Well, establishing permanent colonies elsewhere in the solar system and beyond is obviously not a choice we have,
Sure it is. Why wouldn't it be?
I like the idea of building both down and up myself, but sooner or later a rock the size of Cyprus or something will hit this planet, and failing that the sun'll eat it anyway...
Hey, the position of cities like Denver or Winnipeg weren't meant to sustain populations in the hundreds of thousands in warmth and comfort through the winter, but they do. If you want to complain about the natural order of things being upset, you might want to take a look about you and think about how much sense some places currently make.
I mean, augh. Barrow, Alaska. Town! There! Countless millenia of evolution, and Mother Nature gazes down upon the hairless African savannah-primates building a town in one of the crappiest locales on the planet for hairless African savannah-primates, and goes, "WTF?"
Its probably not ethical or even remotely possible *yet*.
"This raises ethical questions" is one of the most popular anti-genetic-engineering comments out there. It's usually worded as though the fact of the questions is a condemnation of the idea itself.
Now, I see all sorts of claims that it's not ethical, or it's immoral, or whatnot. I can sort of understand some of these; some consent issues are obvious involving children, of course, and anything else involuntary. On the other hand, if people have to be modified to cope with a certain environment, the modifications will with a very high chance of success permit them to thrive there, and the initial generation going over can give informed consent, then I see nothing wrong with the fact. (That's my primary bias right there on the issue.)
However, a lot of people talk about human genetic engineering in general and simply say "it's unethical" or "it raises ethical questions" and think that leaves it at that.
This leaves me with a mix of dissatisfaction and curiosity; dissatisfaction because people are brushing off things with no real backup behind it, and curiosity as to where these questions are hiding.
So a question, both to the parent poster and to folks in general: Assuming (this is a significant asusmption, I'll grant, but play along) that it's possible to take healthy adult humans and gengineer them into beings fit for a Martian (or whatever other) environment, assuming those adults give informed consent to the process, and assuming the process is safe, what are these ethical questions that somehow make this an idea that people should not be allowed to undergo?
You can probably assume I won't agree with them;), but I'm genuinely curious as to the reasons. Most people talking about this sort of thing either hold opinions similar to mine or tend to talk either in terms of "eww, Nazis!" or "eww, playing God!", neither of which tend to hold much water with me. Even going so far as to take a few looks (cursory looks, I'll admit) through academic literature have come up with a mix of those and the "different from baseline homo sapiens = not human = subhuman" idea, which I find more despicable than false. What else is out there?
So really, what's the beef? Why, if no one's doing this to you, should they not be permitted to have it done to themselves or even seriously discussed?
He is not right in the sense that the traditional use of the term implies a great deal of involuntary control, is guided by the belief that it is possible to breed culture and ideology, and the fact that the practice was typically through actions such as forced sterilization.
The word has become diluted to mean "bad" rather than "improving the qualities of the species" in much the same way that something like the term "genocide" has come to mean little more than "Nazi Germany-esque concentration camps." Because of the interpretations changing over time, any other possible use for the words have become rejected by people, and as such the words themselves become attacks.
If someone comes out and refers to transhumanist activity or whatever else as "eugenics," they're almost invariably using the term as an attack, as "proof" that the concept being suggested is evil. Look around on the other comments on this story; it comes up as a snarl word over and over. I'm quite aware of the origin of the word, but I'm also aware of what the word has since become.
I've actually done a significant amount of study into the history of eugenics, including the US and Canadian programs (and the other more obvious ones eleswhere) which continued past the Second World War in places. I'm quite willing to bet that I have a better understanding of it than the average layman out there. I know I have a better understanding of what it is than the average person who believes any kind of genetic engineering is fundamentally equivalent to shoving people into the ovens after the experiments are finished.
Just because people are too stupid to understand the difference between voluntary and involuntary genetic engineering doesn't mean I have to strip off enough brain cells to get to the point. It takes a lot more thought to actually think about a term instead of taking the standard "butbutbutEVIL!" reaction, I know, but it can be refreshing.
Oh, right, that's exactly it. Because everyone knows someone voluntarily signing up to be purposely modified to suit a different environment is ethically identical to sterilizing single mothers and the mentally handicapped.
I believe the word for that kind of thinking is "incredibly stupid," or maybe "straw man."
Though transhumanism as a concept certainly does exist as a word to describe purposefully altering humans and human physiology. You might want to look at what you're talking about before immediately flying off the handle with "butbutbutgattaca!" style bullshit.
Oh, sure, it's his server and rules. I've never once argued that.
