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Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

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Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#21

Post by ta1243 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #17
agentultra wrote: post #3

Won't dreams stay dreams? There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with staying put.

There was a time when there was nothing (European) in the entire New World. There was a time when there was nothing known (to the US) about what was in most of the Louisiana Purchase. There was a time when there was nothing (European) in, say, Ohio. And then Nebraska. And so on. There was literally nothing there? Why go all that way? To see what was there. And then to make something there. [Edit, because I'm rate lim…

> There was literally nothing there

No there wasn't. There was a whole continent of untapped resources.

You can argue that the solar system is a lot of untapped resources too. Harder to extract than sailing a piece of wood across an ocean growing some food, and killing the people who are already there. Harder than colonising Antarctica or the surface of the sea too, but there are resources - not just minerals but solar energy too.

But interstellar space? Beyond the Oort Cloud? There's no evidence of anything other than perhaps some very sparse dust. That is nothing, and (jokes aside) completely incomparable to Ohio.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#22

Post by sorcerer-mar »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #17
agentultra wrote: post #3

Won't dreams stay dreams? There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with staying put.

There was a time when there was nothing (European) in the entire New World. There was a time when there was nothing known (to the US) about what was in most of the Louisiana Purchase. There was a time when there was nothing (European) in, say, Ohio. And then Nebraska. And so on. There was literally nothing there? Why go all that way? To see what was there. And then to make something there. [Edit, because I'm rate lim…

They didn't believe there was literally nothing there. They went all that way to find unclaimed riches.

The hypothetical riches were quite obvious: same stuff we have over here, but not owned by someone yet.

What are they hypothetical riches of outer space?

This is a question we should think about clearly and logically without resorting to stuff like "oh tally-ho the adventure!" type nonsense.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#23

Post by ta1243 »

cryptoz wrote: post #4
agentultra wrote: post #3

Won't dreams stay dreams? There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with staying put.

All life on Earth is going die. Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now? And what do you mean "literally nothing there"? The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it.

To quote Babylon 5

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#24

Post by kibwen »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #20
krunck wrote: post #16

The comment by Benjamin Stockton on the article page is spot-on: >I just wonder if humanity’s adventurous nature is leading us away from a proper focus on the sustainability of our civilization, our specie, and our fragile planetary environment? But we still need spaceflight at least for planetary defense against asteroids, mining asteroids(so we don't have to mine Earth), etc.

What resources are on asteroids that justify the energy expenditure to get from space and back? Can't be many of them...

The most compelling economic reason to pursue the technology of asteroid mining (at least as far as Earth's gravity well is concerned) is not to ever actually launch any serious asteroid mining operations, but rather to fool those who own gold into believing that you have the capability to devalue gold at your whim, and thereby accept a small ransom to not go asteroid mining.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#25

Post by pcrh »

jvm___ wrote: post #7
bregma wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it. In fact, technically, there's nothing here . It's all out there .

The Sun: 99.86% of the solar system's total mass. Jupiter: ~0.095% of the total mass, and ~71% of the non-solar mass. Saturn: ~0.03% of the total mass, and ~19% of the non-solar mass. Uranus and Neptune: Contribute a small percentage to the remaining non-solar mass. All other objects: (inner planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc.) account for less than 0.002% of the solar system's total mass. Your bra…

>Tragula's wife used to complain to him about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. She would often tell her husband to have some sense of proportion, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in one day. In response to her pleas for him to find some perspective, he built the Total Perspective Vortex.

>Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she would see in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain...

~Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#26

Post by ninetyninenine »

ta1243 wrote: post #23
cryptoz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All life on Earth is going die. Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now? And what do you mean "literally nothing there"? The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it.

To quote Babylon 5 Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein…

The odds are against us. We will never go to the stars. But it doesn’t matter for us as we will likely die before any of this happpens.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#27

Post by kibwen »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #8
cryptoz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All life on Earth is going die. Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now? And what do you mean "literally nothing there"? The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it.

>Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now? For whatever reason, humanity's attitude in this regard has changed drastically in the last century. We can't even bother to make the next generations, and a shrinking population eventually (quite quickly, really) shrinks to zero. Not only do they want to "stay put", they want to lay down and die.

The steelman counterargument is that focusing resources on extraplanetary colonies at the expense of the one habitable planet within reach will hasten humanity's destruction. How are you going to make an Eden on Mars if we can't even make an Eden on Earth? The only large-scale planetary engineering in humanity's history is Veniforming its home world.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#28

Post by econ »

You first have to build the perpetual motion engine and the reactionless drive.

Current thinking is quite hostile to doing the work. You might not be able to build the things you think you can. You certainly won't build the things you think you can't.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#29

Post by KineticLensman »

ta1243 wrote: post #19
KineticLensman wrote: post #2

> those of us with an interstellar bent naturally start musing about ‘sundiver’ trajectories, using a solar slingshot to accelerate an outbound spacecraft, perhaps with a propulsive burn at perihelion. . The latter option makes this an ‘Oberth maneuver’ and gives you a maximum outbound kick. You can't do a solar slingshot like you can with (say) Jupiter because the sun is essentially at rest with respect to the rest…

If you unfurl a solar sail after perihelion, presumably you get more energy while nearer the sun, giving more of a "kick", and lower in the gravity well (would oberth still apply for solar sail) Your speed once you get to 1AU would I assume be far higher than if you had simply started at Earth

But getting to the sun in the first place (from Earth) is a massive hassle as you have to lose the Earth's significant orbital speed to 'fall' inward [0]. Perhaps better just to use that fuel to head out. Operating a solar sail really close to the sun would also be challenging because of the massive heat.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/its-surprisingly-hard-to-g...

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#30

Post by trhway »

krunck wrote: post #16

The comment by Benjamin Stockton on the article page is spot-on: >I just wonder if humanity’s adventurous nature is leading us away from a proper focus on the sustainability of our civilization, our specie, and our fragile planetary environment? But we still need spaceflight at least for planetary defense against asteroids, mining asteroids(so we don't have to mine Earth), etc.

Our civilization has been driven by expansion. Without it we'd probably collapse into a neurally-connected well-organized ant colony without need for further technological/social/economic progress (which would naturally select/cull out corresponding features in our brain). And, i'd guess that is possible one of the forms of the Great Filter stopping many civilizations.

At 53 and good health, i'm contemplating that my end in 30-40 years would be me buying a one way to Mars and just exiting the habitat out without suit after enjoying a dinner with a Martian sunset view, breaking, even in such a small way, the chains of "We come from the earth, we return to the earth" :)

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