Perhaps. But I still think others are looking at this problem as if there weren’t hard limits on what we can do, and imagine that we will be capable of limitless feats if we just knew how.
I’m suggesting we could know how to make a wormhole, but if it required the energy of 10,000 suns in order to make one, then it’s useless to us for the purposes of traveling between the stars. Because we’d have to travel between the stars for it to matter.
We are understanding more and more limits on reality the more we explore it, not less. The more we know, the more we know stuff isn’t possible.
Everything is possible when there is no rules. When you discover the universe has rules, that rules things out.
Better understanding the rules does help you strategize, because then you won’t concoct theories that are absurd on the face of it. But it won’t give you powers you don’t have and never will.
I do have to say, I’m really enjoying this discussion and I appreciate not being treated like I’m insane/stupid.
The discussion is worth having and I feel most of you on the other side are fine debaters and possibly superior ones. And you could very well be right. I just think this is all worth considering, and I’m providing an alternate and more conservative view. The truth might be somewhere in the middle. Or you could be completely right.
I do know there’s stuff I don’t know, and I do know I’ve been wrong before.
I just wish there was some of that humility when people talk about how it will be rare that we hit a 10kg object. I do believe the universe is more complicated than a calculator and some things are not so easily predicted, particularly when exploring the vast unknown. And playing it conservatively is a good idea when we barely have a clue what we’re talking about.
We either have a good idea of what we’re on about or we don’t, so either we have a good handle on things and our understanding of the universe isn’t radically wrong, or we have no idea, and therefore, we can’t calculate the odds of shit that’s happening in space we haven’t explored yet.
We’re either ignorant or we’re not, and I feel some folks on the other side are arguing with the luxury of assuming we are both at the same time.
We’re so awesome we can know for sure it’s safe to go there because the math says so, but we’re not awesome enough to know that we’'ll still be bound by the laws of physics in several years. Seems like that’s assuming a whole lot.
I don’t like it! You kids and your assumptions. Git off mah lawn.
You don’t have to explore it. Astronomers can SEE it.
Yes, they can’t tell you exactly where all the 10kg bowling balls ARE between here and the next star. But they can give you an idea of how many there are (or at least give you an upper limit). And then it just becomes how much risk you willing to take. And if its lottery level low who even gives a rats ass?
They have a general idea of how much gas, dust and bowling ballish objects are out there. Now I am not a professional astronomer but I am sure a real one could us.
Now, if a real one comes along and gives some hideously bad number than I agree things are not looking good. But I’d bet otherwise.
Think about it. We can see 10,000s of thousands of light years across our Milky Way galaxy. Heck, in most directions we can see BILLIONS of light years to the
edge of the universe. There can’t be too many bowling balls per unit volume of space otherwise they would all be blocking the view.
Well, first, I’m not the same person as Dr. Strangelove: as you recall, it was his right hand that was dorky. So it’s actually two of us arguing separate positions.
That said, I think “what kind of rocks are in space” is the kind of thing we’re pretty good at knowing about. It may turn out there’s something out there we don’t know about–maybe there’s some sort of energy field or particle that exists between the stars that we’re not very good at detecting yet–but rocks? My understanding is that that’s something we’re good at.
Third, I don’t say we’ll not be bound by the laws of physics. I say we don’t know all the laws of physics. The ones we do know, we’ll be bound by, in the same way that we still can’t force our lungs to make a sound that’ll travel through the air, unassisted, to be heard a hundred miles away. But the new things we discover may help us figure out a workaround: we may do the equivalent of using our newfound knowledge to build wires that convert our voice to electrical pulses, conduct that electricity a hundred miles, and convert that electricity into the vibrations in a speaker that mimics our voice a hundred miles away.
If you’d told someone a thousand years ago that we’d be able to hear the voice of someone a hundred miles away in the distant future and asked them to propose the mechanism by which it’d happen, I doubt many people would have said, “Burn some rocks you find in the ground, use heat from those rocks to boil some water, use the steam from that water to make a big metal wheel spin around, and then use the lightning generated by that spinning wheel, plus a bunch of copper wire, to make your voice travel a hundred miles.” None of those solutions violated what they knew at the time about the universe, of course.
We’ll discover new things, and those new things may allow us to come up with solutions to the problem of interstellar travel, solutions that obey the laws of physics. Or they may not.
The luxury I have is that my position is impossible to prove wrong :).
Well obviously we are assuming. If we definitively knew the answer we would be traveling across the stars.
But think about this. For hundreds of years, everyone thought Isaac Newton’s laws of motion accurately described the universe. Then some nerd named Einstein noticed that his theory didn’t apply to objects moving extremely fast (like significantly close to c fast). We already know Einstein’s laws don’t apply to very small objects (quantum physics). Scientists are using the Large Hadron Collider to tear apart the fundamental building blocks of matter (hopefully not destroying the Earth in the process). And they still don’t know what the heck dark matter or dark energy is.