It's perfectly possible for someone to act within their rights and still be an asshole about it, though, and that's exactly what this guy did - and is.
Awww, poor widdle walking ego made his bed and doesn't wanna lie in it? Painted himself into a corner and expects accolades? Poor darling, watch me sympathise.
Not.
Granted, I suppose it's alright for him to do that because they're just blogs, and not something important like someone's Slashdot account or whatthehellhaveyou. Either way, the phrase "suck it down and live with it" should apply to both parties.
Not just any April - the April. They've been waiting for precisely the right April 2004 to arrive. After much preparation and waiting, they found one - one so obscure and subtle that it is not only absent on existing 2004 calendars, but can only be found in a totally seperate date several years in the past
.
I'm struck dumb at the finesse. Or maybe the dumb of the statement strikes me, one or the other...
Languages are defined by their users, not their scholars. The evolution of the way a language used can be summed up with the words "de facto," whether grammarnazis like it or not.
Do you really think folks care if a committee gets together to decide whether something may or may not be a word? I don't. If a word is used often enough by people, then it's a valid construction as a fait accompli.
I won't go so far as to quote James Nicoll, but I will say that what's valid in a language is defined by the users, not by the textbooks. If enough people use a word, then sure, it's valid. "Ain't" is a perfectly valid word in English, even if some English professors with sticks up their asses would howl about the eroding purity of the Perfect Tongue.
This is generally true, though I've read a few sources where they made mention of silver, gold, and non-precious talents (you'd be surprised at the number of times war indemnity/booty was paid in, say, talents of iron, especially in Mesopotamia), only to start forgetting to specify which is which..
When they're obviously discussing multiple flavors of talent, and then neglect to mention which, that's when the historians start committing mass suicide trying to figure out a text..
(IAAH)
One of the problems with determining ancient units of measurement is that they don't give them to us in convinient modern units. We only know what a classical stadia was within a certain range, so there's going to be an uncertainty there.
A lot of units of measurement used in ancient times were subjective like this. The best (by which I mean "Augh! Worst!")example is the stathmos, which simply meant "a day's march."
A day's march how? On foot? Horseback? Chariot? With or without a supply train? Jogging? On flat ground? Broken terrain? Roads? The correct answer is "yes," which means that this unit can vary disgustingly depending on the circumstances. A day's trudge through the Amazon and a day's travel on horseback along a plain are both a stathmos, though they're very different distances.
There's other examples of this, such as the talent, defined as the weight a man could carry on his back comfortably, and therefore something between fifty and eighty pounds. It was used both as a simple unit of weight and as a unit of currency, so you'll see people paying reparations of fifty talents or whatnot to the neighbouring state - which drives people up the wall when the authour's not specifying what the talents are of!
Units of measurement were also different from town to town. Standardized weights and measures are newfangled.
The stadia isn't quite so flexible, but the definitions of it I've seen are still based off other units the Greeks used, so yes, enough uncertainty kicks in that we could be off by some significant factor either way. He could have subscribed to a William Tarn-esque "make shit up" school of thought, it's true, but he could also be right. I'd need to take a better look at what he's written to see whether the shoe fits or whether he had to perform some unrequired surgery.
I highly doubt it. As the last twenty years have shown, it's not the level of technology that determines how easily we get into space, it's the cost. And concepts such as these, while interesting to think about and develop, are ultimately going to take that many more decades to become proven.
It's not the level of technology or the cost, it's the popular will to get it done. The Apollo program was incredibly expensive in its day, and the technology was unproven, but people wanted it done.
Nowadays, we have the technology, obviously. We've even got the finances for some pretty ambitious things; much of the R&D foundations have been laid so there's less that needs to be done for conceptual work. Really, the cost of the Apollo program wasn't just the cost of the Apollo program; it was the cost of everything back to the first US launches. We have that tremendous base of experience now.
The problem right now is that the American public has become scared shitless of any kind of risk. Someone higher up in the thread said that this new launch vehicle is unacceptable unless the radioactivity is reduced to an absolute zero, for instance. People are using the Kim Robinson BS argument to say a space elevator should never be built; RTGs are to be shunned because there's an infinitesimal and even then grossly exaggerated chance of something going wrong...
You see it in other things as well. Note the massive Segway backlash because one - one! - person was incompetent enough to manage to get hurt falling off the damn thing. Fear of tall buildings because anything big might be attacked sometime, number of skyscrapers in the US notwithstanding. The zero-tolerance backlash against students in 1999-2000, which start putting all kinds of pressures and suspicions on people who played FPSes, wore trenchcoats, or were bullied. Paranoia about AI. New medical procedures. Almanacs, for fuck's sake.
