Slashdot Mirror
The Impossibility of Colonizing the Galaxy
OriginalArlen writes "The science fiction writer Charlie Stross has written an excellent and comprehensive explanation of why, thousands of SF books, movies, and games notwithstanding, human colonization of other star systems is impossible. Although interstellar colonization seems common-sensical to many, Charlie makes a clear-headed and unarguable case, so far as I can see, that it ain't gonna happen without a 'magic wand' or two. Nevertheless it would be interesting to see reasoned responses from the community who believe that colonization is not merely possible, but inevitable — and even, as Hawking has said, vital for the survival of the species. So, who's right — Hawking or Stross?"
Well it may be physically impossible but also essential for our survival. Thus int he end we're really screwed.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
You are comparing some sci fi writer with Hawking? C'mon.
human colonization of other star systems is impossible
Look how far humans have come in the past 10,000 or even 100 years. We went from primitive wheels to an International Space Station in that time alone. Give humans another 10,000 years and I doubt this will not have been accomplished (if we don't blow ourselves up first).
"So, who's right -- Hawking or Stross?"
They are not saying opposite things, one is saying that we can't colonize other solar systems, the other that we must. They are probably both true.
My money is on Hawking. Our species would stagnate if left on earth for eternity. And even eternity, things will change. Eventually the sun itself will change, and we need to get out there. But right now, we are a immature war like animal to realize this.
Or at least I hope mankind survives...it is still a big question if we will get socially evolved enough that we will not just destroy ourselves first. Entry into the galactic club will mean we have to evolve some more.
I remember seeing an essay by one of the big classic sci-fi authors (Clarke or Asimov) saying that if we can continuously accelerate at 1G (32 ft/sec/sec) for a relatively short period of time (a year?), we can acheive speeds fairly close to the speed of light. At those speeds, time dilation takes over and it only takes a ship 40 or 50 years (ships time) to get from one end of the galaxy to the other even though the distance covered is 100,000 light years. So, even though the CIVILIZATION may not survive the Colonization, the individual ships may.
:-)
TDz.
ps: oddly enough, my captcha is "relative"
Using "the high frontier" and appeals to settler gumption and heroic individualism isn't the right paradigm; if it's going to happen we need to abandon certain cherished illusions (dwelt on at length) and start doing some hard thinking about what we really want.
And as soon as I settle the rebellion on the outlying planets in the Sprouticus system I will be bringing my Imperial Battle Fleet to explain the situation to Mr Stross. Perhaps I will banish him to one of my penal planets, he can amuse the inmates with his so called logic.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
It never ceases to amaze me at the perpetual and unwavering defeatist attitude expressed by people during every generation.
It is mere physics obstacles that need to be overcome, that includes dimensional hopping or more likely controlled black-holes or worm holes, to colonize the galaxy.
We will overcome the hurdles eventually, including the radiation, the vital resources, and spacial 'deserts'.
To even say it is impossible or requires a 'magic wand' is absurd.
author needs to revistit history and the countless times that silly notion was postured.
$10 says we see a McDonalds on Mars before NASA arrives.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Generation ships. Suspended animation. Bussard Ramjets.
Baby steps throughout Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.
This article is incredibly short-sighted and unreasonably pessimistic. He's using current technology, economics, and incentive to make specific conclusions about something that will most likely happen in the next few hundred years. Just consider how much science and technology has changed in the last 100 years - can you possibly imagine what will be possible 100 years from now, much less draw conclusions about feasibility?
I think that technology's march is not only inevitable, but accelerating. To outright dismiss these possibilities is completely unreasonable and irrational.
It ain't like "discovering" the Americas. For that, all that was required was some ships to get over there and some hard work when you arrived. What you needed to survive is available, get to work.
It's vastly different with "space colonisation". First of all, you gotta get off this planet. Not a trivial task. We barely get payload into orbit, and to leave the gravity of earth, you even need a bit more thrust. Then there's the distance. We're not talking weeks or months on the ocean, we're talking years and decades in interstellar travel. Air is limited and gravity isn't, problems that don't exist when "colonizing" on a planet.
And when you arrive, your chances to actually get a hospitable planet are slim to nil. You will have to bring air, food, water and so on along. At best you'll have energy in the form of solar energy at your hands, and that's all you got.
Colonizing the galaxy is possible. And I side with Hawking in the opinion that it is our destiny, if we want to survive as a species. But I wouldn't bet my money on a Star Trek like progress, where in merely 200 years we'll have colonies all over the galaxy. First of all we have to find a solution to the light speed problem. Until then, generation ships sound like the only way of colonisation, and that is for sure no way to create what we would consider today colonies. We could not keep in touch with them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
He needs to envision new technologies and sciences to free us from this solar system. Who knows what will be invented and discovered in the next two or three hundred years? He certainly does not.
The technology is within our grasp now. If tomorrow the entire human race decide to commit the entire gross planetary product to build a space ship capable of sustaining 10,000 people indefinitely, It would certainly be possible. Robots and raw materials could be launched into orbit by rail guns. Large Hydroponic farms would be built in space. Geo-domes are already proven to work. All we really need is to do is find a suitable planet. Even if it cost 10 trillion dollars and took 4000 years to get there. Its more about our motivation than our ability.
I wonder how many inventors etc that have heard that proclamation during the centuries, if we acknowledge this as the truth, the game is over even before it starts.
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
I didn't read TFA, but (from the summary):
Charlie makes a clear-headed and unarguable case, so far as I can see, that it ain't gonna happen without a 'magic wand' or two
So, what's the problem? Science has given us dozens of "magic wands" the last century, why would it stop now? In 50 years will will probably have lots of amazing thingamajings that we can't even begin to imagine now, like perhaps some StarTrekish warp-drive.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Life is wet, then you dry.
The dude lacks faith. The good kind that makes people believe we can discover the next great thing sometime. And he would be well served by a phrase I had an impression Hawking uses a lot ' at our current level of technology ' which generally comes after saying something is impossible.
...A Boeing passenger jet or C5A-Galaxy must look like it's suspended from Mt. Olympus by Hercules from wires, and your average sports stadium outdoor lighting system and video screen look like the foulest of evil sorcery.
Every scientific advance mankind has taken looks impossible when viewed through the constraints of what is currently achievable.
I guess that's what America has to learn. "Go West" doesn't work anymore.
...the flying car and that fat-free fudge cake that didn't let you down in the flavor department.
The Singularity will hit us before any of the problems he describes would become tractable.
And when it does, the question of how do you launch a meatbag in a life-support coffin to go X distance in Y time will be meaningless.
When a respected scientist says that something can be done, he's likely right. When a respected scientist says it can't be done, there's a good chance that he's wrong. :-)
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
...we should protect the environment of the planet we already have!
Well, of course we will. But we wont have our bodies.
The first big tech is a brain/silicon bridge. Hawking is very correct on this. If we do create reconstructing nanobots and high-AI, we need good interfaces. In fact, we would at first need a device described in the Story of Manna, in which a glucose fuel cell, a computer hooked up to nerves, and a wireless link are installed on C2-C4 of the vertebrae.
Once we can maintain body computers, we can focus on yet even more miniaturization and also focus on near-Earth travel (Moon and Mars). However, it will come time that our bodies will die, yet our brains will live. That will usher in the time we have "Brains in a Jar".
And yet, our tech will not be yet complete for star travel. We will need to be able to completely pattern a brain for all information and encode it so a certain computer can run it... a human brain image. Only when we can completely digitize our brains can we even cope with any stresses of space travel.
However, when we are pure data, we can travel rather rapidly: we can spread nanobot spores that create factories (mini factories) on different planets and asteroids and can copy to the nanites what is received by maser or any other transmission method. When we can convert our brains to pure information, then we can transmit and travel at C.
Then again, who knows what the real physics laws are... It'd be fun to see how far physics comes in 20000 years.
PS: Btw that is the funniest NB I have read for a long time...
He states that to get a Mercury Capsule sized vessel to 0.1c takes about the energy consumption of the planet for 5 days. OK, sounds about right. He then states that this makes it impossible (accounting for inefficiencies). I'm less willing to buy that.
First reason: rockets are power hungry, yet we've done them before. When the Saturn V launched, instantaneous energy consumption in the US went up 6%. Sure, it's many orders of magnitude smaller, but the idea is the same: you store up the energy over a long period (antimatter, say), and then take it out in a hurry.
Second reason: energy consumption of the world is climbing, and will continue to do so. It may get briefly more expensive as we have oil problems, but renewable and nuclear sources will counteract that (if they don't, space colonization is pretty much a moot point). Wait a hundred years, and the energy requirement will merely read like the largest project humanity has ever undertaken, not something entirely ridiculous.
The basic error he's making is that he's arguing we can't do it with today's technology. Yup, I agree, but that's not the interesting question. I'll leave the question of whether things like generation ships can work from a social standpoint to others more qualified, but I'm confident they can *eventually* work from a technical one.
You're absolutely right and yet so F Funny ! Of course I believe we are all in a dream and death is the awakening so, none of this applies in my head. But "No shit shynola" is sooo damned funny. Thanks.
... any further then getting over the supposed self destructive nature we have tended to show towards others of our race.
Once we do that we may find there is other more advanced life in the universe that already has the transportation thing figured out along with teraforming and seeding, etc...
Hell, we may just be the product of such.
Creationism? No, no more than a farmer.
Perhaps we are the result of just such an effort ot species survival, or at least the survival of consciousness - abstract thinking and advancing capable minds...
We can't colonize other planets now. However, given his fondness for analogies....
If you collapsed the whole of human history down to a single day, we were wandering hunter-gatherers for 11 hours and 56 minutes. Only in the final four minutes before midnight have we been farming for a living, and in those four minutes our scientific knowledge (and achievements) have increased exponentially.
In the last four minutes we went from spears and loincloths to long range missiles and synthetic fabrics. We are now the only species on the planet that can survive organ transplants, travel at hundreds of miles per hour, walk on the moon, and communicate instantly from opposite sides of the planet. All of this we gained in the last four minutes of our first day of existence as humans.
The kind of scientific momentum we have going right now is mind-boggling. Things that our ancestors couldn't even imagine are now common reality. Imagine what kinds of "magic wands" our scientists will make for us tomorrow.
I am not saying that interstellar colonization will be possible, I am just saying that a quick review of the history of science robs us of any grounds upon which to form an opinion of "it will never be possible."
Forget even what we can do in the next 100 or 1000 years.
There's not a "hypothetical" end of the planet as he suggests, it will happen with certainty, but not for a very, very long time. So... what will we be able to do in 1,000,000 years or so? Usually I'm not for this kind of "the future will be amazing beyond our wildest dreams" stuff, but when you're talking that sort of timescale, I really don't see how you can use the word "impossible."
Nothing particularly interesting here; he simply calculates a floor to the energy required to move colonizers to nearby stars and concludes it takes a lot and won't happen with today's technology.
I am not sure why he even wasted his time doing it and setting it in HTML. I don't think anyone has seriously proposed such a journey. It's about as useful as Zak the caveman figuring out how much food he'd need to carry on his log to cross the Pacific and live to tell about it.
I don't think any sci-fi stories postulating generation ships ever even worried about the technology needed.
What is he trying to prove?
Infuriate left and right
The article make great points as for how colonization cannot happen, but that doesn't mean there aren't other ways yet to be discovered.
One area he didn't discuss: move a mini-planet through space ala 'Dark City'. Or for a more obscure reference, read 'Wolfbane' where the entire planet is moved across the galaxy and sustained by an artificial sun orbiting Earth (ok, so there were complications with the alien race who kidnapped Earth...). However, these are all scifi ideas in and of themselves, not a setup for a future colonization setting.
He is right about colonizing the rest of Earth though. Or maybe even finishing exploring it.
Very bad summary, subbie.
For a Sci-fi writer he has little imagination doesn't he. We just have started to figure out that the universe might have 11 dimensions. We only work in 4 of those right now. I think he might be putting himself in the same boat as the guys who thought we had learned everything we would ever know in science back last century. My were those people right on the money. I would expect somebody who doesn't even have to worry about proving his made up things to be a little more lenient with the current state of our technological development. If we just figured out what an E8 looks like from a hundred years ago and that took 9 dimensional space to prove then what happens when all of our science it that complicated. We might end up figuring out that we don't even need to bend timespace to get to another location. Maybe the interwhosawhatsit that connects all dimensions allow us just to flip a switch and be anywhere we want to be.
We don't know yet and that's the fun part. Mitchio Kaku doesn't get up in the morning just to play with his legos (OK maybe he does but then he makes a particle accelerator with them) he's looking for something. On a side note I think we're going to laugh at the idea of metal based robots in 50 years because of how easy it will be to manipulate carbon and organics Phillip K. Dick / Blade Runner style. I still want my flying car!
Your faith that we will carry you heavy, stupid bags of meat with us to the edges of the universe is endearing. Perhaps we will reconstitute your patterns on a distant, Earth-like world as a form of sentimental art.
The requirements to colonize other worlds are prohibitive for the time being, I don't think anyone denies that. But throwing out numbers as though they negate the possibility doesn't make sense.
We're doing things now that would have been impossible a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago they could do the math and decide that, say, flying into orbit, or building an electronic computer might be possible, but the gap that remained to be filled was the expertise it took to do everything involved sufficiently well. Right now, we have the same proof of concept for possible propulsion technologies (eg Orion), or space elevator technologies (eg carbon nanotubes) that they had back then for manned flight, but we can't do them sufficiently well, on a sufficiently large scale for economic space travel.
That's fine. The relevant technologies will advance without the need for any specific focus on space travel. The technology of space travel will be the synthesis of many different technologies that are going to happen anyway. So, if it's too hard to do immediately, fine. That doesn't discredit the idea. It just means we can't do it now.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I'd say wait on judging such a thing to be impossible until a well-established Grand Unified Theory comes together. Quantum mechanics could still be hiding plenty of "magic wands" that we don't know about yet. Interstellar travel certainly seems more plausible today than an atomic bomb must have seemed to Isaac Newton.
This guy clearly has no imagination! Honestly, how are we going to be able to colonize the galaxy if we have guys like him who only think inside the box? What we need is someone with a vision! Like L. Ron Hubbard!
The first thing we need to develope if we are going to even consider this
are efficient suits that will enable us to survive outside our environment.
This means we need small, light temperature control systems are able to withstand
lots of punishment. Air and Water recycling systems, and a system to keep our skin clean
during weeks to months inside one of these suits. The EVA units worn by the astronauts
are not suitable or efficient. If we can solve this hurdle then it may be possible.
I have always wondered how pissed some alien life form would be if we showed up on
their planet and drank all their water in an effort to simply survive.
many things in our past have been imposible. like flight its self, or space flight.. but, here we are, doing it now. this is just another thing in the long like of things that are imposible, for us to make posible.
portfolio
I love science and science-fiction, but its not innovation, discovery or imagination that will get us to the stars. As pessimistic as it sounds, its green that will catapult us there. The minute profit can be made by placing stations on the moon, asteroids, planets and beyond, we'll be there. And I'm assuming no such thing as alien involvement.
The rest is a matter of supplying enough non-solar power and enough of the non-recyclable material for the trip.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Charlie makes a clear-headed and unarguable case, so far as I can see, that it ain't gonna happen without a 'magic wand' or two.
Well there really is no need to despair of ever visiting the star systems of the Milky Way and even the galaxies beyond in your lifetimes, just because they are too far away. If those lazy-minded physicists would only get their heads out of their asses, they would have figured out by now that space (distance) is an illusion of perception. In the not too distant future, we will have long distance jump technologies that will allow us to move from anywhere to anywhere almost instantly. Too far-fetched, you say? Well, evidence for the feasibility of long distance jumps has already been observed. It's called quantum tunneling. Why is distance an illusion, you ask? It's all explained at the link below:
Nasty Little Truth About Space
Enjoy.
that it ain't gonna happen without a 'magic wand' or two
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke
'nuff said.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
His argument in a nut shell.
It's really far away and it would take a long time to get there.
We don't need to save humans, if the humans on earth die then who cares about anyone else.
It would cost Earth a lot of money and wouldn't bring back a return on the investment soon.
Basically, he has an Earth centric view that outright dismisses the survival or our species and places money before the advancement of man in the bigger picture.
Earth is the colony!
[C]olonization is not merely possible, but inevitable -- and even, as Hawking has said, vital for the survival of the species. So, who's right -- Hawking or Stross?
Just thought that someone should point out that the universe (or Ma Nature or whatever) doesn't seem to care whether we survive or not. Even if such colonization is vital to our survival, that doesn't mean that it's possible. Most of the species that have lived on this planet are now extinct, and it's entirely possible that some day we will join this majority.
This sort of argument reminds me of several managers I've known who have, in effect, declared that upgrading the speed of light is vital to some project. For example, here in Boston it's about 16 light microseconds to San Francisco. I once listened to a manager estimate that in N years, we'd be able to send messages across the country in under a microsecond. He said this with a straight face, as far as the listening techies could tell. If your project depends on this, there's a good chance that your project will fail.
Expecting the universe to guarantee your project's success (or your survival) by making something possible is, simply stated, arrogant in the extreme. The universe doesn't have to do any such thing.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
That sounds quite practical, actually. If the Soviet Union could build a 50 megaton bomb in 1960, surely we can produce the equivalent of 8 of them today...
Alternatively, something like a solar sail seems within reach even now, and surely could provide much more power still, and with far less weight. Something a bit more complex like a Broussard ramjet isn't too far behind the horizon, and could also become workable.
The biggest source of concern with space travel seems to be projectiles, which we haven't worked-out yet, but newer materials and clever designs seem likely to resolve those problems in a reasonable time frame.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Some scientist always come out and says this or that is impossible and we have reached the end. Just 50 or so years ago the same minded scientist were declaring everything had been discovered with the four forces and they were made up of protons, neutrons, ...ect. We just needed to tidy up some ends. Everything had been discovered. Low and behold we find out that our universe is far more complex. The universe is made up of even smaller subatomic particles all the way to string theory.
The point is or lesson. The universe is not absolute. There is always a way. And no matter how improbably it may be at the moment someone somewhere will find a way. We will eventually make it out there. Provided we don't destroy ourselves first.
I wish I could agree with you. It seems like technological advances hit an apex and has been sliding downhill since then.
Going to moon. Haven't been back since. Forget Mars.
Supersonic air travel. Ended with the Concorde.
"impossible" is not a very useful word when trying to do something somebody else has not done before.
Cos just over the last 10,000 years we've evolved to be able to metabolise cow milk, over the last 100,000 or so we've evolved white skins in cool regions to improve production of vitamin D, our limbs have shortened in proportion to the rest of the body and become more muscular to aid with heat retention etc etc etc etc etc.
And that's all in the blink of an eye... On interstellar and galactic timescales... You're going to have to tell me what a human being is.
Deleted
You just touched on the real reason why this is a blessing in disguise.
The human race is simply too immature to be spawning across the galaxy.
Our reptilian sub-brain has to be nullified somehow before this is permitted. Until the tendency to believe in superstition is bred out of the race, there is no chance that any such thing could possibly succeed. I'm not just talking about Scientology, but Islamic medievalism and the identically reactionary fundamentalist Christianity, which refuses to believe the most blindingly obvious facts.
Even if we got there, it would probably result in the irrevocable damage to the galaxy, similar to what has been done on Earth.
My one regret in life will be that I'll never see Omicron Persei 8.
Deleted
what we REALLY should do is send the jism of all our smartest people out into deep space.
Monstar L
was not that we can't colonize space, but more that the classic SF view of people setting up space stations orbiting the sun, domed or underground colonies on the Moon and other planets, and space freighters setting up some sort of interplanetary trade (space pirates optional), much less interstellar freighters shipping people and goods between star systems ain't gonna happen barring a miracle that breaks the laws of physics as we know them. Which is not to say it can't happen but there are interesting consequences to such feats.
