You left out the answer “No, because of physics and engineering limitations,” which is what I vote.
I can’t produce that directly, I wouldn’t know where to start. I DO know that we engineered the first "sythetic lifeform " earlier this year, and that the application on a larger scale is mostly a matter of computing power. That should resovle itself within a decade. We already have experimental computers that record data on the molecular level and can pack loads of power into a small space…BUT they are ridiculously expensive and impractical due to financial implications, delicacy of the instrument etc… As for nano tech, I’ve read plenty of news articles lately about concept proving experiments that have been conducted. It isn’t really that far a leap from proven concept to application. It’s a matter of money, material and machine availability, and time to work out bugs. It isn’t that we have no idea how to build the machines we need, it’s that nobody wants to pay for the development.
We could make a massive start on biotechnologies by allowing unrestricted human cloning and removing the red tape from other lines of research. Fuck ethics’ panels debating over whether or not some cloned meat feels pain. Fuck the religious bloc right in their superstitious asses. Let’s get shit done. We could allow some more edgy research into the mind and processes of life and death by allowing terminal patients to elect voluntary euthanasia and contribute to the collection of data. There is wealth of knowledge out there waiting.
At the risk of channeling Der Trihs, primarily religion and over valuation of capitalism in regards to scientific research. R&D facilities pursuing lines of research that would truly benefit society or revolutionize existing technologies should not be tied up with direct financial returns. We should be funding the sciences the way we do the military. We also cater far too hard to the religious contingent, and frankly, politicians have no business legislating regulations for science.
First we convert the sun side of Mercury into solar cells and the back side into anti-matter generators. Then we produce 10g anti-matter rockets so we can get near lightspeed with a month-long burn.
We send molecular fabricators on these rockets to where we want to go. The fabricators construct a crew. Not necessarily humans, but perhaps a robot that has the intellect of a human, or even a composite intellect. The robots establish a beachhead. Build a human sustainable habitat.
The robots send information back to us, either with another rocket or a transmitter. On this side humans assimilate the knowledge and memories of the worker robots through sci-fi memory integrations.
You have humans who have done the pioneer thing and built a world out of wilderness. Then, humans on this side have their minds and modified bodies digitized and sent to the new world. On the new planet a first generation of molecularly fabricated living humans are created. They are fertile and modified to live on the planet. They, the first generation have the memories of human volunteers, and get to experience first hand life on the new world.
Eventually they set up their own anti-matter factory and we share info and cultural ideas. Individuals are digitized and sent both directions and have their memories of trips integrated into their lives.
For instance, Larry NuSmith chooses to upload to the Centauri colony. His mind is copied and transmitted. Four years pass as his mind is either rocketed or transmitted and a body is created on that side for him. He works and falls in love. After five years he has his mind digitized and sent back. Larry NuSmith on Earth gets a memory implant and has spent five years on the other world. The memories of that place integrated with his own.
Or conversely NuSmith goes into cryonic sleep and gets the memories upon his awakening. Or conversely NuSmith kills himself and a new body is made when the memories arrive. Probably different people will chose different options.
That isn’t all that hard. Since I’m several years past 50, I won’t live to see it happen - even if a probe aimed at Alpha Centauri was fired into space tomorrow, I’d die before it completed its crossing of the interstellar gulf. But barring unusually early death, my son should live to see that.
We’ve already sent probes out of the solar system. All the probe needs beyond that is to be aimed at a nearby star such as Alpha Centauri, with enough smarts to maneuver itself into a stable orbit around the star when it gets into the system, and a broadcast antenna strong enough to send a signal that we can receive from 26 trillion miles away. Doesn’t sound like an insurmountable set of programming and engineering problems to me.
If we called it “Man reaching X” whenever an unmanned probe of human origin got there, then we could already say we’ve been everywhere in the solar system, and beyond. But nobody’s making that sort of claim.
But if we can arbitrarily edit human memory, and create human beings out of a sack of chemical precursors, then what’s the point of giving someone the memory of an artificial human being that actually lived on Alpha Centauri? Why not just give them any old arbitrary memory?
Sounds like that DS9 episode where O’Brien commits some sort of infraction, and aliens arrive to punish him with 20 years of imprisonment. But rather than going to the bother of actually imprisoning him for 20 years, they just give him the memory of having been in prison for 20 years, and go on their way.
