Why Mars Is Not the Limit For Human Space Flight

"Mars is not just the next or most accessible human destination, it is the ultimate one," writes Louis Friedman, executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society. He says the concept of manned spaceflight is progressing so slowly, and robotic developments so swiftly, that Mars will be the first and last planet humans set foot on. "By the time human spaceflight technology is theoretically capable of journeys beyond Mars, humans in modern space systems will be virtual explorers interacting with the environments of distant worlds, but without the baggage of physical transportation or presence." Mark Whittington disagrees, saying Friedman is demonstrating Clarke's First Law, and that the history of human exploration is rife with periods of stagnation interrupted by technological achievement that led to swift progress.

Comments

Re:Where are the FTL comms coming from?

[dgatwood]

I expect that we'll see FTL transportation before we see FTL communications across vast distances.

Just to be pedantic, by definition, as soon as you have FTL transportation, you have FTL communication. Depending on the nature of the FTL transportation, it may be the "van loaded up with tapes" level of high-latency FTL communication, but it's still faster than light....

Re:Not what he meant by virtual:

[timeOday]

If you're going to posit that we'll explore distant planets by uploading a human consciousness to a computer, why not save yourself the trouble and posit faster than light travel? They're both equally science fiction at this point in time.

I disagree. It is certain that if a bunch of molecules were arranged the same as yours are, including the electrical charges, there would be a person who is you. (Naturally the original you would still feel that your consciousness had not departed him, but it would also exist equally in the new body.) So, unlike speed-of-light travel, there is no theoretical barrier to teleportation.

Re:Dead wrong

[dryeo]

On a trip to Alpha Centauri, to take advantage of relativity, you'd pretty well need 1 G of acceleration. At 1 G for a year you'd be close to light speed and not even 25% there. A few more months ship time and it would be time to slow down. Perhaps 3 years ship time and 7 years Earth time. (Numbers pulled out of my ass but fairly close).
Any less acceleration and you're not going to get much of an advantage from relativity. Any faster acceleration would be uncomfortable but even with inertia dampers so you can accelerate to 99+% of light speed instantly, it'll still mean less then 5 years passing on the Earth.
That 1G acceleration helps much more on longer trips, 30 light years only takes perhaps a year more ship time and still only 33 years pass on Earth.
There was a chart around that I can't find right now that showed trip times, if you just accelerate all the way it was something like 30 years to Andromeda and only 70 years ship time to the edge of the Universe. Of course by the time you got there the edge would be 27 Billion light years further away.
One big problem is how do you protect your ship? At 90% C, hitting a grain of sand would be deadly and at 99.99999999% of C, light itself gets pretty energetic, little well a molecule.