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Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

centauri-dreams.org

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Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#161

Post by sorcerer-mar »

rbanffy wrote: post #159
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say we had to choose one or the other, I'm suggesting actually the opposite: the clearly superior way to do it is to first do one (ensure we are maximally leveraging all IQ points born to humans on earth) then do the other (now armed with billions more brains that freed from the daily task of avoiding premature death). If you have an argument for why the reverse ordering, or in parallel, would be better, tha…

Since the expansion is a far longer term project, I always assumed eradicating poverty on Earth would be a trivial endeavor in comparison. We kind of can do that today, if we really put our minds to it. The benefit, however, is minuscule compared to what an expansion into quadrillions of highly educated humans could create.

Welp I'll let other readers assess this logic and moral system for themselves!

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#162

Post by sorcerer-mar »

rbanffy wrote: post #160
jiggawatts wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people are dreamers that grew up watching Star Wars and Star Trek. The world painted by those shows has lodged in their minds, and no amount of logic will shake it loose. In the past, I've challenged the "Let's colonize Mars!" people to do something that's far easier : Move to Bouvet island, now.[1] This is a frozen uninhabited rock that is nonetheless a tropical paradise compared to Mars. It's far easier to re…

> It's far easier to reach, has free unlimited oxygen and water, and gets more solar radiation also for power! It's luxurious compared to the colder, dryer deserts of Mars where there's only dry rocks and near-vacuum. You miss the whole point. The point of becoming an interplanetary civilization is not to fill every barren rock you see (and there are plenty on Earth, and, if climate change isn't controlled, there'll…

So... go to Bouvet Island and see if it fixes it? Or therapy?

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#163

Post by saulpw »

db48x wrote: post #111
imoreno wrote: post #109

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 M…

Also the Queen song "'39", written by Brian May (who resumed and completed his Ph.D. in Astrophysics decades after his time with Queen).

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#164

Post by andrewflnr »

rbanffy wrote: post #153
andrewflnr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you put it in the title you need a different punchline. :D

It would be a different tale altogether - probably engineers discussing how ludicrous the idea is, until it's feasible, and then debating the consequences before pressing the red button.

Yeah. I think I was really imagining it as a chapter title in something like Ra [0]. Sam is good at bombastic chapter titles.

[0] https://qntm.org/ra

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#165

Post by silverquiet »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #140

Everyone suffers from the sci-fi delusion. We can't solve the problem of large-scale wildfires (sending helicopters and planes to drop water on forest fires is not a viable solution) and we can't even do large-scale terraforming on our own Earth. We have to use containers to transport liquids and solids from one place to another. We cannot control the weather, yet people fantasize about travelling into space. It's de…

I would say worse than that, we are doing the opposite of large-scale terraforming to create a planet that will be rather inhospitable towards the end of this century and even less so in the centuries that follow. I think the sci-fi delusion is a hold over from a better time; the heyday was probably the 50's-60's when scientific progress seems like it was much greater and was actually able to translate into benefits for people that were noticeable.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#166

Post by rbanffy »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #162
rbanffy wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's far easier to reach, has free unlimited oxygen and water, and gets more solar radiation also for power! It's luxurious compared to the colder, dryer deserts of Mars where there's only dry rocks and near-vacuum. You miss the whole point. The point of becoming an interplanetary civilization is not to fill every barren rock you see (and there are plenty on Earth, and, if climate change isn't controlled, there'll…

So... go to Bouvet Island and see if it fixes it? Or therapy?

I am in no hurry to explore a barren rock in my backyard, but I would be very curious to know whether life exists or existed in another rocky planet and what it'd look like.

You can't answer that from Bouvet Island, can you?

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#167

Post by sorcerer-mar »

rbanffy wrote: post #166
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... go to Bouvet Island and see if it fixes it? Or therapy?

I am in no hurry to explore a barren rock in my backyard, but I would be very curious to know whether life exists or existed in another rocky planet and what it'd look like. You can't answer that from Bouvet Island, can you?

You could answer it by shipping a robot to Mars, can't you?

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#168

Post by kfuse »

verzali wrote: post #150
kfuse wrote: post #122

Why is everyone so fixed on interstellar travel? What if the galaxy is chock full of rogue planets? There may be hundreds if not thousands of worlds between us and the surrounding stars. Hopefully, Roman Telescope set to launch in 2027 is going to find lots of them.

Those rogue worlds are frozen though, the only source they have is from radioactive decay in their cores. And eternally dark, since they have no Sun to light them. It would make more sense to use fusion reactors to power colonies in the outer reaches of the solar system than to go to a rogue planet.

Jupiter is 5 times farther from the Sun than us, there is basically no lighting and heat from the Sun there.

I think for a civilization capable of sending reasonable amount of people people at reasonable speeds to colonize such planets, creating suitable atmosphere, lighting and heating is very much possible. Gravity is the only hard requirement.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#169

Post by nradov »

CJefferson wrote: post #144
imoreno wrote: post #109

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…

I used to often hear people joke that because of Moore's law, there was no point running any computation which would take longer than 4 years, as you'd instead be better to wait 2 years for computers to double in power, then run your problem then. Interstellar travel probably has a similar problem, even if you have an engine that can do 0.1c, you have to be sure in 5 years you won't have one that can do 0.2c, or that…

Propulsion technology advances much more slowly than Moore's Law. The rate of progress in terms of ISP or maximum velocity has been approximately zero since 1969. The only way we'll ever be able to afford sending a probe to another star is with some new breakthrough technology, and disruptive technologies don't appear on any predictable schedule.

Re: Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

#170

Post by nradov »

nosianu wrote: post #121
Matumio wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Send a computer Those age too. Especially out there without the earth's shields. If you make one that lives longer than a human it's already quite the feat, add only a bit more radiation, it only gets worse. Computers are much worse with failures than brains too. The nice thing about biological systems is the self-assembly from tiny molecule parts. Worst case, you can create a closed system with birth/death renewal…

The notion of a general-purpose molecular assembler or nanofactory appears to be a pure fantasy. We don't even have a theoretical approach to making that happen.
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