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Humans Will Sail To The Stars
oddsheep points to an "article on BBC news from the AAAS Expo in Boston about how researchers are discussing spreading the human race across the galaxy in solar sailing ships. Not a new idea of course but the social implications discussed are great: what the hell do the volunteer colonists (and their descendants) do for the hundreds of years it would take to get anywhere? Cue "Are we nearly there yet?" from the back seats ad infinitum and the longest game of 'I Spy' in history..."
What the hell do the volunteer colonists (and their descendants) do for the hundreds of years it would take to get anywhere?
Same thing they do here. Go to work every day, come home & watch tv, sleep, repeat, breed on weekends and have a war to reduce the population every so often.
the longest game of 'I Spy' in history..
"I Spy.... A star."
"Hey, thats what I was going to say!"
I think it would be a pretty short game, personaly.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...a three hour tour!
Good overview here.
It would seem that the people on the ship would have a lot stronger sense of forward history. Say, generation two of ten, for a long voyage, they'd understand the critical nature of conservation, preservation, and making sure that their children's lives aren't for naught.
There are many science fiction stories about "people born on the way," in ark-like ships of this sort.
What strikes me is the sense of drama and tragedy if the on-ship culture panics or corrupts itself before it reaches the goal. Does anyone know of any stories that focus on that? Where generation eight of ten finds that they need to scrap the historic goal, due to some miscalculation or some unforeseen hardships, or merely a decadent generation five?
[
The Guardian also has an article. It includes the hilarious quotation 'Some very
clever people have been chipping away at the problem, and now we think it could be possible without breaking the laws of physics' - I presume as opposed to how people used to think it was possible only *with* breaking the laws of physics...
what the hell do the volunteer colonists (and their descendants) do for the hundreds of years it would take to get anywhere?
Do what people do now to kill lots of time: play games or hack on the next open source project.
Heh. I wouldn't be very concerned about the boredom level of the colonists... I mean, if we were going to build such a big spaceship, it wouldn't be much of an extra cost to give them:
a) A digital collection of the complete works of art of Humanity (you know, something to read in the way), and
b) A laser-link or something similar to give them fresh news (inasmuch as 50 or 60 years old news can be considered "fresh").
What I would be concerned is to how to convince their descendants to continue the work started by their parents. No matter how sophisticated the ship's systems may be, there's always gonna be the need for knowledgeable people to keep them in shape, or as backups, or something.
"But I really want to be a... ballerina!",
"Shut up, John, you'll be a cooling system engineer just like your father was, and his father before him, and so on".
Of course, we could end up with something similar to Robert Heinlein's "Universe", where the descendants are so remote from the original colonists that they don't even know they're on a spaceship.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Wouldn't asteroids and space dust pose a threat to the solar sails? On a long enough journey, the combined damage of thousands of tiny impacts could tear the sails to pieces.
--- Foam weapons, real sparring: buyjin.com/diamondsword
Even if such a voyage were possible and volunteers do (which is bound to happen), we must seriously examine how mentally flexible they are and how adaptable would they be to a hostile environment with no longer the comforts of yellow sunlight bearing down on them, and fresh air carrying the scent of flowers around. More so, how comfortable would they be with co-existing with each other, since it is imperative that in a situation such as this, the common good far exceeds the individual benefits accrued.
I still think the easiest way to spread the human race to other stars in a Van Neuman machine. It's a self-replicating machine that when it finds a good planet will first terraform it that clone humans to live on it (I may be confusing it with something else but I think I got the basics right). This would not only be drastically cheaper and more practical it holds much more potential for the spread of the human race. It also avoids finding a way to keep a bunch of people occupied for several decades.
I stole this Sig
I like how they talk about earth english and space english. We already have ebonics english, British English, and the English that my foreign professors have that is completly different then the english I speak. We could always use another English...
I say if you want to go to another solar system, go for it. I would rather stay here and respond to slashdot articles.
So, it's maybe a good idea for low-cost space probes, but it won't work for manned spacecraft.
And I think before worrying about linguistic problems (space English and Earth English, WTF?), we should first find a way for humans to even survive for an extended period of time on our front porch, i.e. interplanetary space.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Hopefully we would have developed some form of hibernation before we tried to set out on such an endevor. Trying to keep a boat load of colonists occupied and safe on a multi-generational voyage would be trying at best.
Not to mention the problem of what to do if your intendid destination proves unsuitable for habitation. Like they're going to go back to a planet they've never been on and a culture they've never been exposed to?
The best system would involve cryogenically frozen embryos and artifical wombs with a small crew in hibernation. Due to the absolute zero temperatures of deep space, little energy would have to be expended on keeping the embryos frozen for the trip as well.
Robotic probes would detect if an approaching system could sustain life or decide to move on to it's next potential target. If it was on the iffy side, the crew could be woken to make the judgement call.
In the end however, until we can develope some form of FTL propulsion, most people are not going to be satisfied with the 'casting seeds' approach to extra-solar colonization because of the dubious chances of return on investment and the enormously long travel times. Everyone on Earth involved with such a project would be long dead before any kind of information could come back from these expeditions.
In the days of instant messaging, cell phone calls to anyone on the planet and relatively fast air travel to any destination, we are fundamentally incapable of grasping and backing the idea of a multigenerational investment of this scope with our current cultural outlook.
"Mommy, Tommy threw my shoe out the window."
"If you two don't stop it right now, I'm just going to have to turn this spaceship around right now! Do you want me to have to do that?!?"
