Live data from Hacker News

Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

centauri-dreams.org

111–120 of 196 posts

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#111

With Alpha Centauri being only 4 light years away, interstellar travel seems almost feasible. But then you consider all the inconvenient details, and realize such a journey would have to take hundreds, maybe thousands or even more years on top of some incredible advances in rocket tech. If you go to something like Trappist (40 ly) at 0.01c (very optimistic), it's not just that everyone you know will be dead when you…

Yes, we have a long ways to go before we can be considered a starfaring species, one that can make and keep long–term agreements when they involve round–trip times in the tens of thousands of years. Still, it can be useful to altruistically start colonies before then.

There’s a book called Count to a Trillion which explores these ideas, and others. At the end of it the main character’s wife sets out on a mission to M33 and isn’t expected to return for at least 70,000 years. He gets stuck on Earth, unable to catch up with her, and promises to be here when she returns. The sequel is all about what he has to go through to keep Earth a going concern while she’s away.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#113

It won’t be us. It will be our descendants — the machines.

Any autonomous machines in a distant enough future will look neither as the present humans or animals nor like the present robots, because they will have to use a mixture of the technologies developed by living beings and by humans.

Humans have developed various things that are better for certain purposes than anything used by a living being, e.g. metals and semiconductor devices (most of the human-only technologies are a consequence of the control of fire, i.e. of the ability to perform manufacturing processes at high temperatures, unlike the living beings, which are limited to temperatures close to that of the ambient). On the other hand, for other purposes the use of organic substances and of the methods of chemical synthesis used by living beings are unbeatable.

So any future descendants will have to use hybrid technologies, like the "cyborgs" of many SF novels/movies, except that I have never seen any SF "cyborg" that combined the right parts from "machines" and from living organisms.

As an example, for the problem of energy storage for powering a machine, for providing short-time high power bursts capacitors and batteries are better than the chemical reactions used by living beings, e.g. ATP & phospho-creatine hydrolysis and anaerobic glycolysis. On the other hand for storing high-amounts of energy for long-time autonomy at a moderate power level, none of the fuel cell or battery technologies that have ever been attempted appears to have the potential to ever match the performances of the enzymatic oxidation of hydrocarbons that converts their chemical energy into ionic gradients in living beings, e.g. in our mitochondria. So an ideal autonomous machine would combine high-power capacitors/batteries with high-energy biologically-derived fuel cells.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#114

With Alpha Centauri being only 4 light years away, interstellar travel seems almost feasible. But then you consider all the inconvenient details, and realize such a journey would have to take hundreds, maybe thousands or even more years on top of some incredible advances in rocket tech. If you go to something like Trappist (40 ly) at 0.01c (very optimistic), it's not just that everyone you know will be dead when you…

Worse, you have no idea what you will find on the other side and weather that includes somewhere that doesn't make the arctic poles on earth look like paradise. And you'll be traveling in a small confined space. For ages. The good news is, you'll probably be unconscious for the journey. The bad news is that a lot can happen in decades/centuries/milennia and there's no guarantee you'll actually wake up. And everything else you said.

That raises the question who would want to travel and why. And what's wrong with them. Because the profile for people that want this would be hard to distinguish from somebody that is depressed and suicidal.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#115

With Alpha Centauri being only 4 light years away, interstellar travel seems almost feasible. But then you consider all the inconvenient details, and realize such a journey would have to take hundreds, maybe thousands or even more years on top of some incredible advances in rocket tech. If you go to something like Trappist (40 ly) at 0.01c (very optimistic), it's not just that everyone you know will be dead when you…

> it's not just that everyone you know will be dead when you arrive. Your entire nation will have disappeared to the sands of time.

Humans are just a stepping stone. Earth intelligence will transcend our 77 year lifespans and primate brains.

Our lungs are adapted to gas exchange on this particular gravity well and its unique biogeochemistry. There's no reason redox reactions need to happen like this, or indeed even be the primary propulsion mechanism.

This is our frail biases speaking. We are limited by our biology, but we won't be forever.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#116
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.

It is incredibly toxic belief, easily weaponized against space exploration. There will be never enough resources for "sustainability of our civilization, our specie, and our fragile planetary environment".

Isn't that "There will never be enough resources for..." line of thinking the toxic one?

If we ever end up unable to outrun ourselves we might as well end it?

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#117

With Alpha Centauri being only 4 light years away, interstellar travel seems almost feasible. But then you consider all the inconvenient details, and realize such a journey would have to take hundreds, maybe thousands or even more years on top of some incredible advances in rocket tech. If you go to something like Trappist (40 ly) at 0.01c (very optimistic), it's not just that everyone you know will be dead when you…

Worse, you have no idea what you will find on the other side and weather that includes somewhere that doesn't make the arctic poles on earth look like paradise. And you'll be traveling in a small confined space. For ages. The good news is, you'll probably be unconscious for the journey. The bad news is that a lot can happen in decades/centuries/milennia and there's no guarantee you'll actually wake up. And everything…

Given those time frames, maybe don't send primates. Send a computer babysitting a diverse zoo of bacteria and algae, with a variety of landing devices and instructions in what order to deploy them under which circumstances.

Same problem: the best-case outcome is that we never hear anything interesting from that rocket ever again. But it should be a lot cheaper.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#118

With Alpha Centauri being only 4 light years away, interstellar travel seems almost feasible. But then you consider all the inconvenient details, and realize such a journey would have to take hundreds, maybe thousands or even more years on top of some incredible advances in rocket tech. If you go to something like Trappist (40 ly) at 0.01c (very optimistic), it's not just that everyone you know will be dead when you…

> it's very hard to imagine interstellar travel being feasible with our current understanding.

Even with massive advancements in tech, and getting close to the speed of light, interstellar travel will be a lot of "one way heading into the unknown forever" kind of initiative. Interstellar empires only work with truly sci-fi tech that mostly ignores distances, like in sci-fi (instant subspace comms or warp travel with no relativistic effects)

This will never be the same kind of age of exploration as when we crossed the oceans and explored our planet. The scales are so mind blowing that even the fastest speed known to mankind is too slow. The times and distances involved to move and even just send signals (both ways!) and relativistic effects means at best we can "seed" a distant planet and hope that turns into a new (human?) civilization, forever separated from us for all practical purposes.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#119
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a bogus argument then mount a counterargument. The question is simple: what is worth mining in space? So far we have... "maybe platinum." Maybe! Aside from the conspicuous absence of math, "maybe platinum" isn't remotely important enough a factor in earthbound mining to justify asteroid mining on the basis of preserving earth, obviously.

What's worth mining in space? Everything that we can mine in space. That seems glib but I'll elaborate. By moving mining off planet to the moon and asteroids we eliminate the carbon emissions and environmental damage that occurs from these processes. So how do we do it? We don't need to start sending fleets and fleets of crafts into space which is energetically expensive and time consuming, what we need to do is deve…

Not the person you responded to but my 2cents. You expect to find the vast vast majority of materials for this self replicating mining equipment as well on the same asteroid? For them to put up the huge amounts of energy generation, materials refining and self fabrication for them to do a large amount of tasks and build reentry packages without us sending a lot of stuff into space lest we very easily surpass the impact of mining on earth.

We'll have to get very very creative with nickle-iron and silicates to build a small automata civilization on big flyby rocks.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#120
post #30
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…

Why would we not chase technological progress without increasing our proverbial footprint? We're not starting to inhabit new bodies of land for a long time now. We're slowing down our footprint growth among those in the most developed places but chasing new technologies hasn't slowed down accordingly.
Post reply on HN