The stirred-up crazy in the comment thread there is almost more interesting than the post itself. I never realized how religion-like this stuff has ended up being for a lot of people before seeing that.
Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
51–60 of 187 posts
Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
#52That's a good, grounded assessment of the scale of the problem. I too believe that the human colonization of space, even near-space (ie within the orbit of the Moon) is a long way off. The energy costs are simply too high and resources too cheap on the Earth to make it viable (in spite of typical SF fodder of asteroid mining). This is a problem because with 6.5 billion people we're using up resources. Fast. Anyway, I…
Black holes spaceships are the ticket with our current understanding of physics. They can carry a large and heavy cargo in ship form or can push small planets slowly in a desired direction. The travel times for black hole ships are reasonable too, about six years to Proxima Centauri. It beats the other sci-fi concepts like fusion, Orion, anti matter and solar sails. Funny how solar sails seem like the easier option t…
How exactly does one build a black hole without obliterating ones host species/planet/solar system?
Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
#53He's already allowed for nanofactories and artificial wombs, so why send humans at all? Send frozen sperm and eggs and have the robots make the people once they get there. Now, all of a sudden, the length of the journey doesn't matter. Fling probes off willy-nilly at nearby and distant stars. If they get there, great. If not, you've only lost cash. Edit: The cool thing about this is that, assuming these technologies…
If you can build robots smart enough to keep babies alive and raise them not to end up stone-age level feral children, you could probably save some effort, skip the human part entirely, and just send the robots to do colonist stuff.
That would not preserve our species, should planet Earth become inhabitable.
Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Black holes spaceships are the ticket with our current understanding of physics. They can carry a large and heavy cargo in ship form or can push small planets slowly in a desired direction. The travel times for black hole ships are reasonable too, about six years to Proxima Centauri. It beats the other sci-fi concepts like fusion, Orion, anti matter and solar sails. Funny how solar sails seem like the easier option t…
How exactly does one build a black hole without obliterating ones host species/planet/solar system?
A black hole doesn't have any more gravitational pull than normal. If you turned the Earth into a black hole by somehow compressing it past the required radius, the moon would still orbit it the same way. From what I understand anyway, I am not a physicist.
Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can build robots smart enough to keep babies alive and raise them not to end up stone-age level feral children, you could probably save some effort, skip the human part entirely, and just send the robots to do colonist stuff.
That would not preserve our species, should planet Earth become inhabitable.
Right, that's the whole point. It's not an economic venture, it's a backup plan.
Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
#56He's already allowed for nanofactories and artificial wombs, so why send humans at all? Send frozen sperm and eggs and have the robots make the people once they get there. Now, all of a sudden, the length of the journey doesn't matter. Fling probes off willy-nilly at nearby and distant stars. If they get there, great. If not, you've only lost cash. Edit: The cool thing about this is that, assuming these technologies…
If you can build robots smart enough to keep babies alive and raise them not to end up stone-age level feral children, you could probably save some effort, skip the human part entirely, and just send the robots to do colonist stuff.
Not if the "colonist stuff" is "fork the human race".
Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Black holes spaceships are the ticket with our current understanding of physics. They can carry a large and heavy cargo in ship form or can push small planets slowly in a desired direction. The travel times for black hole ships are reasonable too, about six years to Proxima Centauri. It beats the other sci-fi concepts like fusion, Orion, anti matter and solar sails. Funny how solar sails seem like the easier option t…
How exactly does one build a black hole without obliterating ones host species/planet/solar system?
Most of their science paper is in layman English http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803v1 and explains such questions.
The black holes they would build are very very tiny, about the size of a proton. They are relatively light, about 600,000 tons. Such a body doesn't have noticeable gravity, it's too light to attract anything and too small to absorb it. The big danger from these are explosions at the end of their life. The explosions are serious if they happened near Earth, but safe at the distance of Earth to Sun. They're built near the host star anyway.
Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
#58I was watching a documentary about the wright brothers recently and right up until they actually did it many bright people doubted it would ever be possible to have powered human flight.
Like it always has, something will come along that will change everything.
Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can build robots smart enough to keep babies alive and raise them not to end up stone-age level feral children, you could probably save some effort, skip the human part entirely, and just send the robots to do colonist stuff.
That would not preserve our species, should planet Earth become inhabitable.
If you have robots that can raise babies into grown-up humans, the robots need to be pretty much the same as humans themselves at that point.
Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
#60I can't spot any flaw in the reasoning.
But one could sum up the essay as such:
"A man from the XXIst century said it it's impossible to leave the solar system"
Perhaps we should wait for what the man of the XXIInd century might have to say?
We'll need a couple of magic wands, but we've already built a lot of them.
Remember that in the early XXth century going into space was still science fiction.