I'm only paranoid because everyone is against me...
You're rather alarmist - while caring for the environement is a very important thing when it's taken to your point it becomes EcoNazism. Your level of virulent hatred tword realistic society shows naivity, ignorance and embitterment.
Get a Clue
Just some random scientist
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Gimme a break! Sheesh. I'm sure there were plenty of "realist" idiots like you trying to discourage true geniuses like Von Braun or Willy Ley to give up on researching manned spaceflight back in the early 20th. Thank goodness they were smart enough not to listen. The stars are our destiny, it just remains to be seen how and when we get there.
Think your 2.2 ghz p4 is impressive? I've got chloroform molecules and an nmr machine!!! Mwahahahahahahaha!!!
After the colonists spend a few centuries or millenia traveling to another star system, their society will have adapted to life in space. They'll have become emotionally acclimated to living in a confined habitat surrounded by vacuum, and they'll have learned the technical skills necessary for survival there. Hell, they'll probably be agoraphobic.
So why bother going back down and living on a planet again? Any other star system will have enough comets, meteors, and other matter to provide plenty of resources for the colonists to live. Why go back down to a planet to live in a gravity well and have to deal with all those scary wide-open spaces?
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
Here's (one) major problem: skills. Each successive generation after the first will be born and raised shipboard. All the teaching they receive on planets and planet life will be academic at best.
Does an education absent of any form of direct experience make for good pioneers? Especially given that there is no possibility of help from back home?
My guess it probably not...
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
...or at least 80, according to an article at New Scientist.
However, there could be a slight problem with inbreeding. From the article:
"The decrease in genetic variation is actually quite small and less than found in some successful small populations on Earth," he says. "It would not be a significant factor as long as the space travellers come home or interact with other humans at the end of the 200 year period."
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
In the words of Dr. Strangelove:
"Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do."
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
three ships. We put all the laborers on one, all the intellectuals on another, and...
(If you don't get it, don't moderate it)
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
Technology is advancing so quickly that people would realize that any group that launched such a voyage would be passed by a faster group within a few years.
That thought is likely to limit our voyages at any given time to a radius that can be reached in probably about a decade or less with current technology.
In the meantime, they'll be pushing the limits harder with unmanned probes that can endure tremendous accelerations.
And until such probes provide proof that there is an inhabitable world at the end of the journey, I find it extremely unlikely that anyone will put together a space city and launch themselves into the unknown for an unknown number of centuries toward an end that's more likely to be a massive destructive event (either external or internal) than an accidental discovery of Earth II.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
As an astronomer, I think it's vitally important that we continue to research extrasolar planets and the nearby galaxy. But at the same time, I would suggest that we have no business in sending people to these distant worlds, as some sort of "colonization" effort.
Why? The human desire to expand its territory is insatiable, but I believe that until we resolve our problems here, we shouldn't go polluting new worlds with our inevitable conflicts, waste, and all the other byproducts of humanity. Perhaps someday, when humans get over selfishness, the tendency to war, violence, and competition, traveling to these distant places will be a good thing. But I can't imagine for now, that if we were to go, these planets would turn out to be anything but Earth all over again, with poverty, suffering, and human strife.
It's romantic to believe that some great future will be opened to us when we become capable of traveling to the nearest star, but the cynical side of me says that people forget fairly quickly, and degenerate into their innate ways. As I say, perhaps we'll be ready someday, but I don't think that'll be any time soon...
Unfortunately, if it does become possible, it will be done, that's one thing I'm sure of. Don't count on people to have restraint, you can be fairly certain. Asking scientists to be responsible and not contribute to such a project doesn't work -- someone *will* do it, or work for those who want to have it done. It's just a matter of time.
(What follows is a joke. Laugh)
I have a theory. We Americans are the descendents of the people too screwed up to make it in Europe (my anscestors were expelled from Britain for participating in a political revolt). So you have a bunch of crazy Americans living on the East Coast. Some of them were too screwed up to make it there, so they went further and further west. Which is why California is so fucked up.
Think of how reckless and dumb you'd have to be to get on board one of those ships. Do you really want to populate the galaxy with people like that?
That brings us to our possible problem. Do reall you want to populate the world with the kind of people that are reckless and dumb enough to get on board that ship? I don't think so.
Steve
What would be the point of sending poeple on a journey to the stars that would take centuries to complete? As our technology advances, our speed of interstellar transport would (I assume) only increase. What happens to people sent on a 300 year journey when fifty years later, on Earth, a new tech is invented that cuts the journey time in half and we send a new improved ship to the same place? I'd be pretty pissed if I were on the historic First Journey To A New World and when I finally reach my destination and deboard the ship I run smack into a Burger King because people have already been there for a few decades.
:)
Personally, I think we should sit down and figure out how quickly our interstellar travel rate has been increasing over the past few millenia, do some min-maxing calculus, and figure out the optimal time to send the first ship. Heck, if the technological advances come at a rate constant enough to be predicted, we could rig it so they all get there at the same time.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
I would be willing to give up quite a lot to go even 1/4 of the way to another world.
They'll probably solve the suspended animation problem by then. In that case I'd get to go on the whole trip.
In fact I hope they solve the suspended animation problem soon as I'm sick of listening to the kids go at it in the back seat.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
I'll go and wait until we're in another solar system just to use some quotes:
"You know what? Screw you guys, I'm going home..."
