I think we’ll do it; I know the current state of science says that FTL travel is impossible, but also that bigger towers have fallen. Thus, I cannot predict whether the trip will involve generation ships or not. But do it? Yeah, if only because so many of us enjoy doing the impossible. Being able to see the look in the face of those who claimed it was impossible is a definite plus favoring FTL but, as I said, I don’t know whether physics will allow this additional pleasure or not.
the only thing that ticks me off about that is that there’s yet another smug, self-important blogger who validates his/her own existence by trying to make people “uncomfortable.”
We will get there provided we get out of our adolescence as a species intact. As a few other posters have noted, technological challenges and “impossibilities” having been dropping like flies, and I don’t see any reason to assume that FTL is categorically fantasy. Most tech problems can be resolved with the judicious application of time and resources. The better question would be "will Man ever stop quibbling over religion, money, and politics long enough to devote the resources to solving the issues of interstellar travel? " I think we will do so, and I’m optimistic that in my lifetime, (I’m thirty), I’ll see both a lunar/ mars station and the confirmation of life on other worlds IF we can get over our social issues first.
You know, I’ve never really understood the idea that curbing our violent tendencies is a prerequisite for interstellar travel. I mean, a big chunk of the reason we have a space program is that we wanted to develop better ways to lob nukes at each other. We have computers, in large part, because we wanted to lob artillery shells at each other and break each others’ military codes so that we could find and kill each other more effectively. A whole bunch of high-precision manufacturing techniques were developed to more effectively build weapons systems (artillery and fighter jets and so on have tight tolerances).
And we’re still doing it - if we succeed in developing really good autonomous AI, it’ll probably be because we want to use it for UAVs. If we succeed in developing workable human hibernation, it’ll probably be because it has profound military implications (putting gravely injured soldiers in cold storage until they can get back to a top-tier hospital in the US or Europe is a hell of a lot better than treating them in field hospitals).
I suppose it’s possible that continued militarism may lead to a way that does serious damage to civilization. (Though I doubt we could end it, let alone exterminate the human race - people are tough, and we like civilization). But absent a continued drive to do horrible, horrible things to each other faster, cheaper, and harder, I doubt our space program could ever go much farther than it has right now.
Technological progress requires violence.
As always, Orsen Wells put it better than I ever could. From “The Third Man”:
Yes, I’m confident that man will reach the stars. And we’ll colonise other planets. I don’t believe that it will be possible to travel FTL, but I hope we may be able to side-step it.
snip.
To a degree, certainly. The problem with this is that there is finite limit to the usefulness of weaponized tech. What is the military application of FTL? Even the tiniest fraction of that speed would be sufficient to travel the globe in seconds. At some point there is no purpose to continue refinement. A lot of technological hurdles could be solved faster, cheaper, and with an impact that reaches farther if we focused upon that rather than fighting about politics, religion or making money. Technology is now the djinn out of the bottle. People WANT it; better, faster, and more powerful in it’s applications. We don’t need the impetus of war to have incentive to desire to create any longer.
Realistically, if we focused upon biotech and nanomachining we could easily change the fundamental nature of life on this planet in just a few short years. In a decade or two, modified humans might be living under the sea or in other hostile environments without the need for protective equipment. The pace of development is astonishing, but it would be an order of magnitude faster if we removed our social hurdles.
(Leaving FTL out of it) I don’t think there’s much limit to the military usefulness of coming up with more efficient ways to (1) generate energy and (2) convert said energy into kinetic energy, which are the biggest (though not the only) hurdles in the way of STL interstellar probes.
Really? How much power do you need? Enough to destroy the planet? A star? More? That’s kind of the limit I was referring to. At some point the amount or speed becomes irrelevant. It might as well be instant and unstoppable. A sort of super nuclear deterrent, but who is it deterring? Their death means our death. At that point, further refinement is pointless. Only other applications make sense.
Technological development doesn’t work that way, though. For one example, consider the Soviets’ Tsar Bomba - a thermonuclear bomb design capable of a yield of 100 megatons, which was so insanely destructive that even they never tested it at that level. The Tsar Bomba was essentially an unuseable weapon, overpowered and overly expensive for any concievable application. But I’ll bet you that they learned a ton in building it that was applicable to more conventionally-sized nukes.
To use another example: A modern cruise missile carries a far, far smaller payload than a shell from a WW2-era battleship. The course of weapons development hasn’t been to increase the destructive power of missiles directly, but to make them more flexible, longer-ranged and more precise.
There really isn’t a logical end-point at which further weapons development becomes meaningless, because the other guy is constantly developing counters to your own weapons. That’s what drives weapons development, and generates all the nifty spinoffs for the civilian world.
Even FTL, if it existed (which it never could) has obvious military applications - a system that can get you to Alpha Centauri in weeks can get you to the asteroid belt or Jovian moons in minutes, thus making resource extraction within our solar system cheap and easy. The logistical implications are significant.
Hogwash. This sort of magical thinking serves only to discredit the real scientists working on real nanotech and biotech. Show me any real (peer-reviewed) evidence that the sort of fantastical technology you describe is even remotely on the horizon.
