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In a universe without FTL...
electricitylikesme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
...do you think slower-then-light space travel is likely to become a human pursuit. Interstellar travel no less.
Obviously not an endeavour that would have the average return we expect for most of our endeavours, something that would be accomplished over timeframes which we currently consider to be multi-generational. Presuming Einstein saw the whole picture, and we really are just filling out the details, is a substantial human space exploration effort taking place over 100's to thousands of years a likely endeavour without FTL?
I personally think yes. I think we'd be doing it right now, we merely lack certain technologies - humankind has visions of grandeur and once the technological means to accomplish a certain enterprise are available I would argue we're very likely to try it just to see if it can be done. In terms of space exploration, well there's a litany, but presuming we solve the immediate dilemma of heavy lifting launch vehicles, and had some way to survive the time spent in interstellar space, I think we'd have craft out there.
At the very least, I think once we can get things into space cheaply, then there's a pretty good chance someone will start proposing interstellar probes of our nearest systems.
I like to dream about these endeavours - and I hope to see them in my lifetime, if say, space elevators also happen. What do you all think?
Obviously not an endeavour that would have the average return we expect for most of our endeavours, something that would be accomplished over timeframes which we currently consider to be multi-generational. Presuming Einstein saw the whole picture, and we really are just filling out the details, is a substantial human space exploration effort taking place over 100's to thousands of years a likely endeavour without FTL?
I personally think yes. I think we'd be doing it right now, we merely lack certain technologies - humankind has visions of grandeur and once the technological means to accomplish a certain enterprise are available I would argue we're very likely to try it just to see if it can be done. In terms of space exploration, well there's a litany, but presuming we solve the immediate dilemma of heavy lifting launch vehicles, and had some way to survive the time spent in interstellar space, I think we'd have craft out there.
At the very least, I think once we can get things into space cheaply, then there's a pretty good chance someone will start proposing interstellar probes of our nearest systems.
I like to dream about these endeavours - and I hope to see them in my lifetime, if say, space elevators also happen. What do you all think?
electricitylikesme on
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In the 100s of years it takes to get anywhere, we as humans would have moved on and forgotton.
It would be like getting mail from 1000 BC
Advances in engine technology (speed) and hull coverings (for protection from radiation and debris), as well as medical advances will probably make single generation interstellar travel viable eventually.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhMYgq-0cGI&feature=related
Also, assuming the Singularity, hardy nanomachine clouds containing human intelligence could accelerate to near light speed.
Realistically, though, any of these methods would be one-way trips with no relevance to life on Earth. They would, in a sense, be purely altruistic endeavors, because our goal would not be to help ourselves here on the planet but to ensure the continuance of the human race as a whole.
Can I see us undertaking such acts sometime in the distant future? Key word is distant, but I suppose so. Nations have undertaken colossally expensive endeavors for much stupider ideologically-driven reasons in the past, so I don't see why it couldn't happen again. But the key word is "distant", because we're still so far from the many different technological developments necessary to even make it possible.
we can't alter the entire atmosphere, and we don't have enough oxygen to start loading out other planets with it
Right now we can detect planets, even Earth-size ones, around distant stars, and coarsely see their properties. It's only a matter of time before we develop a way of seeing whether they can support life. Then, we'll launch generation ships, so that our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will colonize them.
There are plausible ways to terraform Mars, although they would take a long time and great expense, and obviously there are still problems that we're not sure about (like its lack of a magnetosphere). As I've said many times though, I don't see the point of us trying to anything of the sort as long as we still have plenty of space on the surfaces of our oceans and in our deserts here on Earth.
Still, I wouldn't be surprised if we find a way to do it far in the future, when it actually becomes an issue.
Generation ships have a whole mess of problems. You have to be able to create a completely self-sustaining ecosystem that won't break down over extremely long periods of time; you need to have a population large enough to prevent inbreeding; and you have to find a way to make sure they stay interested in, you know, colonizing a planet, when the people who get there are many generations removed from anyone who has ever lived on one.
Finally, you have to accelerate all this mass and decelerate it again--the more you send, the more difficult propulsion problems become.