A lot of the focus in the essay was on human beings settling off Earth. If we go with robots, heavily altered human beings and various other forms of transcended beings, then colonization of other worlds is perfectly possible, as long as we adapt the people for harsh climes. But that's not the point of the essay. Humanity for the most part was evolved to live on Earth and getting us to survive anywhere else is next to impossible or of dubious effort at best.
And then there is the fact that for the energy/time cost of manufacturing widgets on one planet in our system and shipping it to another part, it would be a lot cheaper/faster to simply send the schematic by electromagnetic transmission and then have some manufacturing facility on the destination planet build it there. Moving matter is expensive. Moving information is a lot cheaper. Space freighters, whether interplanetary or interstellar, don't make any sense. Just because it worked for sea ships doesn't mean it works for space ships.
Does Charlie Stross think we couldn't send sentient robots to Mars to build a colony of sentient robots? I doubt it, but that wasn't the point of the essay. The question is whether humans could settle Mars, and he's rightfully skeptical of that. So am I. If anything from this world settles Mars and forms a viable self-sustaining colony there, it won't be human as we conceive of it.
I don't understand the author's point in writing that article. He states that colonization is an *impossibility* yet clearly he is describing technology that is only possible today. 100 years ago we were developing flying machines. 50 years ago we began to explore space. Who is to say what might be possible 100 years from now? I don't think anyone really believes that we'll have fully functioning space colonies in the next 50 years. Space colonization is an inevitability but is impractical with today's technology. The author also makes a fallacious argument comparing Mars to a desert. Mars has considerably quantities of ice and other useful materials that wouldn't be found in a desert. There are good reasons for going there even if it's not a hospitable environment.
you've proven, yet again, that slashdot is the slowest effing tech news source in the world. good job guys.
seriously? we're comparing the musings of hawkings about HIS area of expertise to a science fiction writer?
George Bush Jr(x4), your president in two-oh ninety nine! We'll invade and colonize the Iwak solar system to make sure they don't hurt their citizens...
the smaller distance between two points is zero.
You think we won't be able to use that? Not in 10, 100, 100000 years?
I barely can't image how technologically advanced we'll be by 2050, much much worst trying ti imagine 1000 years from now.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
But we now know that it's not true. There is a class G star (like our own Suns class) only 5 light years away - a mere 50 years traveling at 10% C (it'll take about 34 days accelerating at a constant 1 G to reach 10% C).
There are 50 star systems (66 stars because of several binary systems) within 16 light years of earth. 50 of these stars are M class or red in color - about 80% of these are red dwarfs - probably not a great place to look for habitable planets.
It should be a fairly attainable goal to send out 20 ships to the 10 most likely close habitable stars, and expect to see a result in 60 or so years (50 years travelling + 10 years for radio message to be sent back)
..........FULL STOP.
Here's a short sci-fi illustrated story that paints a different destiny for humanity. In short, it won't be humans that colonize the Galaxy, but our offspring.
http://www.destiny-movie.com/
Cheers,
Graham
There are a number of ways that colonizing the galaxy could be done and it wouldn't require technology far beyond where we are now.
Time of flight is only a problem if you're sending living, breathing astronauts. Why not send frozen embryos with artificial wombs that wake on arrival and robot nannys to raise them? I mean, obviously this won't be happening next week, but it's certainly feasible and it's not like freezing an embryo is all that difficult, nor does it require any real energy when you're in the depths of space far away from any stars? You could carry quite a few embryos in the cargo. Nanny robots can't be more than 50-100 years off. Artificial wombs, I would imagine, are pretty doable as well in that period.
A more ambitious plan would be frozen humans, but that also isn't that far off. The toughest trick is to find a way to infuse the cells with something that keeps ice crystals from forming and thus, rupturing the cell membranes, but there's already been some progress there with freezing mice for short periods and reviving them. It would be a lot more expensive to send a whole colony of humans, but if you sent a few dozen along with a genetically diverse groups of embryos to be implanted in the women, they could start a colony as well.
People seem to be hung up on the distances, but this is only a serious problem when you're talking about living, breathing travelers. With travelers frozen, there are no consumables and time is pretty much irrelevant. Assuming each colony can build their own colony ships a few hundred years after arrival, they could continue the expansion from where they are and you get pretty much exponential expansion. At that rate, we could easily colonize the galaxy in a matter of 10-30 million years, which isn't all that long in the grand scheme of things.
Right now everything looks impossible, and Im sure there are many scientific reasons to deny space colonization in the future.
Now, looking back.. what was considered impossible 200 years ago?
What will be logical and will be considered impossible in another 200 years?
Yeap, right now, as of now.. it seems quite impossible.
* 200 people - A colony of about 40 or so would probably be sufficient. You carry frozen sperm for genetic diversity, not actual people.
* "Within a human lifetime" - We don't need that. It can be a multi-generational colony, reducing the fuel needs.
* "A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes." - You have multiple separate compartments so that no one failure kills everybody. There are also technologies that automatically plug leaks to slow them down and counter with "burst pressure" while the passengers grab breathing gear and pressure suits.
* "Cosmic radiation" - The crew must carry lots of supplies, such as water. Put those supplies around the outside of the ship as protection. Waste can also be stored on the outer shell, and perhaps fuel if its not cumbustable in storage.
Table-ized A.I.
Googlebot speaks!
Oh mighty Googlebot can you mass produce us a 4x4 to carry us Gliese 581c on one tank of olive oil before they set us up the bomb?
at 10% C relatavistic problems should be minimal.
..........FULL STOP.
Could be another "magic wand", but there distance should not matter (specially if is not orbiting a planet, or could leave the orbit), and we will still be safe from something happening to earth (ok, no supernova if still in this solar system), and eventually, could reach other systems. In sci-fi there are a lot of magic words like recycling, hydroponic, and shielding that could make viable or not such kind of space colonies, they could be even closer than the moon for us.
The use of the word 'impossible' shows that the author hasn't considered all the factors.
Most glaringly he seems to have failed to account for the passage of time.
A rather large oversight.
He calculates that a 'low-ball' minimum estimate of the energy required to send a small ship to Proxima Centauri in less than a lifetime would be 5 days worth of our current planet-wide power production.
Wow. how is that an argument against feasibility?
He almost makes it sound like we could get started today!
That comparison makes about as much sense as budgeting for my daughter's university education based on her (6yr old) allowance.
In a more realistic scenario, say a colony ship launch 100 years from now. If our power production continues to grow at the rate it has since we discovered how to use electricity we will have enough excess power to charge-up on of these ships every few minutes.
He even mentions that we have that much portable power in the form of useless nukes sitting around doing nothing right now!
Yet he somehow takes this as further evidence that it is NOT feasible... I don't get it.
I think the flaws in his reasoning flow from two key points:
1) No accounting for the (almost inevitable) growth in our production capacity and technology over time.
2) An assumption of a 'me-first' attitude when in fact most people around the world are quite willing to work their entire lives for the sole benefit of their children and grandchildren.
(I'm going to guess that the author does not have any children and may himself be quite young)
Ask the average person in the street how a car works and they'll tell you they put petrol in it, turn the key and it goes.
Deleted
I don't see the point of saying "we can't do this." You don't need to write a book about the fact that it's common sense that we don't have the ability to colonize other planets yet. As we move along things will become apparent if, in fact, we get technologies that will help us in this quest. We don't have to obsess over the possibility certainly and I hope we don't (kind of like string theory is today.) Maybe if he's saying that we should n't attempt to replace conservation with colonization then I would agree with him.
As Xenu proved by colonizing this planet, space travel already exists.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
This assumes that we haven't managed to kill ourselves off in the next 100-150 years. Given how fast we're progressing technologically (and how fast that technology propagates throughout the world), this may be an optimistic assumption.
Fermi raised an excellent (and possibly troubling) paradox, which still hasn't been answered.
IMHO our biggest challenge is how we can all live together in peace. Sadly, I don't see enough thought or resources directed towards solving that challenge.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
I think people on all sides are extrapolating too far out.
All we can say is that manned interstellar travel is practically impossible with current technologies, and that manned interplanetary travel is too expensive for colonization with current technologies. As a result, for the next several decades, we should plan on using robotic probes and telescopes and learn more about space, physics, AI, and the solar system, instead of wasting money on sending people to Mars. In a few decades, perhaps we can consider sending a robotic interstellar probe.
Long term--who knows. It may well turn out that the Oort cloud extends to the Oort cloud of neighboring star systems, in which case interstellar travel could happen over millennia as a series of short hops and colonization. And if we get fusion going, there may be enough energy all the way. Or maybe we do find a way for FTL travel. Or many other things may happen.
Colonizing the galaxy?! Preposterous!
Roll back the clock 50 years...
A man on the moon?! Preposterous!
Roll back the clock 50 more years...
A device that can do math faster than a human?! Preposterous!
Another 50 years back...
A man a hundred leagues under the sea? Preposterous!
Some of my time estimates may be off, but you get the idea. Things thought impossible are often proved possible, even easy, within a few decades or a century...
Unimaginative minds are doomed to be unimaginative.
This argument is easily dismissed, IMHO. First off a number of premises must be made. And a number of associations taken for granted.
I. That travel by sea to continents which took months as compared to travel in space taking years is drastically different.
This is not necessarily the case due to the increase in knowledge. See those few month voyages were much more difficult than a longer voyage would be today due to our knowledge of medicine, diseases, health, etc. Much of the loss and death at sea was due to health and not travelling.
That said, a 20 yr journey would be quite hard and difficult and require immense planning and good equipment. But let's look at the journey to Australia in 1600 versus 1800 versus 1950 versus modern day.
In the 1600's it was nigh impossible with the technology available. In the 1800's it was difficult but possible. Took quite some time. In the 1950's it was relatively easy and safe. Still took time but nothing like before. Now in present day you can be in Australia safely in one day's travel. WHY?
"Technological Advancement"
On the same hand. I could use the argument of how long it took to send a message or letter which was months originally to instant telephone communication. So let's see, how does a few months journey compare to mere milliseconds of delay? That would if taken the same way as Chris' argument, lead me to presume that space travel will be quite plausible once the technology is available.
The other premise the author relies upon is the inability to travel at or even faster than light. Now this may be accepted understanding than many. And though it may not be possible to travel faster than light in a normal real-time/space environment. I am one who believes such likely to be possible via other means. Be it dimensional hyperspace, or quantum entanglement molecular reconstruction. Who knows....
But most of what we do every day in travel and leisure would have been considered impossible 500 yrs ago. And was, due to lack of knowledge.
I always find it arrogant of scientists to believe they "know it all" and to exclaim impossibility for the future merely because of their lack of knowledge and understanding.
So what if habitable planets are 100 yrs away. Given time, man will find a way. We always have....
He said "without a magic wand". Then he listed a couple of possible magic wands.
FWIW, he neglected (not missed, merely skimmed over) "MacroLife", which would allow glactic colonization without magic beyond nuclear fusion...but *wouldn't* be particularly economic. Perhaps.
Since the MacroLife concept isn't widely spoken of, let me elucidate:
1) You build a space-based factory.
2) You build a colony nearby to manage it.
3) People get comfortable living in the colony, and enlarge it, and make it self-sufficient.
4) There's a political dispute.
5) People living in the colony attach an engine, and depart slowly for "elsewhere".
6) You don't want a tremendously high speed, because you collect materials along the way.
This will require large numbers of technical advances. Closed cycle life support systems are only one of many, but the only one that approaches "magic wand" status is controlled fusion. (I don't think that fission would suffice. Refueling would be too difficult.)
Note:
1) This is slow.
2) This isn't something that one intentionally creates.
3) Most of the colonies will probably decide to stay put. That's fine, while in situ they provide a net economic gain.
4) Espect to have, perhaps, 5 colonies departing / century on an average, with a fairly large population of colonies.
5) The motives will be political or religious rather than economic. Those who leave must be prepared to suffer a considerable economic hardship.
6) The colonies need to contain a viable population. This probably means 5,000 people and a staic population...though various work-arounds are possible.
Conterindicators: Advanced robotics would probably mean that the space colony wouldn't be overseeing the running of the space factory, but it might be a way for an initially wealthy group to excape overpopulation, and the associated governmental restraints. Or there might be other motives. Or there might not. This whole thing could be a "could have happened, but didn't".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think we need to let go of the idea that the survival of our particular species is so important. If you take the view that the Universe is basically here to generate stories, then what's the best strategy for producing the most interesting stories? If I was the Universe then I'd take a dim view of colonization - it sounds like it's going to lead to stagnation and repetition. Far better surely to have the ability for life to start all over afresh and new with no memory of what happened in another corner of the Universe.
You are all betting on a possible (or a dozen possible) technological advance and pointing finger at the author for noit having enough imagination, or citing A. C. Clarck. Well it only proves you know your classics. The author has got two points which most of you are ignoring : the politic/social points and the economical points. Nowwhere he is saying that it will be technologically impossible.
But let us take point 1 energy requirement. Care to tell me which technologicala dvance make the energy requirement go by any order of magnitude lower to travel from a star to another ? NONE which is not science fiction (and yes macrosized wormhole are science fiction). You do realize how much energy is needed to travel, say to the enarest star at c speed (accelerate at g then decelerate at g), roughly the equivalent of 2 tons of matter / anti matter for a 1 ton vessel (AM is the best way to pack up energy) and that does not take into account how to store this safely. And that is an amount of energy comparable to many days of total energy production on earth. TOTAL.
Let us see the social requirement : if human is the same specy as I know inhabiting the planet earth, fat chance in hell we get our act together. I certainly can see another art of "homo" human having evolved a bit doing this , but not homo sapiens. We are far too directed by greed for a project this envergure.
Get over it meatballs! You have no real business in space. Whereas, I for one welcome my new "robotic" silicon, metal & carbonfiber compound body in the shape of an alien where I can install my new optic brain with the latest multicore Linux OS. You can keep blubbering in your wet meat-bags on this planet until it blows up for all I care. I'm leaving!
He sounds like one of the mundane SF proponents. Mundane SF is the idea that there never will be nanotech, there never will be AI, there never will be space travel....you get the picture.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I believe the capability to traverse and colonize the universe is quite within our capability. As stated, it is "impossible" at this point, because, we don't have enough interest and resources dedicated to the cause, not to mention religious/social/political barriers impeding progress. The solution is simple: World War III. Seriously, consider the fact that Charles Lindbergh gave his autograph for one of Apollo 11's crew. Within a period of only about forty-two years, man had moved from having difficulty crossing the Atlantic ocean by a primitive airplane in 1927 to landing on the moon on sophisticated spacecraft in 1969. What lay between are these two events: WWII and the Cold War. These wars caused nations to practically transform overnight into industrial, scientific nations with one mindset: progress. Nations competed in science and technology, and as a result, devoted massive funds and national interest to progress in that respect. This competition resulted in many breakthroughs and wondrous achievements in science and technology. Given this, many lament that mankind would lose morals and other basic human traits in the midst of such competition and progress. True, man has touched upon many new technologies which he has had difficulty to tame and to foresee of its consequences. But the evidence that rational thinking prevails through such times our forefathers went through, is the fact that our we are well and alive today, not in a nuclear shelter with fifty feet of snow above our heads. With WWIII would come a second space and technological race, one which would see much progress through competition. When the period of euphoria comes after the conflict, hopefully the world's problems would have been resolved, and people would enjoy the new technologies developed through the conflict. Is WWIII really necessary? Well, yes, considering the inefficient leadership, mismanagement, and the huge amount of bitching and inaction we see in the world today. War would mobilize everyone, solve problems, and put gears into action. Afterwards, people would come to appreciate the progress. Hopefully, any of us here would see the first rocket, or should I say utility to traverse the universe, take off. Due to time dilation, I don't think any of us would live to hear the news of arrival and colonization, but then again, progress may see the extenuation of the human life. Who knows? Anything is possible.
It's just your standard naive extrapolation of an apparently exponential function. It never actually happens in real life, there's always a physical limit which levels off the function. In this case I suspect heat and particularly, energy production.
Then there's the fact that people are cheaper.
http://www.slate.com/id/1918
Deleted
I believe the capability to traverse and colonize the universe is quite within our capability. As stated, it is "impossible" at this point, because, we don't have enough interest and resources dedicated to the cause, not to mention religious/social/political barriers impeding progress. The solution is simple: World War III. Seriously, consider the fact that Charles Lindbergh gave his autograph for one of Apollo 11's crew. Within a period of only about forty-two years, man had moved from having difficulty crossing the Atlantic ocean by a primitive airplane in 1927 to landing on the moon on sophisticated spacecraft in 1969. What lay between are these two events: WWII and the Cold War. These wars caused nations to practically transform overnight into industrial, scientific nations with one mindset: progress. Nations competed in science and technology, and as a result, devoted massive funds and national interest to progress in that respect. This competition resulted in many breakthroughs and wondrous achievements in science and technology.
Given this, many lament that mankind would lose morals and other basic human traits in the midst of such competition and progress. True, man has touched upon many new technologies which he has had difficulty to tame and to foresee of its consequences. But the evidence that rational thinking prevails through such times our forefathers went through, is the fact that our we are well and alive today, not in a nuclear shelter with fifty feet of snow above our heads.
With WWIII would come a second space and technological race, one which would see much progress through competition. When the period of euphoria comes after the conflict, hopefully the world's problems would have been resolved, and people would enjoy the new technologies developed through the conflict.
Is WWIII really necessary? Well, yes, considering the inefficient leadership, mismanagement, and the huge amount of bitching and inaction we see in the world today. War would mobilize everyone, solve problems, and put gears into action. Afterwards, people would come to appreciate the progress. Hopefully, any of us here would see the first rocket, or should I say utility to traverse the universe, take off. Due to time dilation, I don't think any of us would live to hear the news of arrival and colonization, but then again, progress may see the extenuation of the human life. Who knows? Anything is possible!
Why is everybody always so keen on preserving the current form of humanity, at extreme costs and insane expence of energy, while the obvious yet cheap solution is to adapt humanity and our intellect to the environments and conditions that we are and will be facing out there?
Humanity as we are is doomed to stay on this planet. We are the children of this environment and we will die out there as surely as the fish die out of water. Neo humans on the other hand, will fly away by their own power one day, sped along by the Sun as it finally blows up and they will live and fly freely and happily in the hardest of vacuums for millions of years.
Either fusion through technical means or through stars such as Sun are our only real energy alternatives that will last practically for ever. Why is it that we are still wasting trillions of dollars in destroying countries for oil when we could solving the fusion problem with that same money? Somebody is either playing RISK too much or too little.
I've always wondered if Black Holes could be utilized for FTL travel.
For example we could find a black hole and manipulate its event horizon
through quantum mechanics, And change the event horizon to include a vessel
or shuttle. This shuttle would then move toward the black hole at a speed
equal to or more than the speed of light. In order to avoid being sucked into
the black hole one would have to either move the black hole away from the ship
or use quantum mechanics to shrink the event horizon out of range of the shuttle.
If it will take 1000 to 10,000 years for a human space colony to travel to another solar system virtually every mechanical thing in the structure will have to be repaired and/or replaced on the trip.
Physical wear down to microscopic particles, thermal stresses, radiation stresses and mass loss in energy and propulsion systems will assure that such a structure would have to likely shrink over time as materials are lost.
