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The Three Possible Classes of Interstellar Travel (forbes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere dream, as our technology allowed us to neither know what worlds might lie beyond our own Solar System or to reach beyond our planet. But time and development has changed both of those things significantly. Now, when we look to the stars, we know that potentially habitable worlds lurk throughout our galaxy, and our spaceflight capabilities can bring us there. But so far, it would only be a very long, lonely, one-way trip. This isn't necessarily going to be the case forever, though, as physically feasible technology could get humans to another star within a single lifetime, and potentially groundbreaking technology might make the journey almost instantaneous.
Only a blank page.
No, I'm not going to enable Javascript on two dozen sites to see this shit. Post a real link or STFU.
So it looks like I won't be reading it. Such a shame.
Um, your 1 and 2 are the same as 3.
And your ridiculous 'embryo freezing' only requires a fully functional human society at the other end, to, um, you know, take 9 months to squeeze out a baby.... Which will need a fully functioning human society to educate it for the next 25 years...
Say, you don't have any ethical qualms about sending human beings (*YOU* called them that, BTW) to some unknown hell, against their wishes?
What makes you so special you get to choose that? Your collection of Star Trek novels?
You Space Nutters get uglier and uglier all the time...
First, the link goes to forbes.com which blocks any browser with an ad-blocker. http://fortune.com/2015/12/22/...
That's ironic and hamfisted, but particularly in light of Forbes own September 2015 article that says ad blockers won't hurt online adversiing. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...
Second, the summary of this "anonymous posting" says:
The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth
No. They don't. Humans evolved to live here, on Planet Earth. Not on our own star, or on any other star, and humanity's future is right here where we have an entire planet we were built for... not on a foreign star.
How CRAZY would we think it of MONKEYS who want to live underwater? We'd marvel at why happy jungle monkeys would leave a comfortable environment free of most predators and full of food to go somewhere hostile where they can't breathe, their temperature will decay, and without machine aids would soon die.
That's no different than us claiming that other stars[sic] becon us to live there. No. There's great scientific exploration to be done, and we could even establish limited outposts where machines keep us alive despite the harsh vacuum and cold [or relative heat] of space. The ISS is a good example of one such outpost. However, there's no "interstellar colonialism" happening because the rest of the universe is inhospitable.
Saturday... when an "anonymous" (friend of the editor?) posts something that makes no sense, and links to a site that's about as close to a paywall as you can get.
Ehud
You can make human colonies in faraway places without humans having to travel there. In 200 years, I expect that we will be able to reproduce entire ecosystems from data alone. That data "recipe" could be packed into a rather small package and transported slowly to many distant solar systems to germinate into diverse islands of life and civilization. Once this becomes possible, I really doubt that nobody is going to get around to doing it. We will need an autonomous asteroid miner, ore processor, and a primitive 3D printer to produce other, increasingly more precise and specialized machines. To do their job, all they will need is the right software, lots of ordinary rocks, and the energy of a nearby star. The system will be able to build anything that we are able to build, including viable cells with human DNA, and the technology to gestate them. With careful planning, I suspect that the starter kit will fit inside the volume of a shipping container. Since the data/software will be stored in a very stable medium, these seeds will work even if their trips to the stars are slow. But if we spam the galaxy with these little seeds, the future of humanity will eventually be pretty grand.
No, the Forbes link is a trashcan of trackers and harmful scripts. Please mod up non-Forbes links when possible.
The Forbes link demands that I turn off my ad blocker. Therefore I won't click on it.
How did this get posted the the /. main-page? Forbes is a magazine about money, with a known editorial slant. The article's author apparently discovered science fiction novels, and then perused Wikipedia for all of his sources (except for a pic or two from NASA/JPL, which are public == free).
WP is great, but for some bozo to lazily summarize a few WP articles, all written by many volunteers, including their fair-use images, and then selling it in a for-profit magazine w/website is disgusting.
It's totally against everything that Wikipedia is about. Ah, but it is also everything that Forbes is about. So there is that.