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
So, in essence, you're saying that if a theory cannot be tested by current technology, it deserves to be completely rejected. Wow thats stupid. Sorry, but you're dead wrong. Glad you have no say in the scientific community. Technology has a sneaky way of catching up with theory (can you say...oh, ATOM BOMB!). Another case in point (and my favorite underdog/wacky research tech, one that i'm researching at Yale's NMR lab and writing a paper on): quantum computation. When Feynmann proposed using molecules and intramolecualr quantum forces as the basis for a scalable computer, people laughed. Now IBM has created a seven-qubit bulk ensemble device that can scale up to factor ridiculously large numbers using Shor's Algorithm, and quantum crytography will very soon be a reality. People like you fail to see how these wacky theories can ever be profitable. You think like a businessman, not a scientist. Solar sails and space elavators are wonderful ideas (championed by the great A.C. Clarke!!!) whose time will come. The technological basis for both is already in place, its really a matter of funding and of large-scale replication. Ever heard of bucky tubes, or of the fairly successful NASA experiments with solar sails???? Sheesh indeed.
Think your 2.2 ghz p4 is impressive? I've got chloroform molecules and an nmr machine!!! Mwahahahahahahaha!!!
Um, no. Von Braun's dreams were within reach of the science of his time, but not the technology. He (and a great many other brilliant people) worked long and hard to use the science they had to create the technology they needed to realize their dreams. The analogy with solar sails and skyhooks is quite exact. We understand the basic science needed, and have in fact built small demonstration projects using well-understood principles, in the same way as early pioneers of rocketry such as Goddard had built vehicles which were the direct technological predecessors of the V-2 and ultimately the Saturn V. With an effort of national (or international) will similar to that which landed men on the Moon, we can produce the technology, just as Von Braun et al did.
Whether or not this will actually happen, of course, remains to be seen. But people with attitudes like yours really add nothing meaningful to the debate.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Most likely though, after sixty years of fruitless effort I would throw in the towel. I would spend the remainder of my time drunk in my cabin: a bitter, broken lonely man, shunned by my shipmates.
Upon my death, friendless, my body would be unceremoniously dumped into the biomass recycler.
What you are asking for is impossible.
You want people to stop being selfish, solve all the world's problems, and in general, become angels.
Since this will never happen, your goal will insure that we will never pollute the universe with our evil selves.
Here's a point: the very things that make us "evil", such as greed, lust, territoriality, warlike tendency, aggresssion -- all of that -- are precisely the qualities that make a species dominant over others in the evolutionary sense. And given that, if we do go to the stars, and meet others, I'd guarantee that those others will be selfish, paranoid, violent and warlike. A species without those traits would not have survived the test of time. If we go to the stars as Zen Buddhist monks, those colonists will be annihilated by the locals - even if the locals are bloody non-sapient crytals. Life is hungry and pitiless.
As for a great future for humanity among the stars: by your logic, Europeans should never have left their continent. Instead, they should have stayed home and perfected their societies.
Well, think of this. If there had been no Canada or United States, what do you think would have happened to world civilization after World War I or II? The Western Hemisphere was critical - CRITICAL - in defeating a thousand years of twisted nationalism, and in rebuilding the shattered nations in the aftermath. If Europeans had not left their homes and travelled to the New World, the Old World would have shattered into a new iron age, and would not have recovered for centuries -- if ever. New worlds create opportunity for those who would want to leave, and create resources that can be used to shore up those left behind, even heal them and advance them.
The fallacy is the basic Zero-Sum game. The idea that there is a finite ulimate prize to human endeavor will concentrate human social toxins, and ultimately kill us all. We need the IDEA of new horizons, even if we don't have them yet.
The solution, of course, is to use Slashdot Geeks.
Used, and perhaps even comforted by the lack of sunlight and fresh-air, the Slashdot Geek presents advantages over other subespecies of the human animal for such an endeavor.
Its lack of social skills might be problematic, of course, but taking into account that most of them barely leave their rooms if given a network connection, human contact and its unfortunate consequences can be minimized.
Co-existence will be limited to posts and flamewars, and provided sufficient sources of electronic boards, sophomoric pseudojournalism and porn all violence would be confined to the network.
Ensuring reproduction of each generation, however, could present a bit of a challenge...
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Saying we will sail to the stars can be likened to the inventor of the zepplin saying that we will have mass crossings of the atlantic via deridgible.
Not even the ultra skeptical Nasa believs this solar sail stuff, which is why they are working on the REAL way that people will colonize the stars, with next generation propulsion systems.
These new systems are to chemical rockets as the sails of sea ships are to the jet; profoundly differnent and unpredicted by the "scientists" and sailors of old.
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and our decendants do for the length of time needed to travel from one planet to another star system? Personally, I would spend the time making decendants.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Oh, for God's sake. Look up "science", "engineering," and "technology" in the dictionary. Reda the definitions until you understand the difference. Then read up on the research that's been going on into solar sails and skyhooks. This is not something a bunch of aluminum-foil-beanie wearing crackpots dreamed up. This is serious research which is getting substantial investment from NASA, the ESA, and the aerospace industry. They wouldn't be putting that money into it if there weren't something there.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You could never put several generations of humans on some form of interstellar ark and then have then continue as they had on Earth once they got there. A couple generations removed from the rest of human society would cause them to develope independantly from the rest of the human race both physically and socially. As an example many cultures cremate or bury their dead after performing some traditional rite. This is unrealistic in a self contained environment thus the dead would be recycled to eventually become food for the living. Lets say a voyage was launched tomorrow, how much do you think the culture on the ship would change in 20 years after several people died from various causes, natural and unnatural. A whole dogma might form around the mere act of eating, on an ark you would be eating the remains of your dead* on a daily basis. In a hostile environment (which deep space certainly qualifies as) the weak either die or become a burden on the rest of society. Unproductive members of society would be a waste of resources. Like samurai warriors or elder Eskimos ritual suicide would be a common and revered cultural dogma. Any culture being sent into the wilds of deep space would not have an analog back on Earth, in fact they would be almost an entirely new culture, a result of people adapting to a dangerous environment.
