71–80 of 187 posts
That'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…
Actually 7, in 1 to 3 months.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. You need sufficiently advanced AI, but the purpose is to preserve humanity. It's a one-way trip. You aren't doing anything on another planet that will affect Earth, just spreading the seed.
The sufficiently advanced AI is going to have to be able to do pretty much the same things humans can do for the thing to work, so it'd be a game-changer in itself, not something that gets waved off as an aside. Re. the preservation thing, the question is exactly what counts as humanity. If you have limited resources and can only pick one, would you choose a planet colonized by biological humans who have lost all of…
What? No it doesn't. We can do massively better than this, right now. As in, today's technology. No problem.
Why haven't we? It's frickin' expensive.
But the long-range probes we've launched have been pretty damn near coasting their entire trip, with a few course corrections. They were pushed, and now they float until they gain sentience and come back to say "hi". If they had a huge-ass rocket attached to them, such as would likely be on anything interested in going any distance at any kind of speed (ie, human-carrying ships), they'd get where they're going a lot faster.
Next up, to get to proxmia centauri in 42 years with some hand-waving to make things simpler and 100% efficient energy usage:
>To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon ...
Where did 400 megatons come from, if it's equivalent to 21.6? And if 400 is "the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force", I say that's a miniscule amount of energy, especially once it's divided by 20. Crank it up another 10-fold beyond 400, and we're still talking modern-day terrestrial-level achievable energy without breaking a sweat.
>So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a million seconds — roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-voom.
Not bad, really. We're pretty inefficient right now. Make it cost a few times that - we'll be producing that in a week before we can even get a lame v0.1 ship built and in trials.
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All in all, an interesting read. But it feels more like a half-accurate rant. We're waving magic wands to get 100% efficiency and 2000kg, but we're not waving magic wands to get away from conventional rockets and today's energy production levels?
I'm entirely on their side that our tech today can't get us to the stars. Totally. I agree, the energy needed is quite literally astronomical, and we're not even close to it. But we keep finding weird things with our science - I'm not writing it off entirely. And I don't see why people seem to imply that we must leave from Earth - why not mine the asteroid belt to provide the fuel at our leisure, and build a truly massive ship? We're not going to aim for the stars on our first go, we'll be living in space for a long time before then.
Brief article summary: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Breakthrough_...
"The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead": I thought one of the implications of evolution was that we have a vested interest in protecting our genes, rather than acting solely on individual-level self-interest. Edit: What on earth would cause you to downvote this? Edit2: Thanks. I would still appreciate a comment if I'm 'doing it wrong.'
Evolution is perfectly "happy" to sacrifice the interests of the species for those of the individual organism or gene. That said, we're not slaves to evolution and can make our own choices for our own reasons.
This one is gold: "As Bruce Sterling has put it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live."
I dislike the word "never". As individuals and as a species we are addicted to short term gratification measured in years or decades. We also have a narrow view of the concept of "self" and what constitutes consciousness and experience. If we could stand building for the future and experiencing by proxy, a few more options become available: e.g. We could transport a set of human "blanks" or a "blank" creating machine…
Okay. You just wave 5 or 6 magic wands and then it works out. Isn’t that precisely what the essay claimed?
I'm not holding my breath as neither me nor my children or grandchildren are leaving this planet, but look at the progress in technology we've made since the industrial revolution happened.
That'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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ex…