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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).
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.
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.
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.
...we should protect the environment of the planet we already have!
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Well, you get close to c, but never actually get there. Problem is, how do you pack enough juice to accelerate at 1g for a year?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
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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.
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.
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
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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).
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.
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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
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.
Space colonization will be hard for current humans. Not for robots, and not for AI. Information can travel at light speed, so there's no need to pack humans into heavy life support systems when you can just ship a trillion tiny nanoassembly factories out at 50% light speed and let statistics handle the reassembly at the other end of the trip. Once the factories are running, send the information for whatever it is we want to travel at light speed and let them assemble it, whether it's the newest robot model or schematics for a reconstructed human.
I see the economics for space travel coming sometime after the singularity. Once we have the ability to build huge AIs that can control nano-machines to build even bigger AIs, we will run out of resources in the solar system. At that point, it will be logical to spread to any other star system that can be used as a resource to build more hardware to run our software. Even if it's horribly inefficient, it will still be more than what will be available to us in this solar system. We can also explore the universe right here with much better sensors. The universe has been sending tons of information about itself to us at light speed for the last 15 billion years, we just have to collect and interpret it properly. Then we (humans and our varied descendants) can explore the resulting datasets. There's no reason we can't have swashbuckling space adventure faster than the speed of light in a future MMORPG.
While I agree with both of your points, that the universe doesn't care, and that ignorant project managers/engineering supervisors need to have a clue about basic raw physics when dictating project goals, you still havn't addressed the basic questions:
Is is possible that mankind can get to the stars?
I agree that physics is a significant issue here, and unless somebody can prove Einstein flat out wrong or at least introduce a new subset of mathematics to the laws of motion that refine Einstein's laws of relativity that allow superluminal velocities under some sort of extreme condition not recognized by Einstein previously, I don't see the classical "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" hyperspatial/warp drive ships ever becoming a reality. The USPTO notwithstanding (and the patents they have approved which supposedly claim this ability).
Still, there is much that can be done within the realm of current scientific knowledge that would suggest that travel to nearby stars is at least possible within a human lifetime. That it is right on the edge of the potential of what we understand about physics seems like an interesting proposition, and with many other very rich worlds begging for human exploration within our Solar System that are easily within the range of travel using today's technology that would be comparable to the ocean crossing voyages of the 17th Century, I don't see any pressing desire or even necessity to consider going to another star first. If mankind is already a well established multi-planet species who is well established on the Moon, Mars, Europa, and the Earth, not to mention O'Neill colonies and other such fanciful ideas and concepts; I don't see that it would be too much of a problem digging up the resources to consider going to other solar systems beside our own. But as a proposition to a society that debates if Virgin Galactic is even going to get out of the Earth's atmosphere at all, the question seems a fanciful academic exercise that is generations away from even being realistically asked in the first place.
This question is like asking King James I of England if descendants of his new colony at Plymouth is going to make a laptop computer cheap enough for 3rd world countries of Africa. Or if some of those same people are going to make it to the Moon. The question is premature and we simply don't know right now, nor is there any reason for going in the first place when there are so many inviting places to go at the moment that are much more accessible.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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!
"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.
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
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?
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.
The question then becomes: are artificially-grown (not quite our biology) artificially-taught (not quite our culture) things "human" enough to be compatible with our urge to reproduce and spread? If it's not human, what's the point of sending it into space anyway? Life will evolve somewhere else eventually, the whole point is we want to continue our species.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All