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Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

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Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#81

Post by troels »

redthrowaway wrote: post #42

He'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…

My thought too, when reading this. Next thought - That's going to be some seriously messed up people that comes out of that.

Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#82

Post by berntb »

jacobolus wrote: post #36
mmaunder wrote: post #35

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?

E.g. nuclear pulse fission/fusion is literally 1960s tech. See the Orion project (or NERVA).

There are other proposals, which haven't gotten much funding.

The whole field of propulsion research has been underfunded since the 1970s, probably because NASA didn't want to risk creating competition for their big job program -- the Shuttle...

Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#83

Post by adrianN »

troels wrote: post #80
Detrus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

? I thought it was the mass that made a black hole - not the density ?

No, you just require a sufficient pressure to overcome the repulsive forces between the particles to collapse them to a singularity. That's why people were afraid of the LHC.

Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#84

Post by adrianN »

seanalltogether wrote: post #26
saulrh wrote: post #14

I agree with this pretty well, in that it's likely that flesh-and-blood humans will never physically travel to other planets en masse without some fundamental discoveries in physics. You'll note, though, that he explicitly disregards both starwisps and strong AI, and there's a reason for that: putting human-descended AI out into the universe is a much, much more feasible endeavor, and one that I personally believe we…

I would go so far as to question whether the first "person" to set foot on mars will be recognizable to us as human. We are simply too fragile.

Getting to Mars is actually not so difficult. I'm fairly confident that we'll have at least the token human on Mars in my lifetime.

Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#85

Post by adrianN »

yeahsure wrote: post #53
rsaarelm wrote: post #49

Earlier 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.

Preserving the AI that we created is close enough in my books. Genes are an archaic way to transfer information.

Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#86

Post by adrianN »

nkassis wrote: post #29
Dove wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I thought, too. I think the energy examples were supposed to scare me, and if he'd said something like total output of the sun, ever , they would have. But total power output of current civilization for five days garnered more of a "sounds doable" response from me.

Yeah I don't think it's impossible to build a bomb that big, as far as I understand it, no one felt like building bigger bombs than tsar bomba because it becomes useless, if I'm not mistaken after 400 megaton or so, most of the energy will just be sent to space. From the Tsar Bomba article on wikipedia: "Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting aroun…

You wouldn't build one huge bomb, but instead use lots and lots of tiny bombs in an Orion-type spacecraft. That way you get a better utilisation of your energy.

Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#87

Post by adrianN »

bad_user wrote: post #78
jacobolus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. You just wave 5 or 6 magic wands and then it works out. Isn’t that precisely what the essay claimed?

Yeah, but give it another 200 years and those magic wands may be possible. 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.

Indeed. Two hundred years ago it seemed impossible to cross the Atlantik in less than a week, now we can send people to the Moon and back in that time.

Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#88

Post by demallien »

DavidSJ wrote: post #50
benwr wrote: post #5

"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.

A gene is happy to sacrifice the genes of other individuals - it is not happy to sacrifice copies of itself, no matter where they are found. Hence we tend to protect mammals more than reptiles, apes more than other mammals, humans more than other apes, our own countrymen rather than those from other countries, and our family more than others from our country.

But when it comes to the vexed question of getting those genes to survive beyond our own mortal shell, the correct genetic strategy seems to be to protect our offspring, even at the expense of ourselves, so we commonly see parents sacrificing themselves for children, in many different species.

And that is of course the flow in Stross's argument about there not being any reason not to colonise. Sure, you can't be on multiple planets, but your offspring certainly can be, so if one of those planets goes up in smoke, your genes will continue on through your children on other planets...

Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#89

Post by redthrowaway »

iwwr wrote: post #72
rsaarelm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Desperate times may require desperate measures. Robotic parents won't have to be close to human parents, just good enough to teach language and reading. The result may be psychologically unstable or mentally deficient children, but that may be corrected in a few generations.

>but that may be corrected in a few generations.

Or not, as the case may be. That's why you send out many such probes. You would have to assume that most attempts would fail. You are, after all, attempting to transplant human life with no human oversight.

Either way, it's merely prolonging the inevitable. The Sun has about 5 billion years of fuel left, which is coincidentally about the time the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda, ruining everyone's day. The Sun would be far too hot to support life on Earth long before that, but let's assume we've moved to a more gentrified suburb. Even were humanity to somehow escape the Milky Way in the next 5 billion years, we'll still just be building sandcastle walls in an attempt to hold back the tide. I'm reminded here of Asimov's The Last Question, an excellent short story:

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Re: Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

#90

Post by billswift »

troels wrote: post #80
Detrus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

? I thought it was the mass that made a black hole - not the density ?

You need sufficient mass for a black hole to be stable, otherwise it "evaporates". A very small black hole would evaporate so fast that "explodes" would be a better term.
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