No, addie. The technology is there. The finances are available if folks want to get them. The problem is that the people who will ultimately provide those finances, provide the impetus in terms of manpower, of popular support, of advocacy, of ballots, and of hoping - those people are abjectly terrified, because Something Just Might Happen. Whether by ignorance - not knowing - or stupidity - refusing to know - about the real risks and possibilities, much of the public is a collection of cowards, huddled on the ground clutching at the legs of people trying to go anywhere, afraid more of inflated nightmares than of what could actually happen.
That is the stumbling block. That is what has to be changed before the United States can begin living up to its absolutely enormous potential above the atmosphere.
"Last I checked, a geek would be embarassed to display such an ignorance of space technology."
Unfortunately, that doesn't stop them..
Not too long ago I actually had someone tell me - with a straight face, mind you - that we shouldn't dare put RTGs or any other kinda fissiony power sources on spacecraft, ever. Why, I ask?
Because they'd pollute the untouched, pristine environment of space with deadly radiation.
He was serious!
And to think, if I took a shovel to the guy's head to try and knock the stupid out, I'd be the one to get in trouble with the law...
I love this delusional belief that perfect safety is ever going to be achieved. "We shouldn't do [whatever] until there's an absolute 100% chance of nothing ever going wrong! Let's not use RTGs in spacecraft! Let's not build tall buildings! Let's eliminate public scientific journals! Let's proscribe genetics and AI research! There's a nonzero chance of failure! We have to fear these evil things!"
Oh, give me a goddamn break. If you expect that level of safety out of anything, then I look forward to your explaining why you dare cross the street. After all, there's a greater than zero chance of your getting hit by a car, or at least tripping on the curb. There's such a thing as taking the precautionary principle to the point of lunacy.
Nothing like cowardice - cowardice based on ignorance and, even worse, an active refusal to know anything about risk, or think in terms of the real world - to help keep people stagnating until it's too late to do anything productive about it.
The problem with the Star Wars sets - and the other licensed sets - is that they cost like nine bucks a brick or whatever bullshit inflated price is on the things. I have a tub of 500 generic pieces sitting next to me that I paid four dollars for; a 500-piece Star Wars set would run most of a hundred dollars for some sets.
Granted, I got my tub before Lego started claiming to offer bulk sales, "bulk" meaning "you specify the bricks and we'll charge you seventy-five cents each"...
I kinda think they should do a real bulk sales system and charge by the pound or something. God knows they made enough 4x2s and 1x1s that they don't need to sell them for orders of magnitude more cost than you'd pay to buy them in a tub or set.
Re:Space exploration is in a bad way...
on
Dreams of the Moon
·
· Score: 1
I'm assuming you build it in orbit. You're not going to use an ion drive for takeoffs and landings, of course!
IMO, damn near anything, short of scorching large chunks of the planet, that leads to a permenant human presence in space at any level that could even make attempts at being sustainable, is worth it.
There are other baskets out there, and I want to see our eggs get spread out, dammit. This becomes doubly important as we start getting the potential ability to wreck this place enough that we'll need to spend millenia crawling back to the stars. We're not simply staring at eons of easy future that we can take our time with; this is probably more likely a dangerously narrow window of opportunity, and we need to take a chance while we still have a chance to take. We can worry about the (highly overrated, usually) cost later.
Re:Space exploration is in a bad way...
on
Dreams of the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
(IANAPhysicist, but I think I've got the math right in this post. Anyone able to add anything?)
Six months is a Really Short Time for an interplanetary trip, actually. It's probably actually around the minimum for any real missions, since shots further out can't take a direct route and have to do silly shit like go to Saturn via Mercury, Uranus and Sirius.
Any long-duration trip is going to have to be self-sufficient anyway. Unless you want any offworld presence to be gone and back in a month or something like that, it's simply a fact that people are going to have to work around. It'd be difficult but not impossible, especially if you start working in stuff like resupply if your hypothetical crew's sticking around on Mars for awhile. If you get the groundwork for an almost-entirely self-sufficient presence and start firing, say, three years' worth of spare parts in a multishot train every eighteen months (the turnaround time for direct Mars-shots), you can start doing neat stuff.
There are alternative propulsion methods going on right now, though. We're slowly starting to move away from straightforward "light off this oxygen and hydrogen to go forward" stuff, which is about as ineffecient as you can get - you only have a few seconds' or minutes' worth, even on a tremendous fuel tank like the Shuttles'.