.99999999c that way it will only take me about 8.5 years ship relative to shoot out of the other side of the galaxy. That's one fast rocket monkey.
Thus it is of my opinion that sending people to the stars without a warp drive does little to preserve a culture or way of life which when it comes down to it is the only real difference between any of us. Spaceborne cultures would not resemble anything we've seen here on Earth specifically because they weren't born there. If a decendant of some space colonist were to meet a human from Earth they would be as alien to them as anything else dispite the similarity of their DNA and maybe even the fact they share a common ancestor. It wouldn't matter what you did to prepare people for the rigors of a generations long journey into space they would become wholly alien to anyone back here.
As for the technical feasibility of enormous solar sails propelling people to stars that is 99.99% bunk. The people envisioning such systems disclaim their theories by saying "if we could only find a way..." which usually requires something along the lines of changing the physical laws of nature. I'm sorry but even the magical properties of carbon nanotubes isn't going to solve any inherent problems in using a giant physical structure to capture photons. I groan every time I see this idea rehashed. The key factor in sails all of all sorts if the ratio between the sail surface area (for much force is can use for propulsion) to that of the overall mass of the craft (how much force it needs to get going). While a giant solar sail might work fine for sending a ship to Mars (albeit a small one), getting megatons of personnel and equipment outside the solar system is another matter entirely. The sail needed for a colony ship would be stupendously large which means increased mass and you guessed it needs more force to get it moving. The bigger they are the bigger they need to be to have the energy to get them going. Say the ship is heading to the other side of the galaxy and a solar sail ship is doing about 10% lightspeed by some means. Relative to the rest of the universe not doing 10% lightspeed the vessel would have to survive 600,000 years worth of cosmic travel without something going HCF. Even with relativistic time dialation which would only save you about 2,390 years ship relative off of the 600k that is still quite the feat. Humans not frozen, kept in some form of stasis, or otherwise inert would have evolved into a completely alien species by then. Shit it'd been only recently the last of the other monkeys in our genus died out. Wake me when we hit
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If convenient objects are just a quarter light year or so apart, then the journeys do not have to be so long.
Just make sure to bring along a whole lot of cheese doodles. we'll be sending GW with you. (smile)
Which brings up the question of who should we send as the the first people to travel?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You're thinking about the Orion project, which was proposed in the 70s. It was quietly dropped, and I think it's safe to say that it will never come about, given humanity's disillusionment with nuclear bombs. Not to mention the impracticality of the design, compared to the alternatives.
Ah, it was the 50s actually. My bad.
Some obvious planetary disasters might include racial stagnation, meteor strike, sudden climactic change, intentional NBC warfare, unintentional destruction of the planet through scientific experimentation that goes wrong, and destruction by the Vogons.
The scariest thing about all this is, we should have been visited already if it was that easy to spread to the stars. So I hope we get as far from Earth as possible quickly, just in case the reason for the quiet is that a soon-coming scientific development tends to wipe out races when they are real young.
Put it this way, we are going to eventually move out, or we are going to stick where we are. SETI types grade a civilization by how much energy it can use, and you have to be off the planet to just get in the front door. But considering how long communications would take, it seems much more likely that we will succeed at making other planets in our system habitable before we get to the stars.
Obviously nanotech is going to be the major tool. My hope is that we can develop it soon enough and safely enough that we can get off-planet cheaply. About the same time or sooner we ought to have telescopes large enough to tell us if there is anywhere interesting nearby.
Sails are already understood to be a great tool in doing all this stuff, and we can have it soon. We would send robotic explorers first obviously, but in our first human wave I could totally see travelers kept in a crystalline stasis as nano-stabilized solids which would require little energy to maintain. Conceivably the explorers might not even age so much if relativity comes into play.
However it happens, as soon as we expand our reach beyond planet Earth we are going to start thinking in terms of much larger distances and lengths of time. It will be interesting to see if we can hold something resembling our society together as we develop autonomous off-planet settlements.
It will take a little time before you like/love it and before you can work with the same efficiency (as before the change)...
So what you're saying is that we should load a bunch of Windows users on a space sailship, give them Linux only computers, and by the time they have figured out how to surf for intergalactic porn, they'd have reached their final destination?
Bush Lies Watch
If you can accelerate your vessel to something within the same order of magnitude as the speed of light, time dilation would start to have an effect. I.e, to the landlubbers back on earth the voyage would seem to take longer than for the actual passengers.
If we, like Einstein, imagine riding on a sunbeam the trip to _anywhere_ takes no time at all. Of course, travelling at the speed of light takes infinite energy (and the g-force of the prior acceleration could be lethal), so we'd have to settle for a bit less. Still...