If we have total control over the human brain, then pretty soon we’re looking at a dystopian scenario that we can barely imagine. Dystopian from our point of view I mean, but the quasi-human creatures it happens to will be edited so they like it that way. I guess there’s your impetus for escaping the solar system–to get away from the mindrapers. If they mindrape someone to give retroactive consent to the mindrape, is it still mindrape?
Of course - the fact that the victim isn’t capable of complaining after the fact is immaterial, or murder would be perfectly legal. (When was the last time a murder victim griped about the inconvenience of it all?)
The point would be the “real” experience would likely be more fulfilling than an similar fiction.
As to whether the society would be totalitarian, I’m not sure. In a post-scarcity society with pleasures available at the drop of a hat, what would drive tyrants? I’d like to think we’d ease into it and create a good place to live.
As to the mindrape question, I would say it’s still rape.
Yeah, but it’s gonna be a mindrape virus. OK, one nutty guy writes a mindrape program. He mindrapes a couple of people. And they start recruiting. And the recruits start recruiting. Pretty soon we’ve got a zombie plague.
It’s not that the mindraped turned mindrapists get any satisfaction out of mindraping, they just don’t have any choice. So something like the upgrade process in “Rise of the Cybermen”/“Age of Steel”.
We can send out unmanned ships to wrangle them.
Sounds like Charles Stross’s Accelerando. The singularity is an inevitable clusterfuck, because it turns out that any post-singularity entities that value the same things we do are quickly out-competed in Economy 2.0. (How America-centric is that vision?) But technology-resistant people are just as doomed. So the only hope is a handful of outcasts living on the cusp of the singularity and exploring the remnants of other singularity-ruined civilizations looking for anyone who might have discovered a way forward.
Anyway, if you take the singularity seriously, even if it doesn’t mean something that’s dystopian from our point of view, it inherently means something that isn’t human from our point of view. Post-singularity post-humans reaching the stars doesn’t count as “man” doing anything.
The question is whether we can upload actual humans, or design a robotic system that can generate actually human descendants out of local materials (both of which seem a lot more plausible than generation ships, as I said earlier).
Of course there’s a lot of leeway as to what you consider “actual humans”, but something that’s so far beyond us that we can’t even understand each other doesn’t seem like it counts.
Only if you restrict yourself to a space of three dimensions. Nothing can travel faster than light in three space.
However if there’s at least one more spatial dimension, and space travel within such a dimension becomes possible, then the maximum velocity attained in three dimensional space should increase by one power after the transition to four space.
The great majority of scientists, particularly cosmologists, have ruled out the possibility of more than three spatial dimensions by definition, without seeing the need for any special analysis.
The fact that the cosmological Dark Matter (DM) is completely invisible and can only be detected by its gravitational effects on galaxies and galactic clusters indicates that these Invisible Dark Matter (IDM) particles are in a higher spatial dimension. Whether these gravitational effects are attractive or repulsive has not been conclusively determined as a case can be made either way.
If IDM particles attract normal baryonic matter (the majority view) then no use can be made of it. However, if they repel normal baryonic matter (the minority view) and can be trapped and confined in flat panels, then the implications on energy production and space travel would be enormous.
I don’t even want to go to the stars - unless… will there be chicks?
Sure. If space colonization is possible, I’d give good odds that we won’t be the only ones doing it. But they probably won’t look like human chicks with green skin and/or ridges on their forehead. Plus, their physical reproductive systems and social courtship/mating systems will probably be far more different from ours than ours are from the chimps. And, worst of all, Jim Kirk will get them before you. So really, you’re better off going into the jungle and looking for bonobos than going out into the stars.
In other news, if my grandmother had wheels, she would be a wagon.
Except for the Kirk & bonobo bits, that was all covered in the “Intelligent Design” poll option.
That would be a very impressive level of smarts, since it would need to include the ability to gin up a method of propulsion sufficient to make those maneuvers - or possibly the ability to discover some as-yet-undreamed-of physics that would make this easy.
Since current-technology probes would necessarily require an extremely long time (on the order of 10,000 years) to reach even nearby stars, perhaps there’s time for this sort of on-board innovation to happen.