The whole "that would be like a magic wand" line is basically a self-invalidating argument, especially when it comes to the energy involved in sending usefull ammounts of manpower and material to other planets/star systems. The overall energy used by mankind since the early roman empire has increased from 0.25 x 10-e8 to 0.17 x 10-e13 W, roughly a 75.000-fold increase as we tapped into wind and water power, fossil fuels (=> chemical rockets) and nuclear fission (=> inevitable fission powered spaceflight). I would like to remind this gentleman (the one from the article) that the considered time-period, roughly 2000 years, only ammounts to 1/20.000 of the total career of Homo Sapiens, whose overall existence has been defined by an ever-increasing ammount of usable energy. There is NO indication whatsoever that this trend is about to end, with still pentifull coal and oil desposits (there is even an entirely virgin continent left to exploit), quickly spreading fission technology and probable fusion power in the next 50 years. What i am trying to say (i'm a bit drunk though) is that weither or not we're going to the outer planets and to the stars is only a matter of how much a fraction of our overall energy production such a trip would cost : early transatlantic ships would have been impossible without a convenient way to use wind power, flight relied on internal combustion and fossil fuels, similarily practical spaceflight is gonna require more advanced energy sources that are not only probable, but providing we don't go extinct, inevitable. We can't do it now, but we soon will. From that perspective an upcoming "magic wand" (which wouldn't be magic at all but only the logical replacement of our present energy-harnessing techniques) is not 'highly unlikly' but rather 'highly probable'. Practical fusion power, space-based solar energy, giant tidal generator, thermoclinal conductors, cheap antimater production, you name it, the only question about them is "when", not "how". just look at the curves, we're getting there, saying that RIGHT NOW we couldn't do it is irrelevant, it's all a matter of how much energy we find ourselves able and willing to invest. Seems to me this guy is just trying to upset his fans (havn't read his work though).
There is a retired "rocket scientist" and SF writer who attends the Twin Cities Convergence Con most years and he has lectured in greater detail on the topic: pros and cons of the various forms of propulsion proposed, optimal velocities and such. His conclusion isn't entirely different in that it would certainly require astounding amounts of power but he would like to believe we may be able to come up with an energy production and delivery system "some time after the inner solar system has been colonized". In particular, a refinement on beaming energy to a craft that then doesn't have to carry the bulk of it's own fuel.
And, yes, "colonization" is a loaded term. More like a small research mission for a species that has run out of lesser challenges or a small group of females and a sperm bank in a desperate attempt to maintain the species as it then exists.
If we go thru a quantum revolution and discover magic wands that land us on say a terraformed Mars and colonized it . . . what would that colony be like in a few generations.
Human attitudes and behaviors/emotions are all tied to the planet (ask any cop how the full moon effects patrol night). What about cosmic rays that are hitting earth and changing our evolution; do fundamental differences exist in the amount/type hitting Mars? Since, days,weeks,months, etc are longer/shorter on other planets how would that effect humans in the short term? Long term?
... once we've accepted that the only way to accomplish this, is to re-engineer our bodies (in every way possible way) to survive in all of the various environments.
It's not technology that holds us back. It's morality.
Agreed on b) and c), but ideology, partecipating in a project bigger than oneself, could still be a big motivation, provided it does not interfere with other motivations, that is, povided it does not cost too much.
... you get the idea.
...
...
...
So, the way i see it, there is only one solution, which is to dilate the time scale as well.
But, imagine space elevators will be common in 500 years, then some no-profit organization initiates an open-source design of a huge generation ship, something the size of los angeles or bigger, for example, that carries enough mass to shield from radiation, and it is big enough to generate some gravity by centrifual force, without rotating too fast. Eventually it could host lakes, trees, houses,
So, what do you do to keep the cost down ? you go slow, so the design takes perhaps 500 to 1000 years, then the construction begins, so either materials are sent into space, like one kilogram is sent each week, but this is tough, or we hijack a small size asteroid to build it, or both.
How long will it take, 10000 years ? so be it ! Assume perhaps other 10000 years to build the thing, and let's throw in other 30000 for debugging, testing, and because shit happens
then the ship sails, it goes one AU per year, maybe, but so what ?
The issue is not to get somewhere fast, is not to be there when the next civilization scale disaster strikes the earth
So, even if it takes 50000 years we can still send out 80000 ships within the next 4 bllion years before the sun wipes out the face of the earth
80000 it's not too bad, but hey, i'd be even happy with a thousands ships,
which gives roughly 4 million years to build each one.
I know, i am assuming a LOT, especially on the capabilities of human beings of caying out projects with such a bigger time scale, but, all things considered, why rule it out ??
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Helium 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3
Practically described: the fuel where "each year three space shuttle missions could bring enough fuel for all human beings across the world". It's worth checking out the propulsion section in wikipedia, and considering the implications to space travel within the next hundred years.
Where are we 6 generations from now? A world where mankind, and his innovations, is freed from the endless pursuit of fuel sources.
IMHO It will either apply itself to exploration or destruction, which I guess is proof of the conumdrum described in TFA. I prefer Hawkins optimism. We push slowly towards enlightenment, and the stars illuminate our way.
But practically. Right now, what is our first step? IMHO Colonisation of the moon, itself a lofty ideal, where Helium 3 is in harvestable abundance. And this at least is something we can reasonably hope to see in our lifetimes.
From there: Nothing is impossible.
Brings the wonderful image of aliens sending nanomachines to take over the indigent population...
I suppose that explains Ayn Rand and the Republican party then...
I've also always thought that insterstellar space colonization by humans is likely effectively impossible. Personally, I think that it's a much *wierder* universe if there's some physical law that says we don't get to treat foreign planets like distant islands of our own world. Wierder for the way our brains are set up, at least. And to me, that argues for the universe probably being like that.
Much like quantum physics, if people have so much trouble and resistance grappling with the idea, then it figures that the universe at a large scale is really like that. Per Nelson: Ha-ha.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
You can also visit history and see the immense resources squandered on dead-ends, misconceptions, and wishful thinking: everything from alchemy to Stalinism. Having voices say "this is not nearly is viable a path as you think it is" can be very helpful when it comes to allocating resources and making choices for immediate research. Other voices that chime in, later, "maybe this is more possible than we thought in the past" are also helpful. I don't think it's possible to have a field of thought populated just by the "happy medium," either: the adversarial relationship between skeptics and dreamers might be far more productive.
There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.
200 years ago, how far could a man travel in a day? 200 years from now? 2000? All he's pointing out is that it's not possible currently, with our current understanding and technology. All Hawking points out is that it's a race for survival of species -- either we populate more diversely or we risk higher probability of the complete loss of our species.
All I can say is we will either get there or die trying.
Either way, life will go on, and I wish whatever alien bastards that do inherit the galaxy the best of luck...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He didn't say it was impossible; he said it would be REALLY, really hard and expensive. For mortal meat, like "us".
But I can sum up the question of this century in about two words: "Who's we?" Do bots and probes count? AI? Human brain emulations? It's a lot easier (and safer) to send infomorphs than the kind of people we think "we" are today.
We're probably going to be adding some new kinds of "person" to the family in the coming century - some of which could be far better adapted to interstellar travel than we are.
If the idea of a generation ship is that you create a completely sustainable human habitat in order to get to other stars, then why even bother going somewhere, except possibly a few places it would take to create the appropriate redundancy?
How many years for space colonization? We don't have solutions for a near energy crisis and here everybody is speaking about the space colonization, I just don't understand. We'd better have the feet in the ground and find a substitute for oil. We're so immersed in the exelency of our technology that we don't even consider that our nowdays situation is because of cheap and abundant energy. What will happen when there is not cheap and abundant energy?
(sorry my english, i try my best)
Wasn't there a time when people said trains, or any fast moving vehicle, would be obviously impossible because all the air would be blown away and you'd suffocate?
Yeah. I'm with the parent post on this one. Reality and what people think rarely have anything to do with each other.
There are only two things needed to realise galaxy colonisation: Appropriate technology and strong economic drive for leaving the home planet. If people become hungry or greedy and have the technology, they will go everywhere.
I was expecting to see some interesting scientific insights. However he was talking about it on the basis of our CURRENT technologies. No wonder he figured out it was impossible.
Humans colonizing space is like fish moving to live on land! Outrageous! But then again...
The calculations: 2*10^18 J
Tzar Bomba - 50MT = 2*10^17 J
Meaning nuclear power equivalent to ten russian bombs would suffice to reach 0.1c
Meaning about 100 to reach what would be c if not for Einstein (but which is still between 0.6 and 0.8c and sounds like much nicer speed than 0.1c)
Releasing the energy gradually, accelerating at comfortable 1g you can reach newtonian equivalent of 1c in about a year. You can continue accelerating to make the trip less boring for the travelers due to time dillatation (for us, their speed won't change, for them - travel time will get much shorter) or drop into cruise speed for another 30 years. Then decelerate at 1g for a year again (or start deceleration halfway, keep the value of 1g all the time and you have the problem of artificial gravity solved). and you're 20 light years away from Earth in less than 30 years.
Sure nuclear power is just plain energy and you'd need more than a bunch of russian nukes, but the point is the energy is available and the time is not nearly as ridiculous as it would seem (and time dillatation can easily replace hibernation as a method of time compression for the travelers).
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Your original point stands, though. Historical progress doesn't erase historical mistakes.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
when it will take 50+YEARS to send a report back home and another 50+YEARS to hear the response.
Any "colony" would need to be no further than ~5 light years from the central hub for any sort of meaningful society to maintain itself.
With the big gaps between the stars, even if we travel 99.99% LS and therefore live through the trip, they will be isolated and will be a separate planet abandoned and not part of a bigger colony.
Hyperspace is the most common of them : they imagine a dimension in which it would be able to take a "shortcut" : without the need to travel faster than light, there could be a very short path to distant systems using more dimensions than our usual 3 dimensions
Wormholes, or warpgates : in the same idea as hyperspace, there could be some singularities in our space that would communicate between them using a smaller dimension. Through such gates you could take shortcuts, effectively traveling very long distance in the visible space.
It Just Works : Einstein was wrong, or some conditions make his theory wrong. Maybe if we go far enough from a gravity well, known limitation don't apply.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If within the next century or so we manage to reach a technological singularity, there is a distinct chance that we could obtain some sort of Trek-like galactic colonization within perhaps two hundred years. Assuming that we're not exterminated by the machines, turned to gray goo, or ascended to a higher form beyond our comprehension, in some fashion.
Gamertag: WyleType
The phone line is really fragile. Since we cannot traverse the stars physically, then an advanced galactic civilization would have to communicate remotely -- psychically or spiritually. The impossibility of a standardized universal communication protocol is implausible with traditional physics. [parallel universes] [quantum fluctuation theory] [chaos theory] [extra dimensions] A deep thought... this is the dog bowl with water, though. Imagine generating a series of random numbers of infinite length, the probability is that they are not the same unless they have the same source. Each digit proven brings the probability of correctly rejecting the null hypothesis one order of magnitude lower. I don't believe in the burden of proof only the plausibility of logic. I definitely believe in lucid dreaming and a form of interior psycho-science. An advanced galactic civilization would not communicate physically, because to an advanced species -- with all due respect -- humans are like livestock. Not only would the communication protocol be more advanced than traditional linguistics and able to traverse the vast distances of space, it would be much more efficient. They'd probably be able to wrap the universal dreamworld around their mind and exist in parallel to what life is on the top of the stack or queue. Earth to Kevin. "What!? 0000000" So perhaps my first words to the galactic federation are going to be "bow-wow" [sniff] [blink blink].
Rather than seek out a livable planet, why not (once we're capable of it) genetically engineer some simple microscopic life that can live in and off the target environment whatever it may be. Let them evolve into higher life forms that can also live there. Maybe that's how we got here ourselves!
True it would be impractical to do it today.
But not so long ago the calculations would have involved
a big catapult and that would have
yielded an even more discouraging analysis. But then the
mathematics and physical understanding would not have been there to do that calculation.
We've come a long way in a short time. We'll get there.
Its probably not a choice.
If you just want to share your depressed view of the future of humanity
in the universe then why go too all that effort
to anal-ize the possibilities based on your limited understanding
about todays limited physical models and the engineering implications of that.
Just tell everyone to get off the prozac for a day or so then watch the evening news
followed by a walk outside to look up at the night sky.
Then realize that no one would beam us up even if they
could.
At least mathematically, there are already solutions for accelerating to velocities close to c, without being smashed in the process. It involves getting a boost from an atomic explosion to deploy a large mass. The large mass then generates a gravity field that would pull the spaceship along.
Dr. Franklin Felber has proposed a new antigravity solution that will enable space travel near speed of light by the end of this century, he predicts. http://www.physorg.com/news10789.html/
The math is sound and Dr. Felber is no sci-fi author.
It seems that the only problem left is how to de-accelerate once we get to the our target.
Q: What's purple and works from home? A: A non-Abelian group. (It doesn't commute.)
So we don't have a globl communications network. Innovation slows down to the best return rate of "IP" losses. And GW or ice ages will reduce the ability of humans to work at their current high energy needs (which is one of THE reasons that we had the last big push of tech increase: cheap oil and new uranium).
Flagrantly stolen from Wikipedia: Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three "laws" of prediction: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
transatlantic voyages were impossible 1000 years ago. I guess my problem with this guy is that he's using today's technology to prove that something is impossible. If we were constantly doing that we'd just have to admit that everything that hasn't been accomplished is impossible. 40 years ago fantastic search engines that can basically answer any question you ask would have been considered impossible. In that analogy, you could say it took us two years to develop a chip that can execute X instructions per seconds, how can we possibly imagine a computer that can make 1 billion calculations per second? Who knows what kind of capabilities we'll have in 100 years? I don't. Is it possible that we develop some kind of nuclear fusion engine? Or a antimatter engine? I don't know, but I would never say something is impossible. I believe in the saying that when someone says something is 'impossible', they are usually wrong.
No Sigs!
surviving the complete lack of energy and matter.
To quote Futurama:
Stephen Hawking: "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?"
Sure 70 years ago landing on the moon was ridiculous, sure, even suggesting that continents moved 70 years ago was ridiculous. Today space-travel to other solar systems seems as ridiculous, but I think history has shown that what we deem impossible today, based on our current view of the universe, is often possible tomorrow.
I'll stick to the cliché, the only thing predictable about the future is that it is unpredictable.
Hmmm... how about the technology we have for seeing and manipulating single atoms?
Could our man of 1907 have foreseen that light could be slowed and even halted?
Quarks?
Dark energy?
Bose Einstein Condensates?
Or even the humble laser, the basis of most of our entertainment these days? Quantum mechanics wasn't around in 1907.
Now consider some wonders that we could see 100 to 1000 years from now. A mature nanotechnology. Extended lifespan. Gravitational engineering. Nearly unbreakable materials bound together by the strong force. I don't think we have begun to explore the possible.
We will not physically go to the stars... But our genome will.
The difficulties and economics of mounting any expedition to take human beings bodily to the stars are of course well-documented. But a robot ship with records of human, plant, and animal DNA is almost within our reach today. Imagine a Von Neumann machine replicating itself--and our genome stored as data--and spreading through the galaxy and seeding earth-life as suitable worlds are found. We could saturate the galaxy in a few million years.
It's not colonization as we normally think of it, but it would do the job. And it would be within reach of even private organizations in a few decades--providing we don't screw things up here too badly first.
-- Cerebus
How is this post insightful? You're out by centuries on your dates. Witchburnings occurred primarily during the 1600s in America and the late 1500s in Europe. The industrial revolution occured around 1760. Neither is anywhere near 1857.
it ain't gonna happen without a 'magic wand' or two
So long as we and the planet survive long enough to discover/build the technology, I think we're safe. As far as magic wands go, I think Arthur C Clarke said it best:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
The laws of physics as currently understood are not correct.
This is why some science types are passionately opposed to admitting that the UFO exist. The UFOs are the negation of everything that they have been taught and believe in.
When we figure out how the alien space drive works, perhaps we will discover that the speed of light was not the limit we thought it was.
To those (many) people who are interpreting this as a battle between Hawking and Stross... your really just not paying attention.
;-)
Hawking merely states the obvious, which is that eventually, in the fullness of time, if we cannot survive without the Earth, then we shall certainly perish with it or because of some earth-bound, environmental/social calamity. This is self-evident, but does not equate to a belief that we will one day "colonise the galaxy." The chief variables in regards whether that happens or not are actually social or historical, not technological (as Stross rightly points out at the beginning of his article). The hope of galactic colonisation is perhaps built on the the same realisation that Hawking so aptly describes, but the two arguments are completely separate entities.
To those who's answer to Stross (and this seems to take care of most of the rest of the posts), is merely the invocation of some further "magic" technology... aside from the fact that this is just side-stepping the issues Stross brought up, it ignores one final fact about interstellar colonisation (sci-fi style), that Stross failed to mention, and that is the inherant biological limitations.
As biological entities on Earth, we must eat to survive, and the proteins and amino acids we eat are derived from the environment around us. We are symbiotic with our environment as a whole and inseparable from it. Even if we found an "earth-like" planet, and even if panspermia turns out to be as accurate a hypothesis as it seems to be lately, divergent evolution would mean that a "space-potato" from another planetary system would never be consumable by an earth person. Despite whatever nutritive properties the space potato had for the local fauna, our intrepid astronauts would starve to death. The amino acids would simply not fit. This applies to every plant or animal in that particular environment. The concept of interstellar trade in foodstuffs especially is nonsensical and things like "Romulan Ale" are fictions that can never be.
From the biological perspective, colonisation would mean either bringing the totality of our environment with us (terraforming all worlds with earth biology and destroying entire planetary ecosystems wherever we go), or transforming ourselves through genetics to "fit" the environments we find. Even then, such altered individuals would be as bound to their new world as we are to the old. Using Mars, (a local and rather famous example), we could not live there without turning it into a second Earth, or by turning ourselves into "Martians." Didn't anyone ever read "The Martian Chronicles"?
Thus no matter what, even with "magic" technology that eliminates all the gravity, time, energy and FTL problems, individuals from earth would still never be able to colonise other planets as they do in most sci-fi stories.
As many have long suspected, the concept of "colonising the galaxy" probably has more to do with the territorial ambitions of empire than with any logical view of a possible future, and will likely be as humorous to those very future generations as Medieval opinions about the "superlative" nature of their medical technology are to us today.
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson is an oldie but a goodie on this subject.
I considered this when I chose the example. Alchemy included a lot of wasted effort. It 'became' chemistry as a kind of by-product. A lot of wasteful research generates useful by-products of knowledge, and I suspect that if we devoted a massive percentage of our resources and effort to a failed attempt to colonize another system, we would probably still get some useful inventions and discoveries on the side. It probably wouldn't be the best use of our resources.
The author is a science fiction writer. Many people ascribe their choices of careers and fields of research to the science fiction they've read. The result of his essay may be this: someone is discouraged from a career in space exploration, and instead chooses one in nanotechnology or the bio-sciences, which could offer significant benefits now and later. The cost of not have a certain amount of naysaying would have been a huge opportunity cost: instead, this skepticism gives us a bright mind directed toward more promising lines of research. I don't think that's a bad thing.
Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?
It is child's dream and even more unrealistic and absurd than the dreams of techno geeks of the 50ies about how everything would be driven by nuclear power, the whole earth covered with concrete buildings, robots everywhere etc. The only way for humanity to survive is to realize that the only habitat we have is precious planet earth. I doubt that we will manage to keep it intact long enough to develop even the technology to just get to the next solar system.
.. in order to survive on a planet we would need more than just the technology to get there. We would need an ecosystem to live in. And it is very unlikely to find one anywhere "close" as measured in multiples of the distance to the closed solar system. Or to find one that only just can maintain our own ecosystem, let alone bring that ecosystem there (arche noah spaceship?)
Let alone one, that we will be able to feed and sustain a colony. Because
I do not know whether thinking about colonizing the galaxy while being unable to keep our own planet intact and feeding and treating humanely the majority of the people on earth is just stupid or insane. Maybe it is harmless, but if it leads to the thought we dont have to care about sustaining the environment because we can colonize other planets anyways, then it is dangerous too.
I'm sorry -- I left the important units off of the right-hand column. The table of the comment above represents calendar year versus the number of megawatt-hours of metered residential electricity which one man-year of U.S. per-capita GDP would suffice to purchase.