Spacecraft coast for the large majority of their travel time because of this limitation. What you need is something that can produce a higher delta-V with less fuel so you can coast more effectively. To do this, you need a constant accelleration - a small one will do - relative to a short, massive boost. Ion propulsion is one of the ways of doing this. It's still shooting stuff out the back to make you go forward, but it can do so for a lot longer. The accelleration is comparatively minute, but since you're in a vacuum it's all adding up.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but those kiloliters of fuel used to toss the Shuttle up into space are burned out in about five to seven minutes, at which point the Shuttle is coasting along at roughly 25 kilometers per second. With ion-drive propulsion, that same fuel load could last a ridiculously long time - or you could use a smaller one and save mass, leading to better accelleration...
Look at it this way. Say you're accellerating at a measly one percent of g on such a drive. We'll call that 0.1 meters per second squared because there's so little propellant being used, even if it is going at an extremely high velocity to give your impulse. Any self-respecting ship using this engine will keep it running probably for days. After your first day of accelleration, you're travelling at 8.6 kilometers per second. After your first week, 60 kilometers per second. Let's say you've got enough reaction mass to go for two weeks on your heading-out and coming-back phases, which isn't terribly unreasonable. 120 kilometers per second! Only one spacecraft we've built so far has pulled off that kinda speed, and that was after a sequence of gravity slingshots which spanned years!
Incidentally, after that first week of accelleration you've travelled almost two million kilometers, at a merest fraction of the cost and time of earlier methods...
That's what we'll have to use to get people further afield in this system. It's there, already, just waiting for someone to start backing a project to use it..
Slashdot Mirror
-PS
Sure it is. Why wouldn't it be?
I like the idea of building both down and up myself, but sooner or later a rock the size of Cyprus or something will hit this planet, and failing that the sun'll eat it anyway...
-PS
I mean, augh. Barrow, Alaska. Town! There! Countless millenia of evolution, and Mother Nature gazes down upon the hairless African savannah-primates building a town in one of the crappiest locales on the planet for hairless African savannah-primates, and goes, "WTF?"
-PS
"This raises ethical questions" is one of the most popular anti-genetic-engineering comments out there. It's usually worded as though the fact of the questions is a condemnation of the idea itself.
Now, I see all sorts of claims that it's not ethical, or it's immoral, or whatnot. I can sort of understand some of these; some consent issues are obvious involving children, of course, and anything else involuntary. On the other hand, if people have to be modified to cope with a certain environment, the modifications will with a very high chance of success permit them to thrive there, and the initial generation going over can give informed consent, then I see nothing wrong with the fact. (That's my primary bias right there on the issue.)
However, a lot of people talk about human genetic engineering in general and simply say "it's unethical" or "it raises ethical questions" and think that leaves it at that.
This leaves me with a mix of dissatisfaction and curiosity; dissatisfaction because people are brushing off things with no real backup behind it, and curiosity as to where these questions are hiding.
So a question, both to the parent poster and to folks in general: Assuming (this is a significant asusmption, I'll grant, but play along) that it's possible to take healthy adult humans and gengineer them into beings fit for a Martian (or whatever other) environment, assuming those adults give informed consent to the process, and assuming the process is safe, what are these ethical questions that somehow make this an idea that people should not be allowed to undergo?
You can probably assume I won't agree with them ;), but I'm genuinely curious as to the reasons. Most people talking about this sort of thing either hold opinions similar to mine or tend to talk either in terms of "eww, Nazis!" or "eww, playing God!", neither of which tend to hold much water with me. Even going so far as to take a few looks (cursory looks, I'll admit) through academic literature have come up with a mix of those and the "different from baseline homo sapiens = not human = subhuman" idea, which I find more despicable than false. What else is out there?
So really, what's the beef? Why, if no one's doing this to you, should they not be permitted to have it done to themselves or even seriously discussed?
-PS
He is not right in the sense that the traditional use of the term implies a great deal of involuntary control, is guided by the belief that it is possible to breed culture and ideology, and the fact that the practice was typically through actions such as forced sterilization.
The word has become diluted to mean "bad" rather than "improving the qualities of the species" in much the same way that something like the term "genocide" has come to mean little more than "Nazi Germany-esque concentration camps." Because of the interpretations changing over time, any other possible use for the words have become rejected by people, and as such the words themselves become attacks.