The point being, who knows if in a hundred years, they find something that fundamentally changes the way matter works. Or if they find a way to control gravity without actually having to carry around planet-sized masses.
I’m guessing this has been said already, but there are no show stoppers to interstellar space travel. It’s really a resource question. Just looking at today’s technology, you could use a brute force approach and something like an Orion drive/solar sail/ion drive and generation ship to get to the nearest stars if you really, really wanted too. The Oort cloud isn’t some dense shield that would destroy any ship going through it. Yeah, there are trillions of objects, but in an unimaginably huge volume of space. Watching Star Wars one gets the impression of dense fields of asteroids, but the reality is you’d probably never even see another object going through the Oort cloud (or the asteroid belt, which is a much smaller volume of space). If we can envision ways to do this today (impracticable from a resource perspective, granted, but do-able from a reality check perspective), then you can’t say it’s impossible…merely unfeasible given the current technology. However, who knows what will be possible 100 years from now…or 500 or a 1000. Assuming the world doesn’t go tits up the sky is literally the limit…one merely has to look how far we’ve come in the last 100 years to see that. 100 years ago, space travel itself was considered possible, but unfeasible. 100 years before that, powered flight was in the same boat. What technology will be available 100 years from now? Sadly, the rest of you probably will never know…I’ll be there to see however.
Yes. But that’s a bad example because even though our understanding changed that discovery didn’t mean we went from “can’t do that” to “hey we can do that”.
We may make all kinds of amazing science discoveries. But that does not mean they will be of any help.
We could possibly be stuck with just hoping our engineering/technology eventually gets good enough we can build a really big generational ship that can last a few hundred to a few thousand years.
I think that is doable (or at least possible). But at some level of difficulty we might just not even try.
That WARP drive stuff just seems silly to point of invoking magic.
I think the dark horse here is gravity. We seem to know so little about it that I think there is a slim chance we might discover how to control it. That could be a game changer.
It may not take a generational ship. It may just take enough genetic tweaks to turn us into waterbear types. Maybe what we are now won’t make the trip. Der Tris touched on this earlier. We have only begun the genetic journey. This may be just a scratch on the surface of our reengineering ourselves. Can you imagine being able to create life to fit the function we wish of it? We may reach the stars not by changing physics but ourselves. WE may be the grays.
Or religious nuts may force us to keep the devine form we now occupy and keep us from the stars.
There are trillions upon trillions of objects in the Oort cloud blocking our view of the rest of the universe and we didn’t even notice they were there until recently.
We suspected they were there for awhile now. And for the most part they are not blocking the view.
I’m telling you, astronomer have a handle on how much junk is out there. That’s a key part of how they “found” dark matter and dark energy in the first place. Because they are pretty darn sure there aint enough regular matter to explain what they see (and trust me, they tried pretty darn hard to find enough regular matter first). I’m sure there are plenty of observational techniques they can use to place an upper limit on it.
Which all means they know the numbers. You now just have to run them to get your risk level.
And BTW, they suspected and even named the clouds way before they even observed the first objects in them. So, its not like it was a big surprise. All that really happened is telescopes finally got sensitive enough.
And an astronomer will tell you that they still have no idea how many objects could be found between here and the next star system because they don’t.
This is because they noticed that the Universe doesn’t seem to weigh enough to explain the gravitational effects, on an order of something like 85% of the total mass not being present. That’s a big deal.
A rock is not 85% of the total mass of the universe. You’re basically talking about using telescopes to see quarks. They’re not comparable things.
I’m talking about something which is not even close to a quadrillionth of the mass of a planet. You absolutely, under no uncertain terms, can’t determine how many small rocks are between here and the next star system using the math equations you’re discussing.
I am a rank amateur and I’m fully aware that you’re dead wrong on at least this one point. You have to understand this.
This is why I say you’re overconfident. I have no idea what I’m talking about, but it’s still got a better handle on the matter than your previous bit.
They might be able to give you a range. They might be able to say, well, we know there’s not several stars’ worth of matter, otherwise the galaxy would weigh too much.
And they can’t actually say that either, because it doesn’t weigh nearly enough as it stands to explain the gravitational effects.
And then your range is still between zero and 1,000,000,000,000 small objects, or something. In other words, a wild guess.
And the concern here is that the very low probability of hitting an object in the Oort cloud will detract future space explorers from trying it? People (and their committed future offspring) will try it as soon as they economically can.
Indeed. I love it that Newtonian physics was considered DONE! Well except for one or two perturbations - in the orbit of Mercury?? - that didn’t quite jive with the math; but we’d figure that out…with a little thing called Relativity that transformed our understanding of Stuff profoundly…
And here we are, where (I think), we are now estimating that “Dark Matter” accounts for 95% of matter in the Universe? You know, that stuff that we have clue real clue what it is…??
I am Ozymandias, King of Kings; look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!
