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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.
"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.
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.
Colonizing the galaxy is something that will take millions of years. Obviously such a plan is so far beyond our scope at the moment that it's laughable. Mind you, going from Australia to Los Angeles in less than a day was so far beyond our scope ten thousand years ago that it's laughable.
The key question won't be the technology (whether it's generation ships, ships that can move near the speed of the light or faster-than-light vessels), but rather the motivation. At the moment, we can scarcely get most people to see the point of returning to the Moon, or of going to Mars. Where there's a military motivation (China's long-term space plans seem to have twigged the West) there's always a way, but unfortunately something as far removed from us in time and so egalitarian as Hawking's notion of saving the species as sending manned missions to other stars just doesn't get many beyond the dreamers heated up.
We've been sending stuff to space for half a century, and sending humans for less than that. It's so ridiculously premature to start judging whether or not humanity will reach the stars that I can't see the point of such an article. It's one thing to raise the technical difficulties (which are insurmountable with our current technology), but grand proclamations like this usually fall into two categories; blowhards who like to shock and disappoint or people trying inept forms of reverse psychology.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Currently laughable != Impossible
My money is on Hawking.
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.
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.
Not just them. It's just a physical fact. Acclerate for 1 G for a year and you reach speed c. How one does that is another matter; how to shield yourself from hitting a "penny" at that speed and turning into plasma is another. Light, infrared and radio waves hit head-on would violet-shift into x-rays and cosmic rays, so you have to shield for that as well. And then there's the matter of navigating when you can't see out.
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.
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.
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."
Very bad summary, subbie.
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.
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.
I'll take that bet... marking this day on my calendar. I'll be seeing you at 12:00pm (PST) on June 17th 2107, don't be late.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
(To work this out, compute how much momentum would be transferred to a 1kg object undergoing a 1g acceleration for a year, which I make to be about 309264480 kgm/s, and then solve the Lorentz equations to compute the velocity relative to the initial "rest" frame from the momentum. Trivial really.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
"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.
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.
"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?!
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.
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.