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
It would appear that this poster didn't even take the time to read the article. In fact, the term "solar sail" is somewhat misleading, because the scientists quoted proposed using directed pulses of light from lasers to propel the interstellar craft. The 1/r^2 law is only true for isotropic radiation -- not for a directed laser beam, which can remain well-collimated over great distances.
This idea is not at all new -- I recall reading essentially the same notion as a high school student in the mid-1980s in a book on solar sails. Some futuristic plans included building a massive bank of lasers on the far side of the moon. While we are still very far from realizing such dreams (as we will need the infrastructure in place to support such a lunar base first), I always thought that such ideas were intringuing, and provided a physically viable mode of transporting large payloads, to say, Mars, and the outer solar system.
Lastly, I should also point out that it appears that this author doesn't even understand the basic physics of conventional solar sails. Solar sails use light pressure from the sun, not the solar wind itself. The pressure from the hot plasma streaming from the solar wind is orders of magnitude smaller than the light pressure. Light pressure is also tiny, but since your net velocity is proportional to the time exposed to the source of light, you can build up significant velocities over weeks or months. A great number of people extend the "sail" analogy a bit too far.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
when you consider people have only been seriously trying to get into space for the past fifty years.
I'm the stranger...posting to
The chance of a collision with asteroids is very minute. There are actually very few significantly sized asteroids, and they are spread over an enormous volume of space, generally concentrated between Mars and Jupiter. If you don't believe me, just consider that any number of space missions have made it to the outer solar system by now. JPL has launched Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Galileo, Ulysses (on a gravity assist to get to the sun), and Cassini (now halfway between Jupiter and Saturn), and none were taken out of commission by an asteroid (though Galileo had unrelated problems).
Dust and micrometeorites are a much bigger problem, especially since they are distributed throughout space, and the further your mission travels, the more material you will inevitably sweep up. There is an interesting solution here, though. Although the article refers to laser-pulsed sails (in the visible range), it is also possible to use masers (in the microwave range). Since a "good" reflector need only be smooth to within a wavelength of light, a maser sail would only have to be smooth to within a few mm or cm. Not only would this enable you to save greatly on the mass of the sail by using a conducting "spiderweb" sail, which would be mostly empty space, but the sail would also be greatly resiliant to many small dust impacts.
Whether such a design is actually feasible for an actual mission is not immediately clear. However, the distribution of dust sizes in interstellar space is well-known to astronomers, so it would be very straightforwards to study the "damage" done to a sail, as a function of the speed of the vessel. (I'm sure someone has done this...)
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
"a soon-coming scientific development tends to wipe out races when they are real young."
Sir, your logic is flawed. You assume, first of all, that there has been or is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe - and I don't care how many statistics you can juggle, I side with Clemens and say that statistics aren't proof. The idea that we haven't been visited because everyone else blew themselves up is, to be honest, absurd. How many inventions on Earth have been made by a relatively small group of people? What technologies would we still have if all these people had bought it? I'm sure we'd have the wheel, spears, and mud bricks, but how about gunpowder? Antibiotics? Atomic Weapons? The internal combustion engine?
The "tech tree" of an alien species could be entirely different from ours. They may feel spears are perfectly adequate for killing each other with, and see no need to develop further. They might have religious prohibitions against high technology. They might be sentient but...erm...not all that bright.
They might not even exist.
But sir, *we* are not going to kill ourselves off, despite what other species may or may not have done. Nobody really wants us all to be dragged into that good night.
I'm the stranger...posting to
In another post you make the argument that "Just like the fusion research and colliders (aka Big Science) are siphoning funding from real science with no real promise of delivering anything useful anytime within the next few decades." You are not a big fan of mathematicians or theoretical physicists, are you? Mathematics is a good example of a field that is doing fundamental research. Just because you are not researching something that is immediately transferable into a product, does that mean that it is wasted? For example, the important fields of complex analysis and hyperbolic geometry was developed way before anyone could think of a use for them. Since when is the foundations of physics and fundamental research not important? The theory of relativity was basically completely useless and unverifiable for a long time. Does this mean that it should not have been published? What possible use did you have for Murray Gell-Mann's quarks and the invention of QED? How do you propose that we search for the Higgs boson without particle accelerators? Do you have any alternative way of testing the GUT's without particle accelerators?
Also, your claim that solar sails and space elevators are irrelevant dreaming, does not impress me much. True, they are not feasible with todays technology. That is why you develop new technology. Grand ideas of what to do with it is an incentive. I don't care if you feel that whatever it is that you do is an underfunded area - research into solar sails is hardly a big strain on the science budget. Leave it to companies to research products with commercial potential on the horizon (they won't mind). State funded research have through all ages been mostly about knowledge for knowledges sake. Don't you have any curiosity left? Don't you wonder, even just a little, about the implications of these ideas?
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Put some rockets pointing skyward in remote Nevada, and away we go.
"WE ARE MECHAN 5. RESPOND."
Once again, few people will get that.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I thought growing up was hard here on earth. Imagine being a rebellious teenager on one of these voyages.
"mommy, how the hell could you leave earth and put us on this god forsaken ship??"
But seriously, the social implications for something like this are very astonishing. And what happens when space debries break through your 300 mile solar sail 300 million light years from earth? I doubt anyone's going to be able to help you.
...what the hell do the volunteer colonists (and their descendants) do for the hundreds of years it would take to get anywhere?
My bet is that after generation two or three they would have plenty of screaming and crying to do as warp drive ships caught up to them, laughing as they screamed by to get to the same destination a few hundred years sooner.