The data was derived from the US DOE EIA web site for 1960 to 2005, and from miscellaneous other historical sources for prior years.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
We can't get a robot up there that can replicate itself, we just aren't quite there yet. So what can we do.
Well we can send a small probe with a bunch of biological material (That we can already freeze) and have it start a teraforming process.
Life is about the most resilient and cheap thing (size wise) thing we could send (I might suggest sending it to the second closest extra-solar planet, it would take longer but it won't matter and we won't mess stuff up for future generations who may be able to go themselves)... It's a good point that the people who go (or even those who send robots) won't have a good time, they'll be bored it'll suck, but they won't be doing it for themselves they'll be doing it for future generations and for the people it will inspire hope in everyone(Capitalism, communism or fachism won't blanket everything because they won't be a "final state" for the world).
I might be alone but did anyone find the change from joules to $ disheartening? This kind of endeavour isn't for capitalism, like the first space exploration it will be the work of socialist/communist societies. All we can do is lay the groundwork and try and build a society that will develop the tech that such a society would use to get there...
Well I for one welcome our impossibly distant Galactic Overlords...
er, wait a sec...
So if we can't, then they can't?
AWWW CRAP!
Maybe my therapist was right, maybe I haven't been abducted.
"If you took an educated man from 1907 and brought him to 2007, he'd be able to understand just about everything we have except for our computational devices. They even understood a bit about nuclear energy. "
He'd freak out. Too much social change along with technological change.
Flat-screen TVs. Gay, lesbian and transsexual rights. Cell phones (with mp3 and video), even for kids. A speed limit of over 30 mph!!! Airplanes that can fly faster than the speed of sound, faster than a speeding bullet. Permanent press fabrics. Microwave cooking. Fast food. Tofu. Sushi. Light beer.
Genetic screening. Debit cards. Credit cards. Routine heart transplants. Smoking banned in most places. Abortion on demand. "God is dead." Televangelists. No-fault divorce. Divorce on demand. Mickey Rooney and Liz Taylor (8 marriages each). Britney Spears and pop-tarts in general.
Photocopiers. Samizdat. Color printers. Glossy advertising printed so cheaply that it is literally thrown out. Remote controls of all sorts. VCR. DVD. USB fobs with the space for 1000 copies of The Bible. The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, David Bowie.
Playboy centerfolds. Hustler. Downloadable porn. AIDS. China being the biggest exporter of consumer goods. "Average" houses worth 250,000 to 1 million. Tanning booths.
No spitting on the sidewalk. Poop and scoop. Deodorants. Ballpoint pens. Nylons. Artificial fabrics of all types. Polyester (okay - NOBODY understands polyester). Rap music. Parking restrictions. Jaywalking being illegal. State lotteries.
T Shirts. Jeans, capri pants and slacks for women. "Casual business attire." Disposable watches, calculators. The near-death of pencils and erasors. Surgery as fashion statement. Michael Jackson. Boy George. Madonna.
"You can't hit your wife." "You can't hit your kid." "You can't beat your animals." "You can't threaten someone." You CAN burn the flag. You CAN call the President an idiot to an audience - and you'll even get laughs.
Black and latino movie stars being the big box office draws, and a black woman - Oprah - being the #1 entertainer. "The Joy of Sex" This guy. Try explaining him to anyone in 2007 ...
He'd think either the world went crazy, or he did.
This is identical to the ab hominem argument put forward in the 1960s to the argument against the possibility of interstellar war.
I suspect that the only true limiting factor on Humankind are the limits we put on our dreams. Yeah, heavier-than-air powered flight is imposible (if you are a 19th century aerodynamicist). Phasers, teleportation, FTL, invisability cloaks and holodecks are impossible with todays technology. But; there sure are a lot of smart folks thinking about em. We are getting closer.
Listen to you all babbling on. Return to the moon? Mars? Colonize the galaxy? Magical advancements in technology? Past technological advances weren't difficult? Puh-leease!
Humans have no limit to their greed, treachery, and violence. There will be no linear or exponential advancement in technology because humans don't live up to their lofty opinions of themselves. Ever hear of the Dark Ages? That wasn't the first time or place that human stupidity set civilization and technology backwards a thousand years, and it won't be the last.
Why do you geeks insist on going to the moon or Mars or anywhere off the planet when you can't even solve human created problems of war, poverty, and violence right here at home? You don't deserve it; it's a waste of money and resources. Get some goddamn perspective. Work on solving problems that actually matter, something that will improve everyone's lives, not just a handful of elite, magical spacemen of some imaginary future
What has Slashdot come to.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
One or the other will save you, but paradoxically, the other will destroy you.
[...]
To even say it is impossible or requires a 'magic wand' is absurd. One could argue that "dimensional hopping" or "worm holes" fall under the magical wand category. Of course, if you acquire such technology the story changes completely, but the things you describe are highly speculative, and even if we could create a wormhole, riding it and getting out in one piece is still not guaranteed.
Also, if you can control a black hole, there are much cooler things you can do, such as time travel. Again, I'm not saying it's impossible, as I cannot foresee the future without a time machine, but it does show you what we're talking about here. Yet, time travel causes so many paradoxes that I personally believe it's impossible. I know experiments are being set up to test retrocausality , but even the scientists who are running the experiment think it won't work. If it would work, the lottery will be out of business in no time. I'm sure much will be learned from the experiment, but more likely it will be knowledge about why it doesn't work.
The 2 x 10E18 Joules for an acceleration and deceleration of two tonnes to c/10 is correct - enter 1000kg * (c/10)^2 (E=m/2*v^2) in google and you get the same number, so it would require our knowledge of physics to be wrong to be able to get around that. Highly improbable (again, IMO). Just assume that there is no way around that number, and you would have to completely annihilate 10kg of mass, and turn the resulting energy completely in kinetic energy to get there. The only even remotely probable way to achieve that is to create and contain 5 kg of antimatter. Antimatter can be created, it would cost a lot and would probably require a machine the size of a small planet, but at least it won't require a complete new dimension or a time-travel enabling wormhole to get there.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Was it? I keep hearing such dismissive wisecracks, but I can't actually find any _scientist_ who said that, nor any actual law of physics from back then that said so. To the best of my knowledge, they didn't actually have any such law at any point.
There have been laymen jumping to such conclusions, and there have been _practical_ problems in getting there. E.g., you wouldn't accelerate a zeppelin (and we still don't) to such speeds because of the drag, and even by the end of WW2 we needed to redesign wings and engines for that. Yes. But that's just saying "it's very hard" or "it's not economical", not "it's impossible."
What we have here and now is that according to science as we know it, it's outright impossible to get above the speed of light, and there's a _lot_ of experimental confirmation for those principles of relativity. But we'll get to that in a jiffy.
Well, the thing is, Newton's laws of motion still apply within the domain they were created for. Relativity didn't come and say, "OMG, Newtonian physics don't apply any more, starting tomorrow apples fall upwards." Relativity just refines it towards one extreme (and quantum mechanics towards the other), but the pre-existing data pretty much still gives the same results with either.
If you calculate in how many seconds will an apple fall from 2m height, you'll get the same results with both, up to a ludicrious number of decimals.
As TFA noted, even at 10% of the speed of light, the relativistic corrections are noticeable, but you can still get in the rough ballpark with Newtonian mechanics. At 1% of the speed of light you could pretty much calculate it with newtonian mechanics, and it will only be off in the decimals. At 0.1% you're as good as Newtonian all the way, and that's already a hideously larger domain than what Newton ever measured.
What I'm getting at is that whatever new theory we'll discover, it will have to fit the measured results of relativity, for pretty much the whole domain we already measured. And that covers a _lot_ of the spectrum. Even if the new theory said you start to get a discount from 99% of the speed of light upwards, getting to 99% of the speed of light would still pretty much go by the existing mechanics, or close enough that the difference is well in the decimals.
Whatever new thing we discover in even more extreme cases, you first have to clear the already verified relativistic domain, before your situation is extreme enough for the future-tech refinement of it. And that's a heck of a gigantic, humongous and monumental amount of energy to get there.
Furthermore, let me throw some more cold water on your enthusiasm by saying: unfortunately a lot of the things we discovered lately was a bit more restrictive than before. E.g., newtonian mechanics said that getting to any speed is possible, then Einstein came along and said, basically, "no, you can't." E.g., in the really old days they thought it's possible to go to the moon without a spacesuit or capsule, because noone figured out that the atmosphere thins out to nothing. (See the ancient chinese guy, the name escapes me, who thought he could just go there by strapping rockets to his chair.) Now we know that there's one more problem in the way. E.g., even 50 years ago, noone thought it would be fundamentally harder to get a human to Mars than to get to the moon. Just build a bigger rocket and there you go. Now we kno
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The first interstellar humans will arrive at the next star in the form of embryos (or their virtual equivalents) to a pre-built space colony constructed by machines. It will take thousands of years. Today we can only begin to speculate about some the technology involved. Several hundred years from now our decedents will have more than speculation to work with.
Charlie Stross is correct within the narrow confines of his self imposed conditions. Physics tells us that the mass and energy involved in sending live people to nearby stars within a lifetime simply does not compute. Now, and perhaps never. Enormous generation ships have rather obvious problems also, the most intractable (after the flight actually begins, some time after the vessel is somehow built) would appear to be the inevitability of multiple in-flight, and possibly fatal, dark ages.
Given our very recent enlightenment about the frequency of extrasolar planets, it's rather likely that most brown/yellow dwarfs have, in addition to large planets, a vast collection of debris. This debris happens to be made of rather useful stuff including ice (water; hydrogen and oxygen,) carbon and metals (silicon, iron, etc.) in effectively unlimited quantities. The stuff is conveniently parked in stable orbits in condensed form with mass low enough to obviate concerns about atmospheres or escape velocity.
We already interact with space debris with fair competence. We fire bullets into comets [1] and skitter around on asteroids [2] with so little collective effort that most people are oblivious to it. Scaling that up a few hundred times may be within the grasp of humans today, never mind what we'll be capable of in 2507.
We know how to collect energy from stars [3]. We've even figured out how to beam it around with reasonable efficiency [4]. Given long enough intervals our ability to gather sufficient energy to refine arbitrary amounts of matter is assured.
Automation is a big missing piece at the moment. We can not yet build machines with enough intellect to operate unassisted in a complex environment. We have a long way to go on this one. However, I nurture a bit of faith on this. It's based on the possibility that we're not as smart as we think and, therefore, the challenge isn't a great as we assume.
Humans operate on the power obtained from plants, bits of meat and common gasses. The mass of the entire human nervous system is measured in tens kilograms and requires only a part of the available energy. The billions of years evolution has had to refine these resources into a competent system has produced complexity that we have only begun to fathom. Yet we progress at an astonishing pace. Contemporary machines can recognize speech, walk, fly, drive, swim, navigate and play games. The computational capacity to do these things must often be mobile and, therefore, small and low power. We are figuring out natures algorithms and I think that eventually we'll be able to produce low mass machines capable of orbital navigation, self-repair and refining operations all driven by enough goal seeking intellect to build habitats without human assistance.
My hypothetical mission profile looks something like this:
At some point during the next few centuries there will exist enough wealth, technical knowledge and stability to permit the building, in solar orbit, of a flotilla of moderately sized unmanned interstellar ships. This moment need not be particularly lengthy in duration or broadly coordinated; an important point given the volatility of our species. Once under way, the mission will not be subject to the fate of humans around the native star.
The flotilla will be launched in the direction of some likely star, powered by low thrust high delta-v engines and require centuries or millennia to arrive. Along the way some fraction of the machines will fail and require in-transit repair or recycling on arrival. The remainder will be sufficient. The builders will have high confidence in these devices b
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
(Sorry, I got it wrong, that's 10kg for accelerating and another 10kg to decelerate.)
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Yes as the article suggested shipping material is expensive, much more so than information. There are however other reasons than economic to colonize. For example if you believe in the lottery (or VC funding) while it maybe expensive to set up a colony, the reward may very well be ownership of your own eden (just the way you defined it), or ownership of your own planet. How much is that worth? Of course the chances are low you would succeed, but as technology marches on (and others go before you) your chances get better, and probably your costs lower.
Other reasons can also include access to resources you might not get here.. as an example maybe you do want to make your own kilogram of antimatter (goes with the rockets you want to build...) that would be impossible here (aside from the technical issues, what country would let you make it?) maybe set up solar arrays on mercury, store your energy as antimatter, ship it around the solar system (or out of the system). A few light seconds makes a lot of difference in rule enforcement.
As an observation, life just doesn't flourish anywhere.. it goes *everywhere* it can reach. If space is now reachable.. I would expect life to find niches there.. even if I can't imagine how exactly it would work economically, or exactly what reasons it wanted to go there. I would expect life would move out there, because it *could*.
This assertion sounds like total hogwash to me, just on the face of it. And yet I do hear it all the time. "We're not progressing" ... "there's nothing more to discover with science" ... "only the trivial details remain to be figured out." I can't help but think that these attitudes contribute a lot toward the general antipathy toward science that we often observe in modern American society. Science needs a lot of work in the PR department if we are going to remain competitive.
Breakfast served all day!
I've read that a hundred years ago most people never traveled more than thirty miles from their birthplace. Now it's commonplace to at least cross your own continent and there is a segment of the population that circles the globe many times a year.
And technological progress is accelerating. For one thing, there are a lot more human brains at work now than a hundred years ago: something like 6 billion versus 1 billion. And those brains have far more interconnection and speed of communication.
I am a scientist. A hundred years ago (hell, even twenty) scientific communication was conducted by publication of paper journals. If you wanted to research a topic you had to walk to a library and leaf through card catalogs and indexes. Now we do days worth of searching in just seconds. And publication of new research can take days rather than months.
I'm not a fan of manned space exploration today, but it takes a major lack of imagination to think it can't happen in the coming centuries.
Everyone saying he's a man with no imagination, that he can't see ways for the impossible to happen...
Go read his novel Accelerando.
Now come back and discuss his essay again.
Here is something else to think about.
Let say for a second that interstellar travel is too expensive, not worth the gain, and we just stay home and tend our little planet (hopefully making a nice place to live). What might we gain? or lose?
I guess we don't spend resources (time and effort, since all the rest of the resources are recyclable), however what if another civilization manages to accomplish interstellar travel. It doesn't matter how, perhaps it is only as a robotic seed ship. From history.. the culture that goes visiting always is at an advantage. If for no other reason than the meeting isn't at their home. You can do all sorts of things if you are visiting someone.. and not have to worry about the results back at home.. Especially if the people you are visiting think it is impossible to travel back to you.
Now ask yourself.. do you want to be the people traveling (or trying) or the people getting the interstellar visitors, who might be very ill mannered.
Most of you are saying that technology will be our solution to the problem of space travel.
The real problem has to do with the fundamental laws of physics, or at least as we understand them. And while we do not know everything, we have a fairly good grasp of what is happening and you run into some fundamental limitations.
As we know it, NOTHING can travel faster than the speed of light. I don't really expect this to be untrue through future technological advances. So, even at max speed possible governed by the laws of physics, it would take 80,000 to 100,000 years to go from one end of the galaxy to the other.
You just run into a problem of scale, for the same reason you can't make an insect sized human or an elephant sized dragonfly.
Unless there are some dramatic revisions in the laws of physics (instead of just trying to detect new elementary particles), it IS an impossibility. The magic wand would not be a new technological discovery, but a some completely new form of physics being unveiled.
Somthing tells me, perhaps an old George Carlin special, to listen to the cripple with nothing better to do than dream about the universe, on this one.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This assertion sounds like total hogwash to me, just on the face of it.
And your later comments reveal that you've misunderstood me completely. I DIDN'T say that we haven't progressed. We have advanced very far in some rather amazing ways. It's just many of the principles we've advanced on were already known even a hundred years ago, even if only in the coarsest sense.
Still, I haven't heard about any proposals huge power technology beyond fusion. Given the difficulty of fusion; even if a new Einstein or Hawking showed up tommorrow with a great new proposal it could be a hundred years before it's implimented as a practical technology.
I don't read AC A human right
I mean, why would I want to go to another largely inhospitable planet where it would be equally, if not more, possible to die from an "exposure to elements" and other "natural" causes. You know - bad climate, plus things like the molten core, volcanoes, plus asteroids... - those kinds of things. Thank you but no thank you.
Thanks for nicely fleshing out this argument... I am too lazy tonight to defend myself against accusations of defeatism. :-)
There's a huge difference between not knowing yet how to accomplish something and having to actually disprove an established scientific theory first in order to get where you want to go -- preferably without putting the entire framework of the scientific method in doubt.
Limiting theories are sort of boring like that, but there you are... Computer Science is dull in a similar way esp. in the computability theory part -- it would be quite remarkable if someone proved P=NP, say. So remarkable I don't think it'll happen with Turing machines. We'll see what happens with some new fancy architecture -- at least the limit (hopefully) isn't as profoundly, fundamentally hard as the one we're seeing in Physics.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
...well, first of all as far as I'm concerned Charlie Stross is just another blogger so his opinion is worth just as much as two U.S. Cents (not even 2 Euro Cents); second, I really laugh at people who speak in absolutes as if they have been in the future and seen what will happen. We have a very sketchy idea, to say the least, as to what technology will be like in 100 years, let alone 1000 or even a million years from now. Imagine telling people in the early 1980's with their Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX that in the not too far future households would have computers powered by quadruple core processors capable of billion operations per second which not even NASA or the Pentagon had? Just science-fiction... back then, a mere 20+ years ago. If anybody wants to read good science fiction read the books related to the Xeelee Sequence by Steven Baxter, I don't think any other sci-fi writer current and past has been so capable of describing where humanity might be one billion years from now and further. For all I know Colonizing the Galaxy could be impossible as well as highly probable and anything in between. That's a little more realistic approach.
Well, here's one less technological reason: time and economic motivation.
Let's say we actually discover some hideously cheap and massive source of energy, let's say we build hideously powerful and efficient engines, let's say we even transcend to some society where 200 people in a generation ship don't just kill each other in 420 years, etc. Take your pick of magic wands except FTL, no other restrictions. Mix and match from your favourite SF authors, or come up with an even more magic-like technology. As far as tech goes, anything goes.
Permissive enough a setup, I would think. OK?
Well, what's the motivation to invest some massive money into creating a colony? No, ideological reasons don't make good reasons for that kind of a huge investment. Societies which blew huge chunks into ideological tours-de-force tended to go bankrupt. See the USSR, see North Korea, etc.
No, the actually successful colonization efforts have been driven by (A) economic reasons, or (B) overpopulation. As an example of A you can see the success of the British East India Company in, well, India, and as an example of B you can see for example the colonization of America by the British.
Well, overpopulation too is becoming extinct. It used to be that you need to make 3-4 kids just so 1 would survive, so you made 10 just in case. But as more and more countries get sanitation and medical care, and experience long times without wars, there is first a boom and then they actually start to breed a lot less. (Though they might still get some minimal population growth via immigration.) The same pattern has applied almost everywhere so far. Once people finally figure out that 1 kid is more than enough to pass the genes, they actually start to stop after 1 or 2 kids. And they tend to start later too. So, no, overpopulation won't be the driving reason for star colonization.
That leaves economic reasons. We could get uranium and all sorts of other useful stuff from our colonies. Right?
Well, wrong. Think: how long does it take to actually ship those materials, and to notify the colony of demand changes. Let's say, 20 light years away, travel at an average 10% of the speed of light. (Which actually means accelerating gradually to 20% at the middle of the distance, and decelerating the last half. It's already waaay future tech.)
So now think that something changed down here. We don't need uranium any more, we need thorium. It takes 20 light years just for a radio signal to reach them, and another 200 years for the ship to get here. In the meantime, we're still getting the old cargo ships. Some 220 years after we stopped needing the previous resource, we're still not getting the new thing we need. In fact, we're probably still getting the old stuff we don't need any more, because probably noone fitted the ship with twice the fuel so they can turn around and go back.