Frankly, of all the concepts for interstellar colonization, generation ships seem the least plausible to me. The most plausible would probably be sending a ton of embryos and having either a tiny manned crew or robots grow them and raise them when they reach the planet. After that, a big meatlocker filled with cryogenically-frozen people. This is assuming we actually send biological humans, of course.
Past any mission taking longer than say 10-15 years I just don't see the use. The amount of technological advance in those years would most lead to something that could make the same trip faster. It would just totally suck to be on some sort of colony ship in say suspended animation, or a generation ship, extended lifespans via drugs etc, on a 100 year trip. Only by the time you arrive the planet is already colonized by the ship that left 50 years after you traveling 3x as fast.
Heh, the people who got to the planet first should be dicks and dress up like aliens to psych-out the people on the slow ship when they arrive.
Centuries later the few remaining survivors will finally get the joke.
Terraforming is less far fetched than interstellar travel
That's actually a minor plot point in an Alastair Reynolds book. The planet isn't already colonized by the time they get there, but the tech is already painfully out of date by the time they get there, resulting in the colony becoming something of a backwater.
It's like all the problems with NASA, plus all the problems with home schooling, plus all the problems of colonialism. And yeah, word wouldn't even reach Earth for an irrelevantly long time.
I always liked the idea of his Ultras subculture. Basically the people who travel from system to system in near light speed ships using cyrogenics end up hip hopping their way around history because their trips take decades
That's why he said "Extreme example", it's not possible, but we could get very close to it.
I'd write them a check.
His point was that, as you approach the speed of light, the distance you need to travel is compressed, and so the trip takes less time up until the upper-limit of being instantaneous at the speed of light.
Which is always everyone's first reaction
The only problem is, there really might be other people out there and I'm not sure how comfortable I feel about Scientologists being our first impression. Fuckers would sell us out to Xenu at the drop of a hat.
Somebody will Dr. Smith them. It's a small price to pay.
Not really. At realistic speeds, the time dilation effects are pretty unhelpful.
Realistic how? If we're talking about a living crew, then 1g acceleration is probably a realistic upper-bound... which accelerates (classically) to the speed of light in about one year. Too lazy to do some relativistic physics at the moment, but you'll definitely have some relativistic effects at that point.
Of course, getting 1g acceleration over a full year is another issue...
I forget what the method was for transporting materials for construction of bases and the like though...I imagine that will be the more difficult part.
Time capsules seems a bit inefficient when we have these magical waves that can propagate long distances through space and can easily be used to transmit information.
There's a book called A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. It takes place in a universe without FTL drives. For the most part, human colonised worlds are pretty much isolated and operate independently from other worlds. However, a trading culture devised this system where they set up a network of radio broadcasts which is designed to transmit their information across the entirety of human space. So, while the farthest worlds may be several hundred light years away, they'll at least be kept in sync within a couple of centuries. The benefit of this is that if a colony should collapse and lose their advanced technology, as soon as they find radio technology, they'll discover these broastcasts which will accelerate their return to civilisation.
Time capsules don't attenuate.
Over the vast distances of space, I think attenuation is a far easier problem then getting a time capsule reliably to a distant planet. The other advantage of radio is that it's easy to pick up anywhere on a planet, whereas a time capsule could easily crash into the ocean and just be lost.
Of course, that's assuming the thing actually makes it to the planet in the first place. If you sent an object on a 100 light year journey and you fail to account for some force for whatever reason, the time capsule could be pulled several light years off course, missing the target solar system completely.
I'm pretty sure if we have the ability to send a spacecraft 100 light years, we can also build a navigation system into it. You can already use any cheap computer to find stars automatically, so it's not a stretch.
Not much of an advantage, since anything you can send physically you can just send specs for and have them build it at the destination. Really, the only thing we'd need to send that way are historical artefacts, the kind where a near-perfect reproduction just isn't good enough.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
There are more things that can keep a radio wave from reaching its destination than a well-built ship.
With radio, first you have to get a ship about a light year from earth to send the signal, then you have to hope it doesn't encounter any objects in interstellar space (a ship with a navigation system could fly around asteroids and planets).
And then there's the wide range of radiation that would probably stop the signal quickly.