Then again, if you never build a ship to go because you are waiting for the next big breakthrough....
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
This doesn't really relate to the same story, but I just had a new theory about intelligent extraterestial life, and since no talk about space travel would be complete without the search for extraterestial life, here it goes....
lets say that there is an intelligent species that's about a billion years older than the human species. Then we can assume a few things.
a) their populations would likely have exponential growth like our's always has.
b) their technology will likely have had exponential growth like ours has
c) their societies would likely need to accomplish "big" projects like ours has to accomidate social changes like with the pyramids, the great wall of china, the hoover dam, and our big cities, which have distinctly changed earth's in a non natural way forever.
d) this would likely mean that at their stage of development they would be intefering in planetary orbits, star orbits, and possibly galactic orbits, and perhaps even creating artificial super-novas to achieve engineered goals.
e) human beings would be able to look for these changes (in the stars) that would be allowable by physics, but almost impossible in a natural un-tampered setting. From these we would be able to deduce the existence of intelligent life, know their level of development and resource needs, and the goals they were trying to accomplish and perhaps even develop a strategy for contact.
Even in the remote chance that we do develop a manned space ship that is capable of supporting generational travel to some nearby part of the galaxy, then unless there's something terminally wrong with planet Earth, it's more than likely a ship which is twice as fast will be developed within the next decade. Before the first ship even arrives at its destination, we would most probably have a ship that could make the journey there and back in less than half the time.
It's kind of like imagining what would happen to a family who got lost on a small self-supporting island (a family who could not make radios out of coconuts) during the late 1800's, and being found by GPS or satellite photos somewhere in the 1980/1990's.
The technology of any offworlders we send out into space will be obsolete a year after they have left, let alone generations. So is there any point in sending people until the travel time is negligable ?
As you get nearer to the other star, you'll have to turn it around, and let it start decelerating.
You've gotta decelerate if you don't want to just shoot through the other system.
However, there are some tricks you can pull to slow yourself down faster than you get started, and thereby spend more time going faster and get there sooner. For example, you can use a big loop of superconducting wire to transfer your momentum to charged particles. Space isn't all that empty, and you can get drag in an imperfect vacuum if you try hard enough. You might even manage to scoop up propellant to finish braking maneuvers.
Another trick: imagine two mirrored sails forming a right angle. Now imagine that light is coming from both sides equally. Aim the point of the wedge at the destination star, and the light from it will be redirected to the sides, while the light coming from the departure star will be reflected straight back, resulting in a net gain of momentum towards the destination star. With this system, you can get forward acceleration about up until the light from the destination is double the light from the departure point. You can up that by bringing the sails closer to parallel, but you lose area as you do that.
Such a trick might not be worthwhile, of course, since light intensity drops off pretty quickly with distance. You'd get most of your boost early on. As a double-whammy, as your velocity increases, your driving light will red-shift, reducing its pressure, while your braking light will blue-shift, increasing its pressure.
However, as the pressure reduces, you might be able to increase sail area by reprocessing structural support into sail surface.
Maybe some nice people back home will let you leave a system of mirrors (or perhaps solar-pumped lasers?) to focus the sun's light on you as you go, and keep the pressure from dropping off. If you can do that, you can have almost constance acceleration for the trip, which is really nice for space travel. OTOH, how much do you want to trust the people of Earth not to redirect your system for their own transportation or power generation?
It's a thoroughly interesting topic.
Well, we advertise it as a nudist colony space orgy...
It was quite usefull in Niven/Pournelle's "Footfall"...
karma capped
The real beauty of the light sail system is that you don't have to carry the fuel. If you're carrying fuel, you have to have more fuel to accelerate the heavy spacecraft, which means you need more fuel to accelerate the extra fuel . . . :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
100 years into their journey, faster than light travel was worked out by the techies back home.
Never seen that idea before.
Also. . .
Here's another idea nobody ever seems to contemplate:
What would prevent aliens from using generation ships to come here? This is possible right now without the need for 'magic' space travel tech.
Hmmm. . .
-Fantastic Lad
From this page, for example: The following chart shows the perceived travel time for the particle moving at 0.9999999999999999999999951c from different locations in the universe: Alpha Centauri 0.43 milliseconds
Galactic nucleus 3.2 seconds
Andromeda galaxy 3.5 minutes
Virgo cluster 1.15 hours
Quasar 3C273 3 days
Edge of universe 19 days
For a better understanding, consider the following. If you set out on a ship from earth moving at the velocity of the above proton, and travelled to the edge of the universe and back, you would perceive being gone for 38 days (19 days out and 19 in). However, when you arrive back on earth, 34 BILLION YEARS would have elapsed! The earth probably won't even be here by then. That time is twice as old as many speculate the universe is.
The world is stranger than you think. Next week perhaps I'll tell you about quantum mechanics ;)
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
And it is entirely possible that if these humans remained in reproductive isolation for long enough, they could evolve into another species altogether.
Well then we'd just have to kill them and start over! Muahahahahaha!
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
This idea is almost as stupid as the idea of sending our DNA and other junk out into space for potential hostile aliens to use against us.
Now we are worried about what will happen to the sun billions of years from now? In another couple thousand years we will have technology so advanced that the solar sail idea would have been a complete waste of time and resources.
At the rate of development we will be a type 3 civilization within thousands not millions of years.In a hundred years or so we will have the ability to use nano technology and completely control matter, extend life with genetic technology, and use warp drives, anti matter could provide the energy source.