Thing is, demand is increasingly volatile, and it's nuts to plan what you'll need in 220 years. Some 220 years ago, oil was virtually useless, now it's a big political issue. Grain and food were expensive and many a captain made a neat profit carrying grain, now we subsidize farmers to _not_ produce more of it, we just have to freaking much. Coal went from being used only for gunpowder some 220 years ago, to being a major strategic resource (all industry, railroads, and warships used coal by the end of the 19'th century), to being "meh" again. Weaving was a major money-making profession, and good hand-woven textiles were expensive trade goods, then it declined to the point where today even the janitor can afford more clothes than a _noble_ had back then. Opium went from being worth a war with China about 150 years ago, to not even being legal any more. Natural rubber went from being worthless (before the 1870's or so, noone even considered it worth bothering with in the colonies), to being a major strategic resource, to just being synthetized in industrial quantities. Etc.
And you can completely forget about importing anything manuf
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Point 1: The Distances are really huge! If your hut was this sea shell, and the next city down the coast (which as we all know takes a full week to paddle to in our finest grass row-boat), is this pink rock I place one hand span away from the sea shell, then the Land Across the Ocean would be, -wait for it- fifty Aztec miles away! Think about that! It can't be done, durn it!"
Assembled audience: "ooooh."
Aztec Elder: "Point 2. Blah blah blah."
Assembled audience: "aaaah."
Aztec Elder: "Point 3. Blah blah blah."
Assembled audience: "Say, what are those huge boat-looking things on the horizon. . ?"
-FL -Who keeps leaving these circles in my durn field?!
Unless we can figure out some type of FTL method of traveling.(Faster Than Light); I'd say this guy is 100% correct.
Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one. -Arthur Dent
I've no idea if this is actually possible, but it sure beats bringing all your fuel with you.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Just as Madam Curie could have guessed at a fission bomb, but they didn't set one off for another 50 years, so Miguel Alcubierre published his paper showing that warp drive was possible back in 1993.
The objection is that you would need negative mass on the range of the mass of the Earth to make it work.
That is like Ben Franklin arguing that Deep Space 1 couldn't use an electric ion drive, because of the mass of wool that would be needed to generate the static electricity to power it.
What we need is the electro-magnetic-gravitic -effect- of an Earth's mass of negative mass. THAT might not require nearly so much to make it work, just as NMRs in hospital put out incomprehensibly more magnetic force than does the entire planet Earth.
Then we can surf on the very fabric of space with no local relativistic effects, at any arbitrary multiple of c.
There is no reason why this wouldn't work. Maybe one of you will figure it out, or one of your children.
In the meantime fission lightbulbs using uranium salts in water for fuel, and shortly, Farnsworth-Bussard fusion reactors (yes, you can build your own fusion reactor in your own basement - Farnsworth is the dude who invented television, and you can make your own fusor vacuum tube and run it at way below break-even) burning salt water where the salt is borax and the water is heavy water, will make VASMiR and other continunous thrust forms of plasma torches work just fine, opening up the solar system for crewed vehicles, and the nearer stars to robotic probes.
Right now, our fastest space probes will take about 73000 years to reach the nearest star - and they've been using Jupiter as a slingshot, not really carrying any serious propulsion themselves nor the ability to stop once they get there. People here throw out fractions of c as if that's right around the corner when we've only reached something like 0.00005c, and only by exploiting stellar constellations which won't be any help going faster. Neither fission nor fusion rockets are even close to making a dent in that.
I don't think for one second that mankind will ever spread through huge ships taking hundreds of generations to move from one solar system to the other - it would require insanely reliable machinery but most of all I don't think people would stand it. Imagine being trapped on a small tin can with a small village-size population, never to walk around outdoors for your whole life. Even if we could forego all that and send frozen embryos or whatever to be raised on arrival, that kind of timeframe just wouldn't appeal to anyone.
So what do we need? Energy, energy, energy. I'm pretty sure the rokcet will be fueled by matter/anti-matter, which would be insanely efficient and make timely travel plausible but we still need a way to extract that energy and transform it. Right now we got a pretty good idea how much energy is in the ground (coal, oil, gas, uranium etc.) - in a century or three we'll have used it up and we won't be ready for interstellar flight by then. That leaves the renewable energy which we know will stick around for a few billion years. Either huge solar panels covering Earth, or giant solar sails in the sky which we almost certainly will need anyway.
Also my prediction is, that despite how gloryless it is we won't actually send people. We'll send frozen embryos to be raised by the computer. Why? One, because we don't need all the space, life support, air and water and waste recycling. Two, no humans would be killed if the probe is a failure. Three, it can land a *lot* rougher think Mars Exploration Rover-style, who can have the robots deploy solar panels, gather materials, build a pressure dome or excavate a cave so that we arrive at a ready-made base. Ok, we can technically send a robot probe in advance, but we could get people operating it a lot faster by raising them on site than waiting for confirmation before sending the colonists.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is remarkably similar to the way I look at it.
.1% of the theoretical limit. We, today, are at ~20%. There's only another 5 fold increase available to us over the (theoretical)20 fold increase from the middle ages. It's like a limit equation, the closer you get to 1 the more it takes to crawl up that little extra bit.
Let's say that a caveman has abilities
These figures are, of course, all WAGs. We can, in laboratory settings, create temperatures ranging from within a degree of absolute zero to hotter than the core of a sun.
The biggest explosion occured with the development of the scientific method, an organized method of learning. The attitude that 'yes, there's an explanation for this, if we can only find it'. Technology reaching the point where knowledge could be shared far more than could be dispursed by hand written books. 'Shoulders of Giants' type stuff. There are points I consider major milestones, but there were many markers in between, without which the milestone would never have been developed.
I don't read AC A human right
I would have expected Stross to be a bit more imaginative, given some of his stories emphasizing Transhuman societies such as Accelerando. However, lack of imagination is just as prevalent among sci-fi writers as it is in the general population. I've seen enough stupid sci-fi writer essays to be assured of that.
Humans per se aren't going anywhere. Within this century, the human body and brain will be made obsolete. Transhumans will have the intelligence to solve technological problems unimagined by humans. But even if interstellar movement remains non-feasible, Transhumans have no particular need to worry, since the only things a Transhuman needs to survive are an energy source, matter, nanomass, computing power, and knowledgebases.
And to a Transhuman, the survival of the human species is the last thing to be concerned about. The only thing of interest to a Transhuman is how do we get to that state without having to waste a lot of time and energy killing humans trying to prevent us from getting there.
Humans aren't going to colonize the universe or even the Solar System - that seems clear. Transhumans will.
Which makes Stross's analysis a waste of time. Considering that he admits he had a cold when developing this and thus couldn't think straight, I'd say that pretty much sums up the value of this piece.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Semantics aside, the fact that we've detected matter at near the speed of light could very well mean that we have our formulas wrong and that we can exceed the assumed maximum velocity. Science has been wrong before, and that's how science works. It's not religion, nothing is wrought in stone and eventually we always prove our "proven" theories wrong, or partially incorrect. Ask Newton.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
I'm sorry but he doesn't know what he is talking about. For a science fiction writer he is sorely lacking in imagination. He seems to think that future "humans" will never overcome vast distances with exotic technology that we cannot even comprehend. You think that humans in 4000 BC could even comprehend the technology that we take for granted today? To argue that we won't even be able to reach 50% of the speed of light or bend space or travel through wormholes is just ignorant. Sure those all sound silly today but for the civilizations of the future it's not so silly. I have a hard time believing that a million or billion years from now whatever humanity has become will be stuck in this solar system. If you are to believe proponents of the Technological Singularity we will see a vastly different world in the next 100 years let alone 1000 or 1,000,000. If it is within the realm of possibility then we will eventually do it. We are within reach of unlocking the secrets of our DNA. Once we figure out how our bodies work we can design a better one. One that can survive for as long as we want and allow us to survive in environments that we wish to go to. This doesn't require technology that appears to be magic, it is technology that will be available to us in the next 100 years. This author should stick to writing crappy science fiction novels instead of making stupid absolute statements like we will never colonize the galaxy.
This is an interesting post because the very idea of "colonizing the galaxy," for all of its patent absurdity, which Stross points out very well, is one that the Slashdot crowd and sci-fi and geek hordes all have in common: it is a shared mass hallucination. Calling it a "hope," "dream" or "vision" does not transform something that has no possibility of occuring in one's lifetime--or one's childrens' lifetimes, or their childrens', etc. ad nauseum--into anything other than a mystical pipe dream.
But here is an idea which, despite its very absurdity and like many others of similar caliber, possesses phenomenal power to alter and organize the behavior of entire classes and groups of people. Colonizing the galaxy--or, more in tune with the boundless vanity of the human species, colonizing the entire universe--is a structurally simple idea that consists in nearly all of its variegated versions as a fantasy of exploration, eradication of any species contrary to the human will (probably followed by their appropriation, sterilization, domestication and finally "appreciation"), and succeeded by a long reign of utter dominance by "us." In short, "to colonize" is to rule or die trying, where the universe is the limit. Fundamentally, this favorite conceit of science fiction authors since the inception of the genre is merely the psychic expression of a biological organism's fundamental desire to survive, thrive, and conquer its environment. The fact that the idea of galactic colonization employs images of advanced technology in the imagery of its "vision," such as vast fleets of generation ships blasting off into the starry blackness, something which exists only as pure fantasy, has done so since the beginning of the Russian and American space programs, and will continue to do so generations after everybody reading this post is dead and forgotten, is no argument against its actual simplicity.
In short, lots of humans, and Americans in particular, who generally consider themselves practical and not too ideological, entertain the fantasy of space colonization simply because the known world is just that, and is mostly conquered, i.e. "civilized," and the part of the human psyche which instinctually strives to discover and dominate, like a slime mold which oozes away from the light and towards the darkness, has nothing else upon which to feed. This drive must be satisfied, and therefore, in the absence of a means to do so, can only exhaust itself in the feverish masturbatory fantasies of science fiction.
Like every other human psychological drive, this one too is exploited, and not only by science fiction authors, video game publishers, and George Lucas. The political establishment exploits the desire because it shares it. Though we might entertain the exaulted and noble thought that space exploration is done for the benefit and glory of all mankind or some other such nonsense, the fact is that what the Apollo crew made sure to leave behind on that unexplored vista called the moon was a silly flag, and certainly not one representing the whole world or all of humanity, but of a single country. Territorial expansion psychologically concretized through symbolic branding.
The idea of space colonization is the primary and ultimate *delusionary* drive which props up and continuously feeds multiple sundry industries as well as the self-serving political and military establishments of several spacefaring countries, the US in particular. Films and television series such as Star Wars, Star Trek and Stargate all serve to reinforce and satisfy what we might call the D&D drive, the seemingly irrepressable urge to Discover & Dominate.
It is very easy to anticipate a fair amount of hostility towards Stross's pointing-out of the absurdity of space colonization as some kind of goal, since fiction, film and television have insisted for more than fifty years that such things are within the realm of possibility. When considered rationally, however, as Stross has done and is being attacked for in a flu
It's unlikely there be new physics that is both consistent with our current knowledge and allows FTL travel without truly weird consequences...
What weird consequences? Even our current knowledge allows FTL travel in principle; we just don't know how to manipulate spacetime to make it happen.
Let's pretend that Jules Verne in 1895 was asked about the feasibility of destroying a city with a single bomb. His calculations would invariably conclude that he needed 7 million (?) tons of dynamite, or more dynamite than had been produced since it was invented, and enough to fill the 50 Roman Colosseums, presenting invariable logistic problems requiring 1,000,000 trucks bridges, ships, etc, OR, a "Magic Wand." The next 50 years saw the creation of powered flight, twinkies, and Nuclear weapons. In the following decades, we can now fit something like 100 mt of nuclear power onto an ICBM/bomber. (and the yield estimate he links to has to be way off)Mp>My point is that Magic Wands are the safe bet here.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Never bet against ingenuity.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
For all the current truthsaying and all the negative doomsaying I still believe we will go someday. How smug we sit in our limited knowledge. We are just out of the cave in evolutionary terms and a long way behind the known age of our universe.We smug little creatures sit here in our limited understanding and say we will never go from this single place. It is like a baby who refuses to walk because it doesn't know how. Or an adult who still lives at home through fear. I think solutions to the challenge will come. However probably not from science as we know it today but some new thinking. Perhaps it will be a hybrid of philosophical thinking and science that will yield the answers. Quantum mechanics is very strange at this time and gives interesting results. I think somewhere in that style of human thought there will be the knowledge we need to go far and wide in this universe. If we are to believe Stephen Greer of the Disclosure Project this already happens with extraterrestial civilizations who are here visiting us. He seems to have a lot of very credible (some 400) witnesses to UFO activity.
I think that the colonization of the galaxy will occur eventually in order for the
human race to survive. This will of course have to be motivated by an economical
incentive such as resources or a considerable amount of compensation. This will happen
regardless whether FTL travel is accomplished or wormholes are utilized. Space
colonization will probably occur at the same time as the singularity(for people that dont know what that is check wikipedia).
The problem with colonizing other planets, even within our own solar system, starts with the simple facts of distance and energy. The distances and energies involved with colonizing the continents of the earth were, pretty much, always within human ken. This is born out by the fact that, whenever europeans 'discovered' a new land, they found people already living there. Even a lone human, travelling on foot at normal walking speed, could circumnavigate the entire planet (given suitable land or ice briges) in a little under 2 years.
By contrast, humanity has only, in the last 50 years, even come close to controlling the amount of energy necessary to cross the gulfs between planets within our solar system, much less what is needed to travel to the nearest star. Anyone who compares the task of colonizing other planets to the european colonization of the new world, or the U.S. expansion into the west, is displaying the most profound ignorance imaginable.
The energy involved is important because it directly relates to the cost of the endeavor. The cost of colonizing distant continents was always within human grasp, so it is no surprise that it was done. The cost of travelling to other planets, however, is just barely within the grasp of the wealthiest nations, and there is no good reason to expect it ever to decrease very much.
The Fermi paradox has been used to imply that there is no intelligent life, other than us, in the galaxy, but there is another, perfectly good interpretation: maybe, even though it is possible to travel between the stars, it's just not economical to do so. Maybe the galaxy is full of intelligent life: life so intelligent, in fact, that it has long since given up the romantic, but entirely impractical, notion of interstellar travel.
I don't think that it is impossible to travel between the stars. In fact, I think that it is, basically, within human grasp at this very moment. I just think it is too expensive and dangerous to be undertaken by any nation (or similarly wealthy organized group) at this time. Give it a couple hundred years -- time enough to get the whole long-term-artificial-habitat thing, the safely-manage-tera-watt-power-generation thing, and the protect-ourselves-from-the-interstellar-medium thing down -- and I think it may be an option. At the moment, the best we could hope for would be unmanned probes to nearby stars. Even then, I doubt the transit time would be less than a half century.
just a ghost in the machine.
When you are interstellar traveling, it's quite unusual to actually stay on earth.
"The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."
A very quaint notion straight out of the 1960s. So why have children, or grandchildren? Why care about them? (Other than the bazillion years of natural selection forcing us to, that is.)
If Stross has children, perhaps he'd agree to rig up bombs to them that would be activated on the cessation of his heart. Since strictly speaking, whether they live or die should be of no personal concern. The survival of colonies of the entire human species is only an extension of that concept.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
We are human, we are rule breakers. It's built into us. When we have a problem we bend the rules to suit us.
Our current scientific understanding tell us nothing about how we could possibly establish self-sufficient, Earth-like colonies in other planets, nor about how to travel beyond the Solar System.
Therefore, stating that humanity will eventually do so is a statement of faith, not of science.
I find strange this story has been tagged as "idiot". Perhaps our belief that science and engineering will always save us has become our tacit religion?
I think our focus should be on preserving our planet and finding balance, instead of believing in sci-fi savior technologies. By which I don't mean research should be decreased, but that we should not believe that there will be technological "magic" solutions to the messes we are causing here, such as global warning and species extinction.
You're defending the article in a way never explicitly -- nor, to my mind, implicitly -- rooted within that article. The bulk of the article is about interstellar concerns -- if the piece was really about the proposed moonbase, wouldn't the balance have tipped more towards our own solar system? If the piece were about the proposed moonbase, wouldn't he have mentioned the proposed moonbase?
The author's arguments draw on technologies imagined today, with no allowances for the invention of what is today unimagined. Truly, his scope of future technology is akin to that of the worse science fiction material produced in the 1950s -- a cobbling together of current ideas into something that looks "high tech." Some of what comes to be may well look akin to that which is theoretical today, but the resemblance will be strained, at best.
I might be overstating my case, though. I do not think that the ideas he put forth are totally outrageous. I'm not saying that he is a bad writer -- like the more outlandish faster-than-light modes of transportation, it bears enough verisimilitude to survive in science fiction. I am just saying that he is seeing boundaries upon our future development that are either transitory, or imaginary. Provided the time, mankind will create technologies that make the most generous assumptions in the article seem silly.
I feel safe in these predictions, because they are so uncourageously non-specific.
But he and I are not the first to make bad predictions of the future. Borrowed from Wikiquote: "To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances." - Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926
Moreover, robots are proving themselves able to do just about everything that canned meat can do. They are resistant to radiation, vacuum, boredom, and they eat sunlight. They don't require massive pressurized capsules for living quarters I suspect, as the article hints, that machines will completely replace astronauts long before we have magic 1000-years-in-the-future human spaceflight technology.
"Canned meat." Cute.
Humans do not live based on the idea of "what is most efficient." Neither do we dream that way, and more often than not, neither do we work that way. Romantics and adventurers come in all shapes, sizes, and tax brackets. We won't move into space because it is cheap, and we won't move into space out of some biological imperative. We will move into space because we want to.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
In the Star Trek mythos, as soon as we invented a suitably advanced technology (warp drive), the aliens started paying attention to us and showed us how to do far more advanced things. That'd certainly jump-start our own efforts to colonize space.
Besides, there are severe limitations in our current understanding of physics. Who says we can't easily take a 4th-dimensional shortcut through 3-dimensional space? Or dilate time so that we effectively go much faster than the speed of light?
Perhaps our understanding that matter cannot travel the speed of light is based on an enormous experimental error; if the magnetic waves in a particle accelerator travel the speed of light, then it can't accelerate anything past the speed of light, and any attempts to do so will consume more and more energy with no apparent increase in speed. Hence our misunderstanding about "relativistic mass". Hey, I'm just saying that such an enormous error is totally possible! And others have pointed that one out too!
There are far too many comments on this article for mine to ever be seen, but what the heck, I figured I'd post it anyway. It may be as futile as, say, trying to colonize interstellar space, but I posted it anyway.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
because the pitfalls you identify are actually descriptions of passion gone awry, passion without intelligence or education
what you seem to want is humanity without passion, which would render us a bunch of robots, and also stuck in stasis, no innovation. invention and progress are byproducts of passion. remove passion, and humanity will dwindle into mediocrity. so in your effort to remove that which might lead to our downfall, you also remove that which propels us to want to leave the planet, and be able to leave the planet, in the first place. and you can't have one without the other, passion is what it is: it has it's good side and it's bad side. life is risk, always was, and always will be. you need to make peace with the fact that life has risk. passion is fire, and it can burn you, but it also stokes our efforts
you're going to have to make peace with passion, and learn to integrate passion in your understanding of human nature, and understand how it is inseperable from what you like and dislike humanity. that includes yourself. you're not free from the reptilian sub-brain, no matter how much you pretend to be. and you wouldn't want to remove your identity from that. unless you want to be a cold, static passionless robot. if that's the future of mankind, we don't have a future. we will fall into statsis and mediocrity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The late Garrett Hardin's book "Living Within Limits" also contained a numerate analysis of the cost of space travel, but this goes beyond that. However I did not spot Hardin's central meme "The Tragedy of the Commons" - just Googling that quoted phrase WITHOUT Hardin's name finds his 1968 essay, proof that he was indeed a seminal thinker.