What social hurdles do you think are holding us back?
Could you please name one? I sure can’t think of any, at least not any that humankind can claim credit for.
The fact that one’s mass becomes infinitely great as one’s velocity approaches the speed of light seems to me to be a pretty good reason to make that assumption.
Tangential nitpick. This line always bugged me. Actually the Swiss produced some of the most ferocious soldiers in Europe. When the Borgias and the Medecis were having there terror and war, they were often using Swiss mercenaries. The Swiss guards at the Vatican are a remnant of this.
Granted, but I think the broader point stands - the Swiss didn’t produce cultural contributions on a par with violent Rennaisance-era Italy. For that matter, there’s an argument to be made that they produced such excellent mercenaries because these men left peaceful Switzerland to participate in violence and horror elsewhere.
ETA: Though, I suppose I should defer to a Borgia’s judgment - both because you’d know, and because I fear what you’d do if pissed.
Heh. I picked that name in haste, while reading a book on the Renaissance. I’ve always meant to change it, but could never come up with a new one I liked. I’m neither Italian nor Spanish.
I chose the ‘yeah, but not FTL, so it’ll take generations,’ but I think it’s just as likely that we’ll embark on some million-year project to create our own star out of several brown dwarves, and put the star somewhere nearby. And by the time we have the capability to make an interstellar trek, we’ll probably also have the ability to keep the earth artificially warm without a star at all, for millions of years.
Where do we get these other brown dwarfs from?
I think that eventually machines and/or biological material that originated on Earth will arrive in another solar system. Whether you call that “Man reaching the stars” is another question.
But this depends on a couple of assumptions. First of all, it requires that the economic expansion created by the Industrial revolution continues. I think this is pretty reasonable. Lots of people seem to think that we’re right at the limit of what’s possible, and we’ll either plateau at our current level, or crash back to the feudal ages, or go extinct. I don’t think this is likely.
We’re going to continue to increase, with occasional bumps and bruises. And eventually we’ll reach the point where traveling to the Moon or Mars is still as expensive and difficult as it is now, but our total global economic output will be so large that we can afford to do these things for fun.
Of course, FTL travel is right out. I suppose we might discover some new laws of physics, but if we do then FTL travel is going to be a sideshow. If FTL travel is possible, then time travel is possible, the two are logically equivalent. Traveling to Alpha Centauri in a week is the same as going to Alpha Centauri in 5 years, then going back in time 4 years and 52 weeks. So FTL travel is beyond the Singularity. And anyway, if time travel is possible, then where are the time travelers? Perhaps we’ll prove FTL/time travel is theoretically possible, but it takes more energy than is contained in our universe, or some such.
Anyway, that digression was just to show that if we achieve workable FTL technology that really could move a spaceship containing multiple individual Homo sapiens to another solar system then that technology would be a toy compared to the real implications.
So STL it is. And therefore, we need the technology to live in space for arbitrary amounts of time. Before you can build a generation ship that can travel to Alpha Centauri in 100 years, you need a space habitat that could sustain life for 100 years with no inputs. If you can build a generation ship, why do you need a generation ship? You could build hundreds of generation habitats for the same price. And if you can build generation habitats, you could build all sorts of space habitats that don’t need to be materially closed.
If you allow inputs of new building materials, water, carbon, solar energy, biological material, new people, and so on, then your habitat becomes much more easy to maintain. So the ability to construct a generation ship requires as a prerequisite that you’ve mastered the ability to live and work in space. It means hundreds or thousands of space habitats that have lasted for generations, and you need to give your habitat some sort of propulsion system, or fire it out of a rail gun, or whatever.
But if you’ve got the ability to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars, you could do the exact same thing 100 times more easily on Baffin Island.
Of course, we don’t need to send probes to Alpha Centauri to find out whether it’s worthwhile to visit Alpha Centauri. We’re discovering extrasolar planets by the bushelfull today. Long, long, long before the first STL probe heads for Alpha Centauri we’ll have done surveys of all nearby solar systems and know exactly what planets will be there, and what sort of atmosphere those planets will have.
So most science-fictional scenarios of space travel seem to me to be ruled out. If we don’t have the resources to maintain billions of people on Earth in wealth, comfort and safety, we’re not going anywhere off planet. If we don’t have the resources to maintain tens of millions of people in comfort in off-Earth habitats, then we’re not going anywhere extrasolar. And if we have the energy resources to accelerate a large habitat to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, then we’ve got the energy to do all kinds of other things that will make the colony “ship” look like a stunt.
Or maybe we’re talking a Jor-El scenario, with a probe that has frozen embryos, and you land on the other planet, automatically build uterine replicators, thaw out the babies, and raise them by machine. But if you’ve got an industrial revolution in a can that you can throw at another solar system, then what have you got back home?
I threw something like this out earlier; it’s the most likely scenario I can think of for biological humans coming to exist in another star system. But the only reasons I can think of why we’d bother to do this if we had the technology are superstitious or aesthetic.