If someone comes out and refers to transhumanist activity or whatever else as "eugenics," they're almost invariably using the term as an attack, as "proof" that the concept being suggested is evil. Look around on the other comments on this story; it comes up as a snarl word over and over. I'm quite aware of the origin of the word, but I'm also aware of what the word has since become.
-PS
Just because people are too stupid to understand the difference between voluntary and involuntary genetic engineering doesn't mean I have to strip off enough brain cells to get to the point. It takes a lot more thought to actually think about a term instead of taking the standard "butbutbutEVIL!" reaction, I know, but it can be refreshing.
-PS
I believe the word for that kind of thinking is "incredibly stupid," or maybe "straw man."
Though transhumanism as a concept certainly does exist as a word to describe purposefully altering humans and human physiology. You might want to look at what you're talking about before immediately flying off the handle with "butbutbutgattaca!" style bullshit.
-PS
It's perfectly possible for someone to act within their rights and still be an asshole about it, though, and that's exactly what this guy did - and is.
-PS
Not.
Granted, I suppose it's alright for him to do that because they're just blogs, and not something important like someone's Slashdot account or whatthehellhaveyou. Either way, the phrase "suck it down and live with it" should apply to both parties.
-PS
. I'm struck dumb at the finesse. Or maybe the dumb of the statement strikes me, one or the other...
-PS
-PS
Provided people ask in a specific, formulaic manner which betrays no unhappiness at the decision. Power trip? Uhhyep.
-PS
Do you really think folks care if a committee gets together to decide whether something may or may not be a word? I don't. If a word is used often enough by people, then it's a valid construction as a fait accompli.
Bzzt!
-PS
When they're obviously discussing multiple flavors of talent, and then neglect to mention which, that's when the historians start committing mass suicide trying to figure out a text..
-PS
A lot of units of measurement used in ancient times were subjective like this. The best (by which I mean "Augh! Worst!")example is the stathmos, which simply meant "a day's march."
A day's march how? On foot? Horseback? Chariot? With or without a supply train? Jogging? On flat ground? Broken terrain? Roads? The correct answer is "yes," which means that this unit can vary disgustingly depending on the circumstances. A day's trudge through the Amazon and a day's travel on horseback along a plain are both a stathmos, though they're very different distances.
There's other examples of this, such as the talent, defined as the weight a man could carry on his back comfortably, and therefore something between fifty and eighty pounds. It was used both as a simple unit of weight and as a unit of currency, so you'll see people paying reparations of fifty talents or whatnot to the neighbouring state - which drives people up the wall when the authour's not specifying what the talents are of!
Units of measurement were also different from town to town. Standardized weights and measures are newfangled.
The stadia isn't quite so flexible, but the definitions of it I've seen are still based off other units the Greeks used, so yes, enough uncertainty kicks in that we could be off by some significant factor either way. He could have subscribed to a William Tarn-esque "make shit up" school of thought, it's true, but he could also be right. I'd need to take a better look at what he's written to see whether the shoe fits or whether he had to perform some unrequired surgery.
-PS
It's not the level of technology or the cost, it's the popular will to get it done. The Apollo program was incredibly expensive in its day, and the technology was unproven, but people wanted it done.
Nowadays, we have the technology, obviously. We've even got the finances for some pretty ambitious things; much of the R&D foundations have been laid so there's less that needs to be done for conceptual work. Really, the cost of the Apollo program wasn't just the cost of the Apollo program; it was the cost of everything back to the first US launches. We have that tremendous base of experience now.
The problem right now is that the American public has become scared shitless of any kind of risk. Someone higher up in the thread said that this new launch vehicle is unacceptable unless the radioactivity is reduced to an absolute zero, for instance. People are using the Kim Robinson BS argument to say a space elevator should never be built; RTGs are to be shunned because there's an infinitesimal and even then grossly exaggerated chance of something going wrong...
You see it in other things as well. Note the massive Segway backlash because one - one! - person was incompetent enough to manage to get hurt falling off the damn thing. Fear of tall buildings because anything big might be attacked sometime, number of skyscrapers in the US notwithstanding. The zero-tolerance backlash against students in 1999-2000, which start putting all kinds of pressures and suspicions on people who played FPSes, wore trenchcoats, or were bullied. Paranoia about AI. New medical procedures. Almanacs, for fuck's sake.
No, addie. The technology is there. The finances are available if folks want to get them. The problem is that the people who will ultimately provide those finances, provide the impetus in terms of manpower, of popular support, of advocacy, of ballots, and of hoping - those people are abjectly terrified, because Something Just Might Happen. Whether by ignorance - not knowing - or stupidity - refusing to know - about the real risks and possibilities, much of the public is a collection of cowards, huddled on the ground clutching at the legs of people trying to go anywhere, afraid more of inflated nightmares than of what could actually happen.