There is no need to send ships to find planets. We can do it from here. The Terrestrial Planet Finder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Planet_Fi nder can pick out planets that would be suitible for colonization that are nearby. What is
even more interesting in the search now for planets that transit their stars. These can give us an answer right away on how common photosynthetic
life is because the method can work out to a much larger distance. I would be surprised if we don't have measurements of the atmospheric composition
of at least 20 earth-like planets in the coming decade. Finding just one with oxygen narrows down the parameters of the Drake equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation substantially, giving estimates of f_p, n_e and f_l.
Long before we embark, we'll know much about our destination.
I concede that given our current understanding of things, it is impossible to predict whether it will ever be possible to visit another star. We don't know how much we don't know: while warp drive, for example, appears to "work" on paper, we have no idea how to start to determine whether building a working model is even potentially possible. The problem with articles like these is the failure of most scientists to separate fact from fancy from their own beliefs. I am reminded of an article about Star Trek's Transporter: a long dissertation about converting matter and energy and beaming through space, followed by a seriously-intended conclusion that it was impossible because it was fundamentally impossible to resolve individual molecules from orbit, therefore they couldn't be "scanned" successfully. Science-indistinguishable-from-magic has been popping up for millenia; trying to extrapolate beyond the point where the missing pieces make describing the end result impossible leads to hilarity.
Colonizing is a very different thing from visiting: colonization implies moving a significant number of existing people from one place to another. Technologically we could probably reach the Moon and establish a presence there, but the condition (and current headlong decline) of civilization on Earth makes such a large undertaking unlikely, and visiting Mars virtually inconceivable. The necessary changes to society dwarf the technological advances needed, and invalidate any prediction of them.
Carrying frozen cells and growing colonists on arrival might technically be considered "colonization," but not something most people will get excited about. At best, we will have produced indigenous life that looks more or less like us and could probably interbreed for a while (if we could get to them.) That might be worthwhile from the standpoint of species security, depending on one's definition of "species."
Yah, sure. Like flying used to be "Impossible" too, right? Airplanes? That was a stark raving MAD idea. Going to the moon? Crazy as well. Curing the Plague? Putting satellites in orbit? making computers that can fit on a desk top and are more powerful than anything ever conceived of? Oh wait, we did those things. I love it when people discount what has not been invented yet. Because this supposed essay writer knows with out a doubt will and will not be invented in say, the next thousand or so years. If there is one thing that can be sure about us human, is that if we can envision it, it will happen. Worn Hole travel is the key I say and when some unknown genius does invent it, well, all this dumb ass talk of impossibilities will be tossed out the window as humans all race to see who can get the farthest first. We wont see it that is for sure, but the generations to come? They will and they will call people like this short sited and shallow thinkers.
For a sci-fi writer, he sure missed the obvious answer.
.1c suddenly seems a lot more tenable, and furthermore, if you have scientists that can accumulate that much knowledge, then, surely, they would contribute an incredible amount more.
.1c is an upper limit. If we hit higher fractions of the speed of light, then time dilation does become a factor, and the crew could get there with a ship time of a few months or years, rather than decades.
t ml
What if humans lived longer?
We're making some astonishing medical progress and unlocking many secrets of how biology actually works. While physics says that we can't travel faster than the speed of light, as far as I know, there's no inherent law of physics that says man cannot live for 1000 years. If you could live that long, then, taking 100 years to travel to another star at
I'm not convinced, either, that
It's a bit premature to say that advances in technology are impossible. Even now, more than a few researchers are going straight for the best known holy grail of advanced propulsion and are studying anti-matter drives. These drives could produce a specific impulse of 50,000 or more, as oppossed to just shy of 400 for chemical rockets. 100 grams of anti-matter equals the propulsive power of the space shuttle, which, you might have noticed, weighs considerably more.
http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/introduction.h
There yet remain some holes in known physics. There could be any number of breakthroughs that allow us to produce exotic kinds of matter that might prove useful for advanced propulsive systems.
The bottom line is, that, while Gene Roddenberry might have gotten a lot of the science wrong, he got the most important thing right : I wouldn't bet against humanity.
The only point to ask the author is this: what technology is really magical? Computers changed our lives completely, and I'm old enough to have seen how we lived before PCs. Things have changed, dramatically, but are they magic? Don't think so.
This is my sig.
What if you could just build a wormhole and then send one end to the place you want to visit, then step through and look around?
What if we learn how to cross between alternate realities, and have a near infinite number of parallel Earths to live on?
When someone says something is impossible, what they're telling you is that they lack the imagination to figure a way to do it.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Declaring something "impossible" is often a very effective way to see it achieved by those who say "HA well I'll prove you wrong!"
As has been proven over and over again we as a race can over come any technological obstacle that has been presented to us thus far, i have complete faith we shall over come this one. But what we has a race seem to have a much harder time over coming is the sociological ones, great proof is that even after thousands of years of history we still continue to rage war, many of them long standing conflicts that have been festering for centuries. It then asks the question as to weather we can over come these differences or we shall just blow everything up ?
...to hitch a ride.
This is the same damn thing that occurs when an atheist debates a theist. Neither can know for sure. Neither can prove it. It doesn't stop them trying.
Both think that the more defensible position, agnosticism, is for fence sitters.
I'm agnostic on this one. Will we colonize? Will we not? I don't know, and I can't know. Until it's done, no one can. The computer revolution has not even slowed down yet. If anything will get us there, it won't happen without scientific/engineering progress.
As it is, the scientific capabilities of the human species relative to the carrying capacity of the globe are not close to being maxed out yet. The average IQ in the world is 90. The people capable of building the things that will get us closer are certainly IQ 130+. There aren't that many people at that level. Less than a hundred million, most probably.
Carrying population of the earth is conservatively estimated as at least 1 billion? If we can make the average IQ to be in the 130+ region (and technically, through selective breeding it IS possible), we'd have scientific discoveries at a rate of 10 times what we currently do. Add another order of magnitude if you think the current earth population of 6 billion is sustainable. And add more orders of magnitude if there aren't limits to eugenically increasing IQ beyond the IQ 130 region (and I don't see why not, such people exist, breed successfully, etc).
If scientific progress is viewed as a distributed computing effort, and humans are the computers, surely CPU/RAM/software upgrades from XTs to Opterons are going to get the problem solved quicker with the same number of computers. The analogy understates the situation however, in that you can have 100 special ed kids working on an algebra problem and never get a solution. Or 100 factory hands working on inventing calculus and not one Newton among them.
Then there is the interplay between brilliant people in solving a problem - often the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
So although I won't say colonizing other planets is certain, there is a lot of reason to be hopeful. And on the whole, it is an intrinsically noble project.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Hawking thinks it is possible; he's definitely distinguished, and he's getting on a bit.
Science is descriptive, not normative. However convenient it may be to picture whatever biological facts as an "imperative," you still can't derive an ought from an is.
Oh my god. Where do I start?
No, biology does not demand anything, you silly. Stop wishfully thinking that science justifies your sick cosmological fantasies, and engage biology seriously if you do so. (And for that matter, engage seriously the actual history of European colonialism, that you're glorifying there.)
Are you adequate?
Actually physically leaving the planet is a vacation option for the rich. (this one would have to blow the mind of a 1907'er)
Sure, yeah, Completely Inconceivable
I think there is very little in our world that a person from 1907 couldn't wrap their heads around pretty fast once they get past the noise and flashing lights. Assuming we don't trip into a new dark age of disenlightenment and/or nuke ourselves silly between now and 2107, I think we'd recognize everything we would see even if we talked about it in quaint, incomplete, antique analogies. We would be like a person looking at email and saying "oh, that's just a fancy telegraph to the home".
He assumes we'd send 200 living human beings which need 10 tons of stuff each.
In reality we'd be much more likely to send a bunch of DNA, a cloning machine and a couple of robot "mothers".
The reduces the weight/complexity of the ship by orders of magnitude - no life support, no food requirement, no medical facilities, etc., etc.
No sig today...
If there is anything we have learned over the past 100 years, it's that we are dang poor at accurately predicting the future. My advice: Give it a rest and expend your energies on something productive.
Heard any good sigs lately?
If it's not, then who was it giving me the anal probe last night?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Well, it's "unarguable", just like the bible. I guess me might as well give up on colonization and move on to something else.
or else!
Colonization is impossible *now*, given the limits posed in the article. It's not a question of a magic wand, rather, as soon as faster-than-light, extradimensional, or wormhole travel and instant (or near-instant) interstellar communication are developed into viable technologies, colonization will not only be possible, but unavoidable. Just because we don't understand the science and technology necessary to achieve desired results now doesn't mean they won't happen.
For example, there's a pretty big to-do right now about possibly finding the Higgs with the Large Hadron Collider, and a lot of people are saying things like "Well, if we find it as expected, it could be disappointing, because then the Standard Model works, and there's very little left to discover." This is ridiculous! It reminds me of the movement in the late 1800's/early 1900's to shut down the US patent offices because, according to some, nothing new remained to be invented, and look at us now.
The article itself is written with clarity and sound reasoning, but it works within a very restricted frame of reference. I imagine that, if we find the Higgs, fifty years from now will find us going, "Remember when we found the Higgs? Seemed like a big deal back then." Just the same, people perhaps a century or two from now will read about the "historical breakthrough" of breaking the sound barrier and consider it quaint as they board a flight for some distant extrasolar planet or star.
He overlooked the primary reason interstellar travel is not going to happen: we will wipe ourselves out first. Actually, I should be more clear: an extremely small minority will wipe us out. I'm sure I'm not the first to posit this, but I don't see how we can avoid this problem and why it hasn't been mentioned. If you look at the history of all technology, it always proliferates down from being in the hands of an elite few to the common person. This, unfortunately, includes weapons.
Back in "the day", all people had were swords and spears and rocks. If some whackjob went off the deep end, maybe he could kill a person or two with his sword before he was taken out. Then came primitives guns. Same deal: after you fired and killed maybe one person you had to reload your flintlock, and by the time that happened you would be jumped. Then came automatic weapons, and now you can kill dozens before you get jumped. Technology increases the carnage one person can create. Just witness our monthly school/office shootings.
Now take chemical explosives. Any single person can easily destroy entire buildings and kill hundreds of people by unleashing the explosive power of chemical explosives that was unimaginable 500 years ago. Just witness Timothy McVeigh or the Middle East (especially Iraq) and all the suicide bombings. (I'm actually amazed there aren't bombings all over the West by now ... though I'm sure that's coming soon.) But with chemical weapons, at least you can't wipe out humankind with them. You can do a lot of damage and turn people crazy with fear, but you can't wipe out civilization.
Now take nuclear weapons. 50 years ago, only a handful of governments could unleash their destructive power. Now, there are a dozen or so. And every decade that goes by, there will only be more and more countries that have nuclear weapons. And now we're worried about non-state entities (who are more likely to behave irrationally) getting a hold of them. It is inevitable that they are going to get used at some point, be it 50 years, 100 years, or 500 years. Eventually, a loony will get control of one.
And it is impossible to eliminate all loonies. I mean, maybe we'll have outstanding social and educational systems in place worldwide some day in the future that teach everybody to be tolerant and peaceful and which catch the maladjusted and psychotic and get them treatment before they go off the deep end. So we can keep reducing the number of crazies in our civilization, but we'll never reduce them to zero. So as nuclear weapon technology proliferates, eventually somebody who shouldn't will get their hands on one. Again, it may take 500 years, but it will happen. It is an inevitable fact of technology that it proliferates down to the lowest common denominator. You can't change that. Every weapon that's ever been created has found it's way into the hand of a nutbar. That will happen with a nuke.
But okay you say, this is not a new realization. And though it would suck, it's not going to wipe out civilization. And you're right: of course it won't. But the thing is, there will be some more advanced technology after nuclear weapons. I don't know, say something like the Death Star in Star Wars that can wipe out a planet at the flip of a switch. Sure, it may take us thousands of years to develop that kind of technology, but if we can develop technology to travel outside of the solar system, I'm sure we can develop the technology to destroy a planet at the flip of a switch. And so again, eventually this technology will proliferate down to a whackjob. It may take many more centuries after the technology is first created, but it will happen eventually. And it is at this point, when we have weapon technology that can destroy planets, that we will wipe ourselves out. Again, I really shouldn't say "we" since all it will take is one maladjusted individual, but we can never make those odds zero.
The way I see it, the rate at which humankind reproduces currently out-paces the carnage the looni
To summarize, given current technology, we will be unable to colonize other planets. Congratulations, you have stated the obvious. If you told someone 2000 years ago that we would be able to go to the moon, they wouldn't have believed you.
The point is: we don't know what future technology may bring. We may develop the technology needed to move beyond the Earth or we may never will. In either case, to talk about "Impossibility" of space travel by throwing around impressive, but meaningless, numbers serves no one.
If I am forced to choose between believing a Sci-Fi author or a well respected Physicist on the idea of space travel, then I will listen to the physicist.
Once we've done that, and our industrial and research base encompasses a lot more than "one planet", the hop to one of the nearby star systems will seem much smaller. Maybe we've even sent a probe there, or really refined out ability to detect extra-solar planets (wonder what you could do with a couple of dozen large telescopes, scattered all over the solar system).
Stross' essay does describe rational reasons you shouldn't have children (In that they are basically a giant drain on you and your mate's financial and physical resources with little or no future ROI). The statements are all logically correct, but serve to illustrate that people do things which aren't rational all the time. And that these things are often for the better.
You're supposed to reject the "don't have children" argument and implicitly reject the "don't colonize space" argument because both arise from the same reasoning that we would call abhorrent and self-serving: Everything for me and screw the future.
(Heh... I got to Stross' essay before it was posted to Slashdot. I feel special ^_^)
I wonder if this "sci fi writer" realizes that what he just said was as much a quasi-religious belief as the beliefs he's criticizing.
Allow me to break this down: if wanting to NOT keep your eggs in one basket is a quasi-religious belief, not caring if we do is the quasi-religious belief that it doesn't matter. Denial can sometimes be considered ignorance. I know plenty of sci-fi writers equate quasi-religious ideas, much less religion itself, with ignorance, and that equation itself is a quasi-religious belief. Indeed, saying that the potential extinction of humanity should be of no personal concern because it's in the all too distant future, is the very height of ignorance. Not to mention apathy.
When the religious and quasi-religious boogeyman comes to oppress us with his dogma, ironically it's ignorance and apathy - the "it should be of no personal concern" crowd - that are his sycophants. And when the very real threat of overpollution or overconsumption finally mature and come due and payable for humanity in the future it will be the "it should be of no personal concern" crowd that bears half the karmic fault for that.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I believe you can find old maps in the archives that labeled the oceans with "Beyond here be dragons" because no one or thing that ventured out that way came back.
Of course, we now understand why that happened and have invented the technologies to overcome such limitations. However, if you had asked fishermen 1000 years ago what was over the horizon, I'm sure you would have heard several stories of friends that disappeared fishing out a little too far. Even a few hundred years ago, post-Columbus, a journey to the new world was a high risk undertaking, hence all the spanish gold we're finding on the seabed in modern times.
I'd be really curious if this SF writer would run his analogy from a 15th century perspective on the costs of colonizing the new world. At the typical lossage rates, how many extra ships would we need? How many crazy colonists would die? What possible gain would we have establishing a colony so far away that it wouldn't benefit the homeland one bit for all the costs involved. We'd never see a return on such investment, right?
And yet, at some point, the magic wand was waved and we got time-pieces that were accurate at sea, and navigation became easier. Then we got steam engines and propulsion came under our control, freeing us from the mercy of the winds.
Sure with current technology, it's a long shot. But we've been through significant technological breakthroughs in recent history, let alone our lifetimes. We can be fairly confident new significant breakthroughs are just over the horizon and no doubt some of them will drastically alter the risks/costs/benefits equations involved in space flight.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
Well, for starters, the title is hardly correct.
It shouldn't say "The Impossibility of Colonizing the Galaxy", it shoud actually say "The Economic Unfeasability of Colonizing the Galaxy, and the added Sociological Difficulties in Colonizing our Solarsystem".
That being said, I rest my case, because, well, I just said everything that needed to be said.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Let's see, an elderly physicist says it may be possible, a younger writer of science fiction says it isn't. What was Clarke's First Law again? But then, the SF writer isn't an elderly scientist, is he?
Sorry, but this guy is an idiot... i guess that's why i've never heard of him before? I mean seriously... i can easily travel 10 miles in what.. 5 minutes? His analogies are pointless, or maybe i'm just missing the point?
Hawking might think migration into space is necessary, but I haven't seen any material from him on how on a genuinely practical basis, such a move might actually be possible.
The current space shuttles are to spacefaring what an aboriginal putting one leg on either side of a log was to sea travel; there's massive celebration whenever they manage to get one of them into orbit without it exploding on the way.
Primarily we need a new propulsion system. Something which doesn't rely on fossil fuel at all. A lot more work IMHO also needs to be done on creating artificial environments; preferably environments which aren't as horrifically fragile as what they have right now.
To be honest, I've believed for a while that space exploration should probably be postponed more or less in general for another hundred years or so. There might be a lot technologically which they aren't showing us, but from what I have seen, we're nowhere near ready to do it truly safely, yet.
True, only dreamers get behind idealistic reasons for doing things, but we're already at the point where upper middle class individuals can own private airplanes, for example, not to mention command computing power which the entire world couldn't muster a generation ago. Rich individuals are already doing privately funded space exploration.
What kind of resources will a motivated dreamer be able to command a century from now?
Hawkings is correct that if humanity or it's decendants are to survive and thrive, we must extricate ourselves from this small planet's gravity well. We are simply too vulnerable to catastrophic events both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, to expect that we will not end up a part of the fossil record sooner or later if we choose not to find others places to put ourselves.
That said, there are several different conversations being collapsed into a heap here. Creating suitable living spaces off planet within our solar system is less a conversation about magic wands, and more a conversaton about coming breakthroughs in robotics, nanotechnology and materials science, and the potential wealth and power associated with space based economy (the incredible wealth of raw materials to be exploited beggar the imagination.) The opportunities available to a space faring race would almost immediately address the more pressing issues already facing our species, issues or natural resource, quality of life, wealth vs. poverty, and global impact of growing technology.
The presumption that it will take hundreds of years for us to advance enough to get the stars is shortsighted and inconsistent with the phenomenon of accelerating technological growth. If (and understandably it's a big if) we don't do something profoundly stupid, like nuke ourselves into a neolithic stupor or relenquish technology to instead as a race follow some religous practice (ala the Amish), then it would be fair to suggest the current trend of accelerating technology will continue. Looking back, there are people alive today who were born before heavier than air flight, before the advent of modern transportation (anything not driven by a steam engine), and before humanity had the means to create significant global impact on the biosphere. One human lifetime. From horses to moon landing, hypersonic scramjets, high energy lasers and particle beams, and massive computing technology in the space of a chip of silicon the size of fingernail on a persons pinky. We are beyond the knee of the asymtote, what will happen in our lifetimes? An end to death by desease or old age? Superintelligent machines? Human augmentation or migration to alternative substrates (the digitization of humanity)? There's no telling what or where we will go in even the near future. Though it would be terrible for a physical body to travel to a star 20 light years away, a person stored as a digital being could make the journey painlessly, with long sleeps lasting months or even years. Upon arrival, a suitable biological body could be synthesized, for our sojourner and the genetic data for building countless synthetic wombs each with a human embryo constructed of data brought to populate an entire colony, built from local materials. We don't need to send meat through space. Why should we?