With Nano technology we could create our own planets if we want to. As far as the sail technology goes. Think of it this way, we can send a sail out into space, but it would be like creating a hot air balloon knowing that next week you'll have a MACH6 speed jet plane which will surpass the air balloon in a few hours.
What we should be doing right now, is gathering information with probes, exploring planets like mars, and developing nano technologies. With a wormhole we could literally fold space itself if we had the energy of a star, so yes its possible for us to create a worm hole in space, and that idea sounds better than solar sail because a worm hole can get from point A to point B instantly regardless of the distance.
IT does make since to live in ships in space, because theres only so many planets in the solar system, and we may not have the technology before the earth over populates but really and honestly, these people are way too optimistic about humanity actually being over populated, theres aids, theres wars that will happen, i dont think we will need to popular other planets for serveral thousand years because thats how long it would take for us to socially evolve to the level where we are beyond war. We may however have the technology to teleport or travel through worm holes within the next hundred years, just because the technology exsists doesnt mean we'd use it, we have technology now to let us run our cars on air itself, on water, on sunlight and so on and we dont. Its not about technology, its about when society is ready.
If we survive another hundred years then i think we'll be advanced enough to travel at beyond light speed, maybe even teleport via quantum entanglement, otherwise we will have destroyed ourselves, or we will be dominated by corperations and government who will be conservative and not want to mess up the economy by investing in such matters (kinda like the situation now, kill enviornment and save the economy says Bush.)
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And when the possibility of life in this dimension ends, we go to another one, not to mention with Nano technology and the ability to harness anti matter energy we could create our own stars.
Dont forget other aliens in the universe far smarter than us wouldnt allow all the stars to just burn
However, I dont think solar sail technology is the way, currently it seems NASA is a joke, they send junk into space with our DNA on it and now want to send even more of it, I think after we have a hostile situation with some aliens, we will be sending most of our probes on missions to get back the little time capsules with our DNA and maps to our planets in them. However by then Earth would have been taken over by aliens and we will have been pushed off into space.
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Think about this, If aliens do come to earth, do you think they'd announce it? Do you think our government would annouce it? DO you think our scientists would have the guts to even look for aliens?
Face it, Aliens may already have come here, its not like we are trying to stop them, or even looking for them. We even give them maps with DNA.
IF aliens are a few thousand or millions of years ahead of thus they'd be so advanced they'd be like gods to us, we wouldnt even see them unless they allowed us to, nothing we have could detect them, hell they could prolly control our every thought like we control some mechanical device like a computer or a robot.
Think about it, do we really want to deal with aliens at our stage of development? It would be like throwing a small child or baby into the jungle filled with wild animals. This is why I think it was utterly stupid of us to give our DNA up and Maps to earth, inviting any hostile alien to come claim our planet.
Even the native americans were smart enough not to go to europe with a map to America and give them the ability to blend in.
I mean with DNA, Aliens could come here as humans and you'd never know it.
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The first generation will of course be volunteers, so that should work well. But the second generation will have plenty of fuel for their teenage rebellion. "Who gave you the right to lock me up for life in a tin can without cable??". Once the old timers are out of the picture, there is no telling what the ship people will do. I doubt they'll feel bound by the original crews intentions.
I don't get the language development issues. Surely they'll have both every book and DVD ever made on the ship, and communication channels to earth. That puts a pretty big stabilizer on language development.
They'd be creating and destroying universes, and traveling through time and dimensions.
They wouldnt be alive in the same physical world we are, i'd think after billions of years their technology would be so great that they'd create their own universe for themselves and be traveling through dimensions.
If we ever did have contact with them we'd prolly worship them as God because they'd be so much more advanced than us that they could prolly destroy our universe in an instant.
Maybe you should think of an alien species a few thousand years or even a few million years ahead of us but not BILLIONS of years.
A species THAT advanced would be Godlike, I mean in a few hundred years we will be able to completely control matter, perhaps live a few hundred years longer, and travel at beyond light speed and we have only been around maybe a few hundred thousand years, maybe a million tops.
A billion years, is 1000 times longer, meaningg they'd have 1000 times the technology of us, be 1000 times more evolved mentally, socially, and physically, they may not even need physical bodies anymore they may be that evolved.
The reason we cant find life in space is because we may be too stupid to find it, other species may be so far ahead of us that we are like single cell organisms to them.
If we were a single cell organism we wouldnt notice a human even though a human is like god to a singlee cell organism. Bacteria is used by us like a tool, while it can be dangerous, we treat it like a tool, Aliens more advanced than us would treat us like a tool if they were millions of years older than us, thousands of years older than us and they'd treat us like a pet, hundreds of years older than us and they might enslave us, our only chance is to find aliens below us, or exactly on the same level, because those are the only aliens we'd be smart enough to detect.
As far as aliens billions of years older than us, they wouldnt even notice we exsist, and even if they did, they could prolly wipe out our entire universe if we pissed them off in the slightest.
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Send humans who arent selfish, violent and who actually care about the enviornment.
you send ignorant people, you create an ignorant world,
Now, as far as if it can bee done having it being done is nott the same thing.
Economics controls all of this, it wont be done until it benifits corperations, the government, etc.
Right now it doesnt benifit those people, it will benifit those people a few hundred years from now when the economy crashes because its burned out.
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I bet they saw that episode of DS9 too. With a little hard work, I'm sure us earthlings can reach Cardassia in about a week, too.
