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Project Icarus: an Interstellar Mission Timeline
astroengine writes "What would the infrastructure supporting an interstellar mission look like? Considerations such as fuel sources, mining methods, interstellar spaceship construction activities and maintenance are being analyzed, all of which would be carried out before even reaching the ultimate interstellar goal. Project Icarus is currently unravelling the complexities of this operation and recently created a nifty animation of how one of the many fuel tanks may be recycled as communication relay pods en route to nearby stars."
I question naming the project Icarus... maybe you don't want to pick a guy who fell to his death for trying to fly too high.
I mean, isn't Icarus associated with failed ambitions?
1000 years ago: "Harrumpf! The world is flat! Sail on towards your oblivion, fools!"
100 years ago: "Harrump! If got meant for men to fly, he'd have given us wings!"
75 years ago: "Harrumpf! Faster than the speed of sound? Never!"
~50 years ago: "Harrumpf! There's no way we can get to the moon!"
40 years ago: "Harrumpf! Home computing? I think not!"
30 years ago: "Harrumpf! Who needs more than 64K?"
20 years ago: "Harrumpf! What good is this 'internet' thing for?"
ACs: shitting on everyone's ideas for 1000 years.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Let's assume full deceleration at the target star has been achieved ... By that time, near-Earth telescopes would be sufficiently advanced to verify and inform the Icarus computers ...
... that the pre-warp technology museum on Starbase 235 is prepared to receive it in docking bay 19.
And then their stars became red giants, and they all died.
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
Nothing lasts forever. Eventually there will be no more stars, do you worry about that too?
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
I care. Because 100 billion years of life is better than 4 billion years of life.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Given that our species in its current form has only been around for something like 300,000 years, I am not going to worry about the sun burning out in five billion years, at least not when there are so many other ways - and a lot of those self-inflicted - we could all kick the proverbial bucket.
Face it, if we haven't figured out how to get out of the way of the sun burning up by the time it happens, we don't deserve to survive.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
I care. Because 100 billion years of life is better than 4 billion years of life.
You aren't going to have either, though. Those billions of years of life are nothing more than a phantasm in the here and now. You will never, ever know whether we as a species will make it a hundred billion years, four billion years, or four thousand years. It might as well be a gazillion years, because you won't be around for a hundred. And nothing, nothing you do in your lifetime will make a difference to the longevity of the species as a whole, and how we face problems four billion years in the future.
Nice that you are thinking ahead, though. Fantasizing about the impossibly distant future is no different than fantasizing about becoming a superhero or the King of Westeros. It's a great way to ignore real-world, present day problems while puffing up your own ego by imagining that you are pondering the really weighty, long term problems.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Icarus might want to avoid it. Just sayin' ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
...after the guy responsible for the first pilot-error accident?
Exceeded the rated service ceiling of his aircraft, inducing a thermal environment that caused primary structural debonding, and left a parabolic trail of wax, feathers and Greek obscenities into the Sea of Crete...
rj
Unless the Human Race spreads to other worlds, systems, and galaxies, we are dead as a species.
God, I am so sick of hearing that tired old cliche. Even putting aside the time scales we are talking here, there is absolutely no calamity, short of any earth-destroying asteroid (nothing even close to which has been encountered since MAYBE the strike that may have created the moon) or the sun going all Krypton on us (sure, in a few billion years) that is going to make the earth LESS survivable than any other planet or body in this solar system, and likely any other solar system for dozens of light years out (which are essentially unreachable by man).
If we had a Yucatan strike today, we would be much better off tunneling deep underground than trying to mount a ship to some Mars colony. Even a post-strike earth would still have water, supplies of oxygen, survivable atmospheric pressure, much more cosmic radiation protection, etc. compared to Mars. And it wouldn't require an extremely resource intensive journey to get underground. The earth of the only planet on which humans can survive for any length of time in a self-sufficient manner. Every other planet in the solar system is a death-trap (and there is no reason to suspect otherwise for any other solar system within reach--which currently includes no solar systems besides our own, BTW).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's a problem a bit farther out (quite a bit, as its theorized that most smaller red dwarf stars will have lifespans measured in TRILLIONS of solar-years - which is an odd unit of measurement on that time scale - by that time a Solar year will be about as completely arbitrary a measurement as we can imagine). I'm sure that EVENTUALLY it will be a problem for someone though. Maybe our descendants - maybe a different species.
Overall though, all successful life has an instinctual gravitation towards preservation of one's self and one's offspring. Without that drive we would die out. Even on an individual level it makes no sense as you could say why even live if we all are going to die anyways. In the end it doesn't matter - it's all about maximizing the time alive, regardless of the inevitability of death. Eventually we'll all be gone - everyone and everything - but you can bet that whatever species are still living in the final days, they'll fight for survival down to the very last minute. It's just how things work.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Actually, MTBF for Earth life is 50-150 MY and the last one was 65-66 Ma.
Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event (End Cretaceous or K-T extinction) – 65.5 Ma
Triassic–Jurassic extinction event (End Triassic) – 205 Ma
Permian–Triassic extinction event (End Permian) – 251 Ma
Late Devonian extinction – 360–375 Ma
Ordovician–Silurian extinction event (End Ordovician or O-S) – 440–450 Ma
End-Ediacaran extinction - 542 Ma
No, I don't think Humans have the ability to destroy the entire species, vertebrate life has evolved to be very resilient. Look at Crocodilia, they've survived massive climate change, mass extinction events and wild continental drifts, all without any technology.
Humans won't last forever, very few species have or do, but I don't have such hubris to think we will last forever or to think we can destroy ourselves.
I figure another 5-10,000 years before we've left this planet and 25-50,000 before humans are gone, for whatever reason.
It will be quite a bit less time than four billion years before life on Earth becomes increasingly uncomfortable: By the time that another 500 million years have passed the sun will be producing about 10% more heat, drastically reducing the availability of liquid water on Earth's surface.
Yes, 500 million years is a long time, it's about as long as fish have existed, and longer than plants on land. It's about 8 times longer than the dinosaurs have been extinct, but from the beginning of life on Earth to the end of it in about 500 million years, we're down to the final 10 or 15 percent of the remaining span of comfort.
Add to that the pressure of a dense population competing for natural resources, and the the impact of their waste on the environment, and I think we can either sit around and squabble for grub until the end of time, or export our exciting life style to another world before things get too crazy back here at home.
--Udo.
Because in less than 50 years we probably have our first major die-off in centuries with a likely world war related to it.
And it's going to take a few hundred years to recover-- if we do recover. This might be it- our moment to get off earth or to end up with either the ruins of a civilization or a civilization so completely overwhelmed by massive overbreeding that it never has the resources to get off the planet again.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This seems sadly necessary. All the social, political, religious and cultural baggage we've accumulated will continue to weigh us down until something terrible happens. We're not collectively going to grow out of it in time.
Also consider the fossil fuel problem - the 'easy' energy from fossil fuels is a technological leg-up, but once that's exhausted it will be much harder to research and manufacture the advanced materials and technologies needed to exploit alternative energy sources, unless said sources are already in place and paying their own way. We could quite plausibly end up trapped by our own (lack of) access to energy.
If anyone is looking for something to worry about, and can't find anything just from a cursory glance about the place, might I suggest worrying about unicorn vaccinations? It is more realistic than worrying about the death of the sun.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
plan as soon as you like. let the practical aspects catch up.
your argument makes no sense - saying we should wait until we have the technology before we plan to develop the technology we are waiting for...
The real problem isn't being wiped out as a species. The problem is the collapse of our civilization. See, we've already used up the easy-to-obtain energy sources. Doing that has raised our civilization to the point that it just might be possible for us to start exploiting the huge pool of resources available in the solar system - but if we blow it, if we miss this opportunity and our civilization collapses, then we may never get another chance to go into space.
I'll phrase all of that as a parable from an RTS game.
You start the game as an agrarian society at tech level 0 with perhaps 1 or 2 units of energy available to you by cutting down trees and such. You use that energy to slowly research up to tech level 2 which let's you drill wells to get oil. There is perhaps 10 units of energy available to you through oil wells near your spawn point.
You use those 10 units of energy to fund research and build stuff and eventually you get to tech level 5 where you have the technology to drill deeper, or drill out at sea. Now you have perhaps 100 units of energy available to you.
Now you can build great cities and do lots of research, and eventually you make it to tech level 50 or whatever. You can now go out into space and if you do that, there are thousands and thousands of energy units available (back to the real world, this would be in the form of space-based solar power, and in terms of resources, one moderately sized asteroid contains more iron, nickel, just about any metal you could want, than has ever been mined in all the history of planet Earth).
So if you make that leap, then you pretty much win the game right there. However, if you don't make that leap, the real danger isn't having all your people die out. As you mentioned in your post, even a KT asteroid wouldn't kill all humans. No, the real danger is that if your civilization collapses, if you go back to tech level 0, then you can never ever rise again. You can wait for the trees to grow back and then cut them down again, and maybe you can get back to tech level 2, but all that cheap, easy to get oil is gone. Without it, you don't have the energy to get to tech level 5 and even if you did, most of the hard-to-get oil is gone anyway. So you're never going to get back to tech level 50.
That's the danger. Not death, but failure.