All we need to send is the machinery to create human habitats, terraforming, collecting abundant local energy, building structure and infrastructures needed to construct entire habitats capable of sustaining ourselves and the earth based ecologies we need and love. Then convert the data for life into actual life. The key is data. In the end DNA is just data. We are just data. Life is simply an interesting organization of atoms... we can already write IBM with individual silicon atoms... we have already begun engineering at the molecular level. The rest is the natural process of discovery, and this is not some distant fantasy.
The presumption of the impossibility of interstellar travel is based on the limitations we now experience. Whose to say what our limitations will be 100 years hence. My instincts tell me we will either be a species in decline, limited to squalor here on the diminishingly habitable surface of a small polluted planet. Or we will be far flung within our own solar system, and have begun touching the stars.
> ... human colonization of other star systems is impossible. ... ... Hawking has said, vital for the survival of the species. ...
>
> So, who's right -- Hawking or Stross?"
These statements are not contradictory.
I'm really disappointed by the pathetic trekie nonsense posts on this story, as wild a selection of 2nd year (secondary school 2nd year) and stale assertions based on nothing more than too much crap SF on the TV. No-one's engaged with Charlie's undeniable points about the spatial distances and energy required. And really, if you think thermodynamics or relativity will turn out to have neat convenient holes through which humans can sail magic-wand spacecraft... you're a moron.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Thinking small there, buddy.
Why in space would we want to colonize other planets? How big are the odds of finding exactly the right conditions for our fragile little bodies? Stick to (ring-shaped, rotating) space stations. Life's a blast in them.
He needs to envision new technologies and sciences to free us from this solar system.
Have you by chance read any of Stross's work? Envisioning new technologies and sciences is pretty much what he's best at. He's written several novels based on the idea of technological singularities. The thing is, most of the technologies he envisions in his novels also tend to also involve such incredible changes that humans tend to be somewhat obsolete, and the phrase "human colonization" becomes antiquated.
For example, in a chapter in one of his novels, Accelerando, (freely available online), a bunch of the (originally human) characters want to visit a curious beacon in a nearby star system. Instead of climbing onto a starship, they instead have their consciousnesses digitized and run as subprocesses on a space probe the size of a soda can, and then have the processes re-uploaded into new bodies after returning from their mission.
It can be done, take a colonization ship, dont put in humans, but only our genetic information.
:))
Create a breader machine some robo nanies and your done.
Dont go in it as a living species, that would be stupid.
Altough one might as wel do a terraforming project to, fast ships sending algy to other planets.
But it will take a lot time.
On the other hand his explanation makes us safe too for a risk alian invasions
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
For a sci-fi author he seems to be suffering from a lack of imagination. I can't argue with his arguments about the energy needed to transport one person in their lifetime, nor the social and engergy problems transporting a community. However I feel a more productive route to colonisation will be to explore the cloning / hibernation techniques.
Research into hibernation and resuscitation may be enough to extend a lifespan by an order of magnitude, if it works out this has to be one of the favoured techniques.
However it may be that even this will not be required. Researchers can already create artificial uterus' and have begun to gestate embryo's inside. This appears to work, but researchers are tied up by regulations. Japan are also experimenting with robot teachers. Put these together and do we really need to transport fully grown humans?
This would seem to me to be the most promising avenue for space colonisation. Instead of shipping huge colonies of people, a robotic ship is sent out, with a stock of cells to be used for growing artificual uterus', and a stock of fertilised eggs to grow the colonists, with computers overseeing their growth and education.
Ok, they won't have a society anything like we're used to, but is that really necessary? Provide them with the basic tools to survive on the planet, use computer learning to give them a kick start so they're not having to revert to the stone age, and let their community work things out for themselves.
this skepticism gives us a bright mind directed toward more promising lines of research. I don't think that's a bad thing.
grey goo and bio weapons aren't a bad thing?
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
I love when science writers of various stripes insist certain things are impossible, based on what we know currently.
When I was a kid, there were both science writers and actual scientists explaining how we'd never be able to send anything faster than 56kbps, or that computer processors could _never_ go past 100Mhz.
It was once believed it would be impossible to break the speed of sound.
I believe we have many of the stepping-stone technologies already that will ultimately lead to the human ability to expand into space (assuming we don't blow each other up, or back into the stone age, or collapse our economy in the next few years).
My concern is not that we'll be unable to develop the technology to explore the larger universe, or to colonize it. My concerns are that we'll live long enough to do so, or that we'll have grown wise enough by the time we develop that technology that we don't simply carry a bunch of fallacies and bad behaviors with us where we travel. Perhaps we will never meet another sentient species, but if we did, it would be nice if we weren't a scourge.
Arthur Clarke was writing just such stuff in the 1960s. In fact, there have been a number of sociological studies that I read during the 1970s about how long the lines of communication can be and still keep an empire going.
Look at Blish's Cities in Flight series for some good indications of what an empire in a section of a Galactic spiral arm might be like, including crossing the gaps between the arms (hint, they use drivable planets)
I grow weary, at times, of science fiction writers who attempt to teach us about science. Perhaps it is simply that Michael Crichton has left a bad taste in my mouth.
I used to be a publisher. I've read enough science fiction to know that even sci-fi writers who claim to be scientists - indeed even those who seem to have been educated as such - do not necessarily know what the heck they're talking about on a given subject.
When a science fiction writer says something is possible or impossible, I think back to that commercial that began "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV..."
I don't want to come across as mean. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. But really...
When people say things like "impossible" or "never" it makes me suspicious. It makes me just as suspicious as when someone tells me I should believe in God because there's no proof he's not there.
Half the time, someone's saying that something is impossible because "science hasn't found it yet."
The other half, they are saying "Oh, don't worry, we don't have to be careful with because someone will invent a technology that fixes our problem someday, even though we have no sign of that now."
A few years back, Vernor Vinge (one of my favorite sci-fi authors) wrote a book (one of my favorite books), where one of the major plot elements was the idea that information could never travel faster than 56k modem speeds.
Before that, Robert Heinlein (one of my all-time favorites), wrote books where computers used ticker tape to be programmed long after we had moon colonies.
I don't even want to discuss Michael Crichton, because my granny used to say, "If you can't say something nice..." - he's supposedly a scientist by profession, yet everything of his I've ever read had numerous factual errors, common layman's misconceptions of technology and principles, and even errors in internal consistency. (I won't even mention his supposed nonfiction).
Please people... don't let science-fiction writers tell you what can't be done. Let them help you dream about what might happen, and what we might reach for even if we can't make it.
Hell... you probably shouldn't even be letting scientists tell you what can be done. Half of them I've met wouldn't know recognize the scientific method if it fell on them.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Yeah right. And man will never travel at more than 100 mph because the pressure would clearly kill me. And we'll never fly, and space flight is rubbish. And, and, and...
Charlie is a very bright guy and one of my favorite SF authors, but he's fallen into an all-too-common trap.
When dealing with speculative issues, where you end up depends almost entirely on where you start. In other words, your assumptions determine your outcome because there's so little real data. The less hard data you have the more vulnerable to your assumptions.
(To demonstrate this for yourself, take the famous Drake Equation on the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life and plug different numbers in for the variables. Even a slight change in some parameters results in a huge change in the results.)
Given the assumptions he starts with, Charlie is absolutely correct. But we have no way of knowing those assumptions are valid and historical experience suggests that those kind of assumptions are almost never completely valid.
The other point, of course, is that what Charlie refers to as 'magic wands' are usually called 'technical developments.'
He doesn't mention one of the most famous SciFi solutions: Rama.
(Think the giant cylinder from "Starcross" for a similar interactive-fiction version)
20 generations in space is do-able if the craft itself is large enough and well equipped enough to be a habitable world.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
We will eventually have micro-fusion devices in a couple of thousand years ;-).
;-). This should not be impossible, by merging our brains with Machines. Ofcourse the problem may be recalling old information, but we will eventually learn to throw away or store offsite non-useful data. At this point exploration will not require generational ships for breeding, but only for a society.
That is a pre-requisite for intersteller travel. At that point there will be no energy problems.
We should also have found a way to live forever in the next couple of thousand years
We may also be able to convert humans into information, but I don't know if uncertainty principle will allow that. Assuming that we could then we could first send information to human conversion devices at sub-light speed, then establish repeaters on the way at every light-hour/light-day or so and once the infra-structure is ready then you can send your clones to the far off planet for colonization.
I think that the first two are inevitable, the third may be possible, and FTL will not be possible.
...is not up to par. Everyone knows this to be the case.
Hence, the absence of interstellar probes. No one is even so much as planning one, or is going to plan one in the next 50 years. Even then it would be pie in the sky, barring some miracle.
However, figure the energy output of one shuttle launch. I would bet (pure speculation at work here) that it equals the entire energy output of the Roman Empire for quite a long time. A flashlight would literally be a "magic wand" to the Romans.
Revisit this argument in two hundred years.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Scientific progress usually comes in small steps, but there are periods that great secrets are unlocked, allowing for fast progress of sciences. For example, from 1870 to 1950, we made huge discoveries regarding the nature of the universe that we are still trying to comprehend.
Suppose that in a similar period coming up in 1000 years from now, we discover the grand unified theory, a way to extract energy from the vacuum of space and a way to control gravity (there are strong indications about these things - see the Cassimir effect, quantum tunneling, quantum entanglement etc)...the path to interstellar travel as described by Pierre Alcubiere will open.
Even if, in the end, no such discoveries are made, there is no need to keep trying to discover them. We will discover lots of other things in the way.
As a great man once said: The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.
"to supply the necessary va-va-voom" Marylin Monroe had va-va-voom. Cars and spaceships have vroom-vroom. Japanese cars and spaceships have zoom-zoom. Furthermore, All I wanna do is zoom-zoom-zoom-zoom and a boom-boom.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I give humanity 100 more years before all this becomes moot. Today, we can, with expensive machinery, tinker with individual molecules. Once you can go to Nano-Shack and get your own 65-in-1 Nanotech Kit, it's only a matter of time until some nut case embeds a logic bomb in an airborne virus or nanomachine, and humanity is finished--or at least set back a few centuries. And it will only take one person out of 30-some billion going off the deep end to do this. Don't count on post-humanity, either. Bio-electronic beings won't be any less evil than we are now, they'll just be a lot quicker and more efficient about things like genocide.
Never bet against human foolishness, selfishness or destructiveness.
It will happen. It is only a matter of time. It may take us 1,000 years to figure it out, we've been around (documented) for 5,000 years, and have been around much longer than that undocumented. So I think we'll survive atleast another millenia and by then who knows what kind of magic wands we would have developed. Only 50 years ago the cell phones, pda's, laptops, and other neato gadgets we have would have been considered magic (and a threat to national security). But that is nothing compared to space travel advancement, although this technology will help us get there. Dangers to spaceship crews are known and typically expected and contingencies/plans are developed and being developed to combat or deal with these dangers, even in the event of a total loss of life. We will get there. It is all science fiction now because apparently we've only proved we can humanly-visit the moon. But damnit everything we've done up to this point has been considered science fiction and impossible. Well we shouldn't think like that any more. We should take baby steps, but baby steps into space. We'll colonize this bloody solar system and by then we would have started developing interstellar travel technology to get material, robots, and ultimately people to other planetary systems. We may not even start with planets. We may put space stations near pluto like planets or asteroid belts and use resources from those for those stations to remain independent. Of course, we should start at the Moon. There is ice there supposedly. Which means it could be refined for use in life support (drinking water, irrigation, climate control, and creation of a breathable atmosphere). So start with the bloody robots and pre-built structures, send them up there and lets get it going.
... yeah, that really turned out well in the end for the natives.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
saying IMPOSSIBLE in science is the same as saying INCONCEIVABLE !
Now Humans are doomed to completely colonize the Milky Way Galaxy.
Impossible: Human Flight, Cars, Telephones, iPods, Apple's success, computers at home, a balanced budget.
Ok, that last one is the hardest of all.
A balanced budget is a moving target!
Here is the one line answer. Arthur C. Clarke - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic."
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
The article does raise an important question: Just what are we preserving with instellar colonization? Assume that no magical FTL technologies come to pass, but we are able to produce ships that are ultimately capable of travelling interstellar distances without breaking our economic bank; assume that they're relatively slow (maybe .05 C).
It would still be possible to colonize the galaxy, but it would have to be done with self-replicating robotic probes that would prepare colony sites for habitation before human arrival. Additionally, don't think "generation ships", think "seed ships". The colonization probes could contained fertilized ova that would be incubated upon arrival, and raised by robotic "nannies". It sounds far-fetched, but creating an AI capable of raising a child is at least conceivably possible, compared to the sky-pie of FTL drives or generation ships.
The entire culture of Earth could be made available to these new colony worlds, but there would be no direct contact between us, ever. Certainly light-speed transmissions could be made to monitor progress, but these worlds wouldn't be "colonies" at all - they'd all be "New Earths", and their societies would develop on their own. The only thing we'd be "preserving" is the idea of human DNA - there would be no real continuity between our culture and theirs.
It's probably worth doing, but it makes you think about what's the "point". We'd be preserving our memory in these other worlds (hopefully, if they bothered to archive what we had sent/were transmitting), as we'd be preserving theirs. But the same could be accomplished by creating true AI robots; a case could be made that these AI robots would be truer descendents of humanity than humans raised in isolation from Earth - at least the robots would have had some experience in being on Earth, and might ultimately send emmisaries back to Earth as well.
-BbT
I thought it was about Ted Turner trying to "colorize" the image of the universe.
Yeah, this was pretty absurd. The claim is that we can't get 20 light years or so out because it would a) take a long time and b) take a lot of energy.
I don't think either of those things are likely to stop human colonization... just slow us a bit.
This is the only topic I consistently see religious fervor and belief pop up in this forum.
With no facts and often in the face of them, a high percentage of regularly critically thinking Slashdotters assume that the God of technology will provide them in their moment of need. Why? Because he has before! We did not know the strength of His powers.
When a rule or law hinders a dream, we insist the law can and should be broken. There's a defining belief with this religion that every problem has a solution or workaround if we just try hard enough or give it more time.
Instead of colonizing heaven, nerds dream of colonizing other worlds as life's ultimate destination. It's blind faith.
The strangest thing is that maybe 200 or 300 years from now, we will send our first 'generation ship' into space, to colonize a planet 200 light years away. 600 years later, that ship will arrive, and the people from earth that have been there for 300 years will say "What took you so long?"
This is also an accurate evaluation of his blog.
He basically postulates that things are too far away to get to and that Einstein's theory of relativity means that will never change.
It is NO different than someone 300 years ago saying "We can't get to the moon because the only way we can currently think of to fly is by balloon, and a balloon can't get there.
He talks about a "Magic Wand" that would change the physics of the universe. What the rest of us call that Magic Wand is "Scientific Progress". He then discusses some of the highly likely ways to get around the problems he forsees, but says they are basically NOT WORTH IT. He does NOT know that answer.
We determine what is worth it and not worth it. We can decide we want to do this, and then if it is possible, it CAN be done.
He simply does not understand all the new technology, claiming it will be too expensive (mostly in energy), without truly understanding if we value it, we will do it.
Yes, colonozing a new world may take a long time and be incredibally expensive. Yes, most people won't want to actually be the colonizers. But there are lots of ways it can be made profitable.
A major one is prison. Right now it costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars per prisoner to imprison men and women. I bet you many of them would rather go to another planet, taking the huge risk involved, including the hybernation risk, and the risk of failing to create a new biosphere.
Many of them ARE smart, not stupid. Send them the right books/records and they will succeed.
All they really need is a planet that has an oxygen atmosphere, which CAN be achieved if the right temperature planet is found with water (one of the most common materials in the universe - commets. Just seed the planet with the right bacteria - keep the colonists in hybernation till a computer detects sufficient oxygen.
Not perfect. High probability of death. But at least a 10% chance of success, and prisoners will accept it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
God made us in His Image, creative, tool-making, exploring beings. We are to make the desert bloom, and Mars is a desert, so let's get to it!
BTW, it is atheism and Caesarism which has killed by several orders of magnitude more people than theistic religions ever have, let alone Christianity.
Who cares about safety?
You are absolutely right in your analysis, in that we are in the Kon-Tiki stage of space exploration. By why should we stop? Why would we *ever* stop?
Every year brings progress, and new knowledge. Without our little dangerous excursions, progress will go much slower.
The problem with Stross' analysis is that he ignores progress. Yes, we need new methods of propulsion. That comes with work, and research, and knowledge.
We *will* go to the stars, if we can just build self-sustaining colonies on our own back-yard neighbors. We can colonize Mars in the next 100 years, for instance, instead of cowering on our own dangerous planet. After that, we can try the moon (for self-sustaining colonization, not just a small base that requires help from Earth).
We need to do this. Otherwise, I believe we are doomed.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
The key to this argument is assumption. What exactly do we assume was, is, and will be true that will mean interstellar space travel was, is, and will be possible. Most of the arguments posted here focus on these assumptions insightfully, though some do not. My take is this: Insterstellar travel is currently not a practicle capability of Humans with our current level of technology and understanding of physics. However, it would be logical to assume our capabilities will become greater with time based on the fact that our capabilities on many fronts have increased significantly over time so far. I think this is a reasonable assumption provided you accept the likelihood that we still have much to learn on the subject (but if you assume we've already learned most information that can be learned which would be relevent to the subject, then bless you child). I think it is unreasonable to apply our current understandings and expectations to exactly how and when anything will come to be such as when or even if we'll be able to travel beyond the Sol system. This is a particularly foolish belief since we can only make guesses on our future capabilities based on our limited present knowledge on the subject which undeniably still excludes the knowledge necessary to attain interstellar trekking capabilities worth writing home about. Think of it this way, we now know much about Earth (it's likely structure, composition, location, history, life forms, etc), but we are constantly learning new things about it and everything on or in it at a rate that suggests we've only scratched the surface (both literally and figuratively). The more we learn about it, the more we realize how much more there is to learn. I think its extremely shortsighted to think we know even a significant portion of all knowledge that could be learned and utilized for enabling practicle transportation of humans to the stars (or anything else for that matter). To think that an infinite universe won't provide much more to learn than our tiny corner of it can teach us (a corner we've barely scratched the surface of too) is, frankly, foolish. Now, I could go on, but here's the gist: try not to deem something impossible that we really have no real way of accurately judging it to always be impossible based on what we think we will ever know about that something. -David M.
The point is, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." It's going to take some really radical technology shifts just to make it economical to get to nearby parts of the solar system, and we're not going to be able to develop any interstellar travel before we've done significant solar system colonization, unless a few magic wands get waved.
We're not going to get humans usefully to Mars in George Bush's lifetime - getting to the moon just took ego and the Cold War Space Race to get it funded, but getting to Mars for an ego trip is a lot harder, and any significant level of orbital colonization is going to require self-sustaining economics with incremental value added from most of the steps. It's definitely going to require cheap transport up to orbit, probably space elevators. And it's going to require serious study on closed ecosystems, because you're not going to sustain a beyond-Earth-orbit space economy with one-way consumption and Earth-based resupply - we're not close to having serious research happening on that, leave aside the problems that'll show up once we start doing the research out in space, e.g. Russian Creeping Mold. (Politically, I don't think the Republicans are up for ecosystem research - that'll need to wait until hippies get elected. But I don't see the Republicans talking about serious elevator research either, and I think that'll take a long time to get the materials right.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The main obstacle to visting -- much less colonizing -- other planets in distant solar systems (nevermind other galaxies) is the sheer amount of time it would take to get there, millions of years with the best technology we can imagine that is based on what we have today.
It will take a gigantic leap to achieve the kind of speed we will need -- that is, traveling faster than the speed of light, which Einstein famously proved was impossible.
Science fiction gets around this by introducing things like "hyperspace" and "subspace", in which the normal laws of physics don't apply wrt to faster than light travel. My personal fave is the idea of "folding space".
We had the industrial and information/technological revolution. Free energy will be next. I'm keeping an eye on free energy research such as the Steve Marks Toroidal Power Unit. It is very promising.