That is the stumbling block. That is what has to be changed before the United States can begin living up to its absolutely enormous potential above the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, that doesn't stop them..
Not too long ago I actually had someone tell me - with a straight face, mind you - that we shouldn't dare put RTGs or any other kinda fissiony power sources on spacecraft, ever. Why, I ask?
Because they'd pollute the untouched, pristine environment of space with deadly radiation.
He was serious!
And to think, if I took a shovel to the guy's head to try and knock the stupid out, I'd be the one to get in trouble with the law...
Oh, give me a goddamn break. If you expect that level of safety out of anything, then I look forward to your explaining why you dare cross the street. After all, there's a greater than zero chance of your getting hit by a car, or at least tripping on the curb. There's such a thing as taking the precautionary principle to the point of lunacy.
Nothing like cowardice - cowardice based on ignorance and, even worse, an active refusal to know anything about risk, or think in terms of the real world - to help keep people stagnating until it's too late to do anything productive about it.
Granted, I got my tub before Lego started claiming to offer bulk sales, "bulk" meaning "you specify the bricks and we'll charge you seventy-five cents each"...
I kinda think they should do a real bulk sales system and charge by the pound or something. God knows they made enough 4x2s and 1x1s that they don't need to sell them for orders of magnitude more cost than you'd pay to buy them in a tub or set.
There are other baskets out there, and I want to see our eggs get spread out, dammit. This becomes doubly important as we start getting the potential ability to wreck this place enough that we'll need to spend millenia crawling back to the stars. We're not simply staring at eons of easy future that we can take our time with; this is probably more likely a dangerously narrow window of opportunity, and we need to take a chance while we still have a chance to take. We can worry about the (highly overrated, usually) cost later.
Six months is a Really Short Time for an interplanetary trip, actually. It's probably actually around the minimum for any real missions, since shots further out can't take a direct route and have to do silly shit like go to Saturn via Mercury, Uranus and Sirius.
Any long-duration trip is going to have to be self-sufficient anyway. Unless you want any offworld presence to be gone and back in a month or something like that, it's simply a fact that people are going to have to work around. It'd be difficult but not impossible, especially if you start working in stuff like resupply if your hypothetical crew's sticking around on Mars for awhile. If you get the groundwork for an almost-entirely self-sufficient presence and start firing, say, three years' worth of spare parts in a multishot train every eighteen months (the turnaround time for direct Mars-shots), you can start doing neat stuff.
There are alternative propulsion methods going on right now, though. We're slowly starting to move away from straightforward "light off this oxygen and hydrogen to go forward" stuff, which is about as ineffecient as you can get - you only have a few seconds' or minutes' worth, even on a tremendous fuel tank like the Shuttles'.
Spacecraft coast for the large majority of their travel time because of this limitation. What you need is something that can produce a higher delta-V with less fuel so you can coast more effectively. To do this, you need a constant accelleration - a small one will do - relative to a short, massive boost. Ion propulsion is one of the ways of doing this. It's still shooting stuff out the back to make you go forward, but it can do so for a lot longer. The accelleration is comparatively minute, but since you're in a vacuum it's all adding up.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but those kiloliters of fuel used to toss the Shuttle up into space are burned out in about five to seven minutes, at which point the Shuttle is coasting along at roughly 25 kilometers per second. With ion-drive propulsion, that same fuel load could last a ridiculously long time - or you could use a smaller one and save mass, leading to better accelleration...
Look at it this way. Say you're accellerating at a measly one percent of g on such a drive. We'll call that 0.1 meters per second squared because there's so little propellant being used, even if it is going at an extremely high velocity to give your impulse. Any self-respecting ship using this engine will keep it running probably for days. After your first day of accelleration, you're travelling at 8.6 kilometers per second. After your first week, 60 kilometers per second. Let's say you've got enough reaction mass to go for two weeks on your heading-out and coming-back phases, which isn't terribly unreasonable. 120 kilometers per second! Only one spacecraft we've built so far has pulled off that kinda speed, and that was after a sequence of gravity slingshots which spanned years!
Incidentally, after that first week of accelleration you've travelled almost two million kilometers, at a merest fraction of the cost and time of earlier methods...
That's what we'll have to use to get people further afield in this system. It's there, already, just waiting for someone to start backing a project to use it..