ALCOR (http://www.alcor.org/) has yet to defrost any of their frozen fools. They think that in the future nanotechnology will allow repairing the cellular damage due to the freezing. But many scientists think this is unrealistic.
As far as carrying human germ cells instead, there has been progress in artificial wombs recently, but in that case you have to have robots smart enough to establish a breeding base on the planet. And if you can do that, why send humans into space at all, when the robots can perform better? The only reason for not sending robots, other than the sci-fi dreams about adventure and reaching for the stars, is to find an outlet for expanding the population. But there are much more reasonable ways to control population here on earth.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
If they did leave probes, or markings, wouldnt we assume its a trick of light and shadow, or just ignore it? Or what if its so advanced that we cant even see it. Last but not least how do you know we havent discovered stuff already and thought it was from humans, or how do you know our government hasnt discovered stuff and not told us.
As far as how we are lookingg for stuff we will never find anything, as far as radio and other waves go, thats a useless effort however if we tried going to actual planets and searching through the dirt, we might actually find something interesting (thats if we havent already, theres debates about stuff being on mars as we speak)
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Comparing us to pymies is still comparing human to human.
They are as smart as us, they have been around as long as us, we have maybe a hundreds of years of advantage over them, this isnt the same as billions of years advantage, orr millions, or thousands.
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I'd volunteer in a heartbeat, but man, imagine the lag on IRC.. and the politics.. they'd probably only want talented sexy people to go. Although.. there'd probably be 20 girls for every guy on that ship.. that'd be awesome. You'd probably have to be a vegetarian, albino, beekeeper to be considered.
Provided the ship isn't going too far (i.e. 20 light years), it could still receive transmissions from earth, like news, including audio and video perhaps, so that the language would remain constant.
See also: "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman. Warships traveling at relativistic speeds, that encounter superior technology once they do battle, since tens of years have passed for the target, and only weeks for the warship.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
This would probably make the cost of sending humanity to another solar system much cheaper although you would have to overcome the difficulties of feeding, educating, nourishing the culture of these new human beings.
This would take a lot of AI and advanced molecular biology techniques.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Realistic society?
The Internal Combustion Engine is anything but a realistic idea. Just because every second person in the West happens to use one doesn't make it a 'realistic' idea. The fact of the matter is that continued use of automobiles at current levels will eliminate life on Earth in a few more short decades.
Of course, the average mother driving her kids to school is just being a good Mom by nearly every standard taught to her by society. She's not likely to give much thought to how many hundreds or thousands of pounds of CO2 and Monoxide her one SUV pumps into everybody's air each year. I'm afraid I can more than see the origin of the poster's bitterness.
Although saying s/he posts with 'Virulent Hatred'? 'Nazism'? And 'ignorance'?
Please.
-Fantastic Lad
WE already have anti matter in labs.
We already have done fusion, Nasa has anyhow and even have a fusion based engine for their next shuttles.
Someone who does not keep up with science has no right to tell the diffrence between fact and fiction. All the technologies i mentioned we have right now, fact is however it would be too expensive to use right now, for economic reasons we arent using it.
However 100 years from now when China and all these other huge countries have economies better than ours, I highly doubt all of these countries will have the same focus as us, Which means yes we will have leaps in technology duh to there being more scientists and bigger exonomies.
I suggest you buy some of the books from the great michio kaku,.
Warp technology is solved on paper and in theory, we know exactly how to do it and have done it on small scales in labs, building large scale warp technology would cost too much and also we dont have the energy to do it.
Anti matter would provide the energy we need, this energy will be whats used for nano technology, in about 20-30 years it will be common energy and Nano technology will be an expensive but common technology. 100 years from now we will have mastered Nano technology.
Warp drive would only require a small amount of anti matter, all thats needed is a device which can gather anti matter in large enough amounts. So we are one invention away from having enough energy, the last question would be how much it would cost to build the engine. If USA China and India are all getting along, and worked together instead of against each other, we could have a warp drive finished within our lifetimes, possibly within 40-50 years from now.
Of course if the countries compete like we expect, it could be a matter of all the countries having specific technologies and it will come down to economics, will the US pay china for the technology needed to gather the anti matter, or will china pay the USA for the technology for the engine, or will both people pay india for the software needed?
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It would have to be manned and maintained by self-replicating androids, who, when the time came, could go so far as raising and parenting a starter population of humans (and later livestock) from a frozen backlog of genetic material and/or blueprints, perhaps after getting started on terraforming and such, hopefully not to the detriment of a pre-existing population. Whew. There's a story for ya!
**>>BELCH
> if the ship is to be say, the size of a small city, say 10^3 .. 10^5 people (multi-generational teams cannot be too small ...)
9 99 91936
0 31 1
They can probably be smaller than that.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns
"For a space trip of 200 years, perhaps eight to 10 generations, his calculations suggest a minimum number of 160 people are needed to maintain a stable population."
The AAAS are talking about similar numbers
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=12
"crew of about 200 men and women"
rant
haha, you so funny.
The fact of the matter is that continued use of automobiles at current levels will eliminate life on Earth in a few more short decades.
so in 30yeas there be no human life left on the planet? doubtfull.
dude, in LA there are 4 times more cars on the road then in the 70s, yet half the polution.
not to mention the fact that we are running out of usable petroleum.
on of the Ironies of the "eco-movement" with automobiles is that if they weren't regulated we'd be out of fuel much quicker. That would pretty much solve the problem for us.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on