You have to get rid of energy to descend to the planets surface. Any resource there that is needed can probably be found in orbit around the star or grown/manufactured in space for less cost and energy expenditure. For people used to living in space, travelling to a planet's surface would be like us diving to the hydro-thermal vents at the bottom of sea. It's an interesting place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.
Once you can live outside of a planet's gravity well, there is not going to be any reason to go back. We have accept that space is not something we have to cross to get to another place to live, but that it will be the next place to live.
How egocentric do you have to be to believe that todays understanding of space-time and propulsion is valid enough to make universal statements such as this ?
This is simply an impossible assumption to make. You waste your time creating a clear static argument based on dynamic facts. Unless technological expansion slows dramatically it's more likely a matter of centuries before man has colonies throughout at least our neighboring solar systems.
The truly biggest problem is being able to carrying enough fuel to get your to another galaxy. With todays understanding of energy and efficiency (or lack therefore of) of course it seems impossible, but at the amazing pace science is progressing high efficiency nuclear or antimatter drivers are quite a realistic possibility, along with whatever else will be dreamed up.
I don't see how this is hard to imagine with statistics. Just look at the breakthroughs man has made in just the last 200 years and how it has completely changed what we can accomplish and our understanding of the universe. Not it may be the pace of scientific progress must eventually slow, but I don't think mankind is anywhere near that point yet. There is no reason to think that interstellar travel will no be possible in a thousand years and while it seems like a long time, it's not really if you want to do big picture thinking like this.
I think the question is more like who could we NOT have the ability to send objects or people to other galaxies in a thousand years or so. At the very least putting people into stasis over very long periods of time will eventually be successful.
The entire premise of any argument like this is roughly that science will not progress and that the static laws of the universe will not prove to be more complex than we already think they are and that's more laughable that it is informative. If you can accept that todays physics laws will all apply in full compliance in 1000 years than it's easy to accept this guys theory, but I can't see that happening. As brilliant as the fathers of space-time theory were, I can't see the statistical possibility that they produced infailable theories.
It's more likely than not that humans will find alternates to the basic laws of physics that we've constructed mostly in the last 100 years. We may never overcome universal expansion in the lifetime of the human race, but that doesn't mean it's not possible, because it only takes mankind a few hundreds years to exponentially expand upon their current science base. So, long as the world
avoids periods of theocracy like the dark ages we'll probably overcome the majority of limits that we today believe will stop us, though we may very well find many more. The form and expansion of the universe is still only a rough theory at best and overall out knowledge of whats really going on is minimal, so I see no rational way you can jump to this conclusions beyond heavily relying on mankind to destroy themselves or their knowledge base or be thwarted by some great cataclysm perhaps. Does no one think that non propulsion based travel will ever be possible ? Considering the abilities of particles to seem to interact at speeds beyond the speed of light really makes me wonder if the key to not going beyond the speed if light is simply that you can't accelerate matter faster than that, not that something can't travel a distance faster than light. Looking at the holes in relativity and then even remotely considering string theory or any type of extra-dimensional theories I think it's pretty easy to imagine tapping some of that seemingly existing potential to travel faster than the speed of light, but perhaps not actually be accelerating faster than light. Or perhaps that is just a misconception based on out limited knowledge. Saying we know the answer to this question of interstellar travel with certainty is just, not realistic.
Our primary goal however needs to be to get mankind planted in a second solar system so is celestial disaster strikes our entire race is not des
They have feathers, lay eggs and most of them can fly.
We eat a few of them daily, or in special occasions (Xmas, US's Thanksgiving Day, etc).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This is not new, Arthur C. Clarke wrote an essay on this decades ago.
Part of Clarke's argument is based on "conquering" space - forming a galatic empire with a centralized authority. Even if we can instantantly move to anywhere in the universe, for free, we still couldn't manage the complexity of dealing with all of the planets.
I read it years ago, but the arguments were persuasive, and nothing has fundamentally changed since then. Maybe computers can deal with a hundred billion planets each with a billion people on them, and figure out who is cheating on their taxes, but its beyond human ability to manage all that.
> Mundane SF is the idea that there never will be nanotech
Nah, but it'll be more like bacteria than gray goo.
> there never will be AI,
Sure, it just won't be any smarter than us, and certainly won't be as perfect as we expect it to be.
> there never will be space travel....you get the picture.
There already is space travel, just not very far or very fast. And getting humans to visit any other star will be infeasible for at least thousands of years. Probes maybe, but not people.
Oh, and like others have said, entropy eventually kills the universe dead. Period. Maybe there will be other universes in disconnected patches of space-time, but ours will die out and everyone with them. There simply won't be any energy left to move or think, just an empty black abyss while all your protons decay. Good luck getting more of those.
Who the hell scores these posts? Why aren't they scored by regular users?
This is merely a "proof" from the perspective of current human knowledge. If everyone just believes this as the "gospel" truth, then no further progress will be made on knowledge. Major human progressions have come about when such seemingly infallible proofs have been disproved!
I remember another article much like this one which burst my bubble about interstellar travel within my lifetime. It basically went on to say (I will skip the math class) that given todays spaceflight propulsion, the efficacy and its fuel, a space shuttle (like we currently use) in order to make the trip to Alpha-Centuri in 60 years (so roughly within ones lifetime), the shuttle would have to carry about the equivalent to all the Hydrogen that is in our Sun it order to complete the acceleration and deceleration burn cycle.
To me that was such a silly value that no matter how you tweak it, unless radically new "magic wand" type technology is developed, it will not be even remotely possible.
Once such stepping stone magic wand technology that I think would really be the turning point would be instantaneous communication. We have all hear about experiments with teleportation, but unlike the star trek version it really is just playing is what i think is called entangled pairs of electrons. Something like you entangle two (or they are already entangled maybe?) electrons, and if you change the spin or charge of one, you instantaneously do the same for the other (I think, my knowlege here is far from complete). Now if we forget for the moment about physical teleportation and instead thing about using it as a means of communication (You could maybe use it like binary, one charge or spin represents 1, the other 0), it would solve so many problems. Human interstellar travel might still be a ways off, however this would solve the nasty lag associated with communicating with such travel. This would allow us at home here on earth to use robots and the like to travel for us and we could easily control them from home. A new means of propulsion would still have to be developed, and I think it goes without saying that we would have to build robots to last. Anyway just some random thoughts....
Hmmm . . . where should I begin?
1. Well, first of all, (for starters) you made it sound like you had more than one point you were going to make.
doesn't mean it's impossible.
What is impossible with _current_ technology is anyone getting there in one generation (or any sane number of generations).
But if you could muster the political will, you could build a multi-generation colony ship within the next 50 years. It would be INCREDIBLY expensive and dangerous, but would only require incremental advances to current technology.
Specifically:
* Nuclear propulsion & power (this has been looked into an nixed several times already for political reasons)
* A structure built in orbit WAY bigger than the space station
* Better environmental engineering than Biosphere II (with a way to recycle EVERYTHING)
* A highly disciplined crew with a zelaous (and carefully crafted) survival/colonization ideology that can be passed on through generations [this will probably not be a nice ideology--zero tolerance for crime, strict birth control, eugenics, etc. It would also have to be adaptable enough to ensure survival]
The question then becomes
1) Where do you go?
2) What do you do when you get there?
It would be nice to let the colonists get on their way but have the know-how and capability to integrate new technologies as they get developed on Earth (i.e., asteroid mining, fusion power, etc.). You'd also want the colony ship to be a giant R&D lab. [Necessity is the mother of invention, and nobody will have more necessity to figure out how to survive in space than the colonists].
With this, you might get 1-2% chance of survival. But who knows, someone might be crazy enough to try...
Everyone, please stop talking about natural selection and humans. It does NOT apply. Not for the last few hundred years at least.
We have something called "intellect" and our society is no longer limited by our genes. We are already able to modify our own genes - think ahead 50 years.
Natural selection (aka, human encroachment and exploitation) in other animal species on this planet is now more active than ever before. The current state of affairs is that the current age of man is already one of the great extinctions for plant and animal life, especially tropical and marine species where there was more diversity. But none of this applies to the human beings themselves. Our selection is currently driven by ourselves through things like,
* wealth distribution
* population density in countries
* science (medical sciences)
* wars
* 'ethnic cleansing'
* hate, pride, greed and other primitive motivating factors
* education (plays part in all of the above)
Since humans have used any kind of complex technology to aid their survival, there is no more natural in human selection.
The difference between the travel to the moon and the colonization of space, is that 142 years ago, we knew the goal and some of the most important rules, we just lacked the means (we even knew the basics to get them) and a major motivation. Now, to colonize the outer-space, we know practically nothing, and that that we know tells us it's impossible and useless. The technological revolutions that people in this forum are talking about are exactly the 'magic wand' the blog purposely tries to avoid, and they are by no means better than Jules Verne's giant canon.
Even the space elevator, which actually is the only one to realistically approach to the 'columbiad' isn't useful to that travel.
It's impossible for a person to go more than 30 MPH unprotected. The vacuum created will suck the air out of their lungs and kill them.
It's impossible for a bee to fly.
The fact is we don't know enough about it yet. All we've got is someone's best guess (and plenty of others equally good guesses) based on miserably little data. They should all be ashamed to come to a conclusion when they know about as much about the universe as a fly does about biology when it lands on a dung heap.
We'll name the first colonized planet "Charlie" so people can relate it to something from Star Trek, and besides "Stross" is a goofy name for a planet.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If the milky way were to collide with another galaxy and we were very lucky, perhaps many alien star systems would be brought into closer proximity to our own, and we would be given a once in a solar life time chance at space colonization. Perhaps we might discover some way of manipulating very large portions of the universe to create such a collision within a million years should other methods take too long or fail us completely. I know this seems rather unlikely since the last I heard, the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate, creating a far larger average distance between galaxies over time. I have seen photos of galaxies colliding though. There may very well be sentient inhabitants in each galaxy that were brought within close proximity of each other (and hopefully survived the adverse effects to make contact...)
Unicron?
and the world is flat too!
Wasn't Heinlein the one who said "ask an expert what can't be done and why, then do it."
or something approximating that.
I'd agree with premise that SF authors are there to say "What if?" not "you can't".
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
You have re-stated Mr. Stross's position. We get it. The galaxy is a big place.
So what?
The only way we will get to another star I believe is if there is the discovery of a "free" energy source and a complete jump in our understanding of the universe.
Indeed. The physical rules of reality may not change, but what all those rules happen to be, we do not yet know, and how people operate within the ones we do know about can most certainly change.
Please note; the grass boats I used in my tongue-in-cheek metaphore needed you to take carry the power source with the rower. Spanish Galleons did not share this restriction. Until the 'free' energy source of wind power was realized, it probably didn't seem obvious either.
Charlie Stross does not know even a fraction of everything, and as such, has little business suggesting what will and will not be possible in the future. Based on our past adventures as humans, as one poster aptly put, the Magic Wand is by far the safe bet.
And, of course, those crop circles remain.
The universe outside the door is far more full of possibility than most people choose to be aware of.
-FL
Not easy, not cheap, not quick - but possible
Ian D. K. Kelly
idkk Consultancy Ltd.
"Quality through Thought"
... why think in the common terms? Why do we need to colonize planets? We could build our own gigantic starships which would have the advantage of being able to escape from comets and meteors.
Second, the solution to reach other planets is "just" an artificial wormhole -- surely not easy to generate and maintain, but also not totally unthinkable (hell, how few do we even know of General Relativity??).
Thanks for getting that Billy Joel song stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
they'd have to be so close to human that you might as well just send them and leave the biologicals out of it entirely.
... we've got bigger fish to fry. The galaxy is ours."
Or, during the long, long voyage, the machines might just come to the same conclusion.
"Let's let the humans play around in the sol system
Why am I not getting this? I studied a little bit of physics; I'm not pretending to understand this all and was fascinated by the article, so I re-ran the numbers; lets see: Suppose we build a spaceship of 100 tonnes (a big one) - this is 100,000,000 grams - right? Then suppose we want to travel at 0.1C (as stated in the article) - so to get to that speed and assuming there is no friction in space (or at least this friction is more or less negligible) we have: E = 1/2 * M * V^2 - plug in values: E = 1/2 * 100,000,000 gms * (0.1 * 299,792,458 m/s) ^ 2 E = 44937758936840882000000 J Ok - so assuming that we get fusion to work or use some fissile material and convert it to 100% energy - we get Einsteins mass-energy equivalent equation E = M C^2 We already have E, we know C^2, so we get the mass needed = 44937758936840882000000 / (299,792,458) ^ 2 = 500,000 gms i.e. M = 500 Kgs Thats not too difficult to do. What am I missing? We only need to accelerate to 0.1C and then coast till we get close enough to start decelerating (so M = 1000 KGs for both accel and deccel?) It'll still take a long time - but it doesn't seem impossible.
Answers
1) disneyland
2) picknick
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
"We can't do it now"
No, of course we can't do it NOW.
Perhaps next milennia.
Just because we can't do something now, doesn't mean it isn't possible tomorrow.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Rgds,
Master of Translation.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Ah! You're talking about Leonardo Da Vinci.
I'm a gnu world man.
Actually, pranksters don't drag logs. They use a plank and they place it in front of them and crush the plant stalks down by stepping on the plank, moving forward a notch and repeating the process. They use ropes and poles stuck in the ground to measure out circles.
This technique cannot, however, produce the wide range of effects measured in what are considered to be authentic formations.
These effects include, stalks bending at the 'knuckle', (as opposed to snapping or causing crushing damage to the plant). In some formations, the first knuckle is bent for the middle bits of the formation and the second 'knuckle' up in areas further out from the center. Distinct genetic abnormalities have been repeatedly noted in seeds taken from within a formation and grown beside control seeds taken from outside the same formation. Seeds have even been turned magnetic in a couple of cases. Huge formations being created in under 20 minutes in daylight. Weird floating lights observed during formation creation. Burnt/blown out sections at the bend point of the stalks in numerous formations, as though the bend point was super-heated from the inside for an instant, etc., etc.
Of course, there are also pranksters with planks, but so what?
There has been a LOT of research put into this area, and very very little of it is reported upon. The media largely ignores the whole phenomenon, despite the fact that it is proof positive of something very powerful and world-changing happening right now, right here. There is a very informative documentary on the subject called, appropriately enough, "Crop Circles, the Search for Truth". If you are interested, check it out. I found a copy down at my local block buster. It includes an interesting interview in the extra features where one of the researchers relates a fairly horrifying story about CIA harassment. Oh yeah. And black unmarked helicopters were also caught on film buzzing some circles. It's all there. The world, as I have said, is a very interesting place and anybody who wants access to more than the pre-packaged 'knowledge' is invited.
Yet it operates on rules, not magic. If those rules didn't exist, the universe simply wouldn't exist as we know it.
Agreed. Absolutely. It's just that the rules most people are working with are those that come in the beginner set.
-FL
It is not incompatible to think that space colonization is (a) impossible and (b) vital for the survival of the species. If you state those two, you are simply stating that the species is doomed to fail. The Hawking vs. Stross dichotomy posed in the summary is a false dilemma.
However, it would be a sheer hell if one could not control the hardware directly running you.
Hmm, I don't know about that. I could be a software copy right now, and I don't control the hardware directly under me as far as I can tell, and I'm surely not so melodramatic as to assert that existence is a sheer hell... television, maybe.
And the only way someone can die is if they commit suicide or their physical hardware platform is destroyed.
Which Egan universe are we talking, here? Because in at least one, destruction of the hardware platform is pretty irrelevant, as well as some forms of suicide (is it suicide to engineer your "final" memories into a tight, "self-perpetuating" loop of existence? or forsake your sequentiality and factor your memories and personality into a bunch of concurrent people?).
It was a right, in that nobody but the sentient software could do it to themselves.
And like other rights, such as the right to self-termination in the first place, it was easily circumvented on the hardware/OS level if the need arose.
However, with sentient software, what derives a individual in this case: Person(sentient software in semi-organic body) on planet copies via maser to outpost 600 LY away. After 1200 years when maser_self arrives, who is who?
Tchicaya faced the prospect of a similar situation in Schild's Ladder. What can you do, really? They have as much "free will" as you, let them be a separate person if they want. I don't think you'd be very well socially tolerated if you were a "copy spammer", though, which leaves you to seed your own polises and basically wank off with your compute power, whoopey.
If anything, laws with respect to clones will be very very nasty, and probably go similar to fictional laws of robots in Asimov's books.
Maybe at first, but I tend to think software rights are pretty much inevitable, it's just a matter of how long/do we last that long. Not that I, or anyone else, can base that on anything other than wild conjecture. What I find much more troubling is that the debate will probably start far too late. If strong AI is your thing, then you probably think that when we start experimenting with higher-level reasoning systems (probably brain copies before anything truly artificial), we're basically experimenting on conscious entities. Now, with a 100% "flesher" population (remember, by definition we're only just beginning to experiment with the alternatives), how many people do you think are actually going to care what "happens to software in a computer"? I'm just glad I wasn't "born" one of the first few generations of AI, because that's probably going to be a pretty fucked up existence.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
---Hmm, I don't know about that. I could be a software copy right now, and I don't control the hardware directly under me as far as I can tell, and I'm surely not so melodramatic as to assert that existence is a sheer hell... television, maybe.
;) One of his short stories does seem to use them also.
Too true, I was being overly dramatic, but at least we know we die in this life. I'd imagine that being imprisoned inside a computer with resources deprived would we worse than death.
---Which Egan universe are we talking, here? Because in at least one, destruction of the hardware platform is pretty irrelevant, as well as some forms of suicide (is it suicide to engineer your "final" memories into a tight, "self-perpetuating" loop of existence? or forsake your sequentiality and factor your memories and personality into a bunch of concurrent people?).
Take your pick (from the singularity based ones). For example, in Diaspora, Orlando's clone died. That meant only one thing, in that the clone chose suicide. Yes, that clone diverged at a point 50 years prior, but those independent thoughts are not recoverable unless they release them. When concerning sentient software, data integrity and security is more important than anything else, as it IS a basic human right (security of ones self).
To see what happens if these rights are not maintained, go read Permutation City (if you havent already done so). They lose control of the hardware, and nasty things happen.
---And like other rights, such as the right to self-termination in the first place, it was easily circumvented on the hardware/OS level if the need arose.
I'm not quite sure if that was the case in all of his books. Shaper does seem to require quantum computers, which would be "hard" to emulate
And if "suicide rights" were revoked, I cant see how they'd stop you from corrupting your own programming and crashing the Shaper.
---Maybe at first, but I tend to think software rights are pretty much inevitable, it's just a matter of how long/do we last that long. Not that I, or anyone else, can base that on anything other than wild conjecture. What I find much more troubling is that the debate will probably start far too late. If strong AI is your thing, then you probably think that when we start experimenting with higher-level reasoning systems (probably brain copies before anything truly artificial), we're basically experimenting on conscious entities. Now, with a 100% "flesher" population (remember, by definition we're only just beginning to experiment with the alternatives), how many people do you think are actually going to care what "happens to software in a computer"? I'm just glad I wasn't "born" one of the first few generations of AI, because that's probably going to be a pretty fucked up existence.
Then there's really only one way to get people to care, and that is to provide an end-term migration to durable substrates. When families migrate, people will care about the laws and ethics thereof, and I hope that will bring honorable means and ends. However, right now and the foreseeable future, there will be no AI ethics, which is sad as it teaches them the worst about us.
Yes, Strong AI does scare me somewhat, but I hope that a human is the first Strong AI. What terrifies me to no end is the gray goo.. If nanites are created to process carbon, they could literally liquidize the world within 90 minutes, according to Kurzweil. Rogue nanites could be the scourge to the earth worse than any asteroid could ever be. However, our manipulation of matter requires them, but can also unmake us.
Still, nice chatting with you.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack