases the technology hasn’t changed. We still lack those immortality gene-splicers, and it may be that we’ll always lack them. But I disagree that we can anticipate all changes to our science, or to the technology we’ll apply to solve our problems.
No, we don’t. To use your analogy, chess has rules that grow in complexity the more you study them, and thousands, if not millions, of people have devoted their lifetimes to understanding the rules of chess, and there are still disagreements about certain aspects of the rules among people who have studied them, and there are people who are totally famous just for uncovering a specific rule of chess (not for a strategy, not for how they play, just for finding a rule that nobody had ever seen before), and there are entire areas of the board that we’re still unclear about–time, dimensionality, whether other universes exist, how our universe started, what everything is made of, field theory, etc.
We don’t know the rules that apply to us. We know some of them, just as squirrels know some of the rules of the universe that apply to them (okay, we know more than squirrels). But there are vast swaths of knowledge we haven’t uncovered yet. We can predict some changes: it’s unlikely that we’ll ever be able to turn the usn into a marshmallow with the power of our brain. Others, though, we can’t predict as easily. Will the study of dimensionality reveal some way to alter dimensional structure? Will the study of other universes reveal some means of sending or receiving information or matter to those universe? Will the study of field theory lead to a technology capable of more powerful field manipulation than we can currently accomplish? Will the study of time reveal some way other than traveling near light speed to alter its flow? Will the study of quantum entanglement reveal something about the relationship between information and matter that can be utilized either in communication or transportation?
There’s a lot we don’t know yet. Calling the game is premature.
