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Where did all the starships go?

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Re: Where did all the starships go?

#101

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

chasil wrote: post #15
delichon wrote: post #7

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…

That's true, but stop to consider all the things we ARE doing...

* Space Station that lasts 25 years

* 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service

* Mars rovers that run for 10+ years

* Flying helicopters on Mars

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#102

Post by chasil »

sandworm101 wrote: post #87
chasil wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…

There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself. It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand generations. When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole merge…

The Chinese built a much larger spherical telescope, so what was the point of rebuilding Arecibo?

I visited Arecibo a decade before it collapsed. It was impressive and of great historical value, but could repair be cost-effective?

Edit: It did have some unique features.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#103

Post by Rodeoclash »

WJW wrote: post #93
jfengel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to break the speed of light to get to the stars. Time dilation and space contraction mean that you can get there in as little time as you desire. Everyone you knew on earth would be dead by the time you got back, but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all. (The rocket equation, however, presents stupendous engineering challenges.)

Time dilation and space contraction only matter if you can reasonably achieve speeds of a significant portion of the speed of light. AFAIK nobody has even come up with a reasonable way to achieve this for lightweight probes, let alone for hundred-ton ships capable of carrying humans. And let's not forget the practical problems like all photons incoming from the front being blueshifted into ultrahard radiation that wo…

Laser accelerate a lightweight probe, probe lands on alien planet and self replicates a receiver and basic robot body. Send mind in the form of information at speed of light and download into robot body.

Something roughly along these lines was believable enough for the Altered Carbon universe.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#104

Post by watwut »

flohofwoe wrote: post #25
pfdietz wrote: post #22

A great deal of science fiction is just fantasy with spaceships. It uses technological tropes to seem like it isn't fantasy, but that's just surface gloss.

Which is unfortunately true, but also just illustrates how far science-fiction has fallen - not sure when it started but I guess Star Wars played an important role to remove the 'science' from 'science-fiction'.

I suggest you rewatch star trek. Plot and complexity wise, they are basically childrend stories plus technobable.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#106

Post by watwut »

LanceH wrote: post #86

I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in general. As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir dies). I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids -- who are reading less i…

I remeber reading tons of junk and pulp as a teen decades ago. If anything, the teen section is more complex then pure hero fantasies and repetitive scary stories that used to make the bulk of reading. Yes, lord of the rings was popular before and now. But the stuff people read en masse was not lord of the rings and certainly not some kind of smart complex stuff.

What used to be read a lot was literary equivalent of a sitcom or slash fantasy.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#107

Post by [deleted] »

WJW wrote: post #89
dboreham wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably these are equally likely because you could build a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing though)?

Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.

[deleted]

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#108

Post by a3w »

thomasguide wrote: post #4

FYI, this is about the titles of these books, not the textual content of the books themselves. The implication of the article is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become more abstract and less literal over time.

The genre where we find the "fantasy/sci-fi" books right next to usually mystery books in our German book stores usually is speculative fiction:

- mystery, - horror, - fantasy, - and sci-fi have lots of overlap. - And XKCDs What-If-Books even.

But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened, and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the limitations and effects of their magic system.

Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would never work, when historical torched looked completely differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in fantasy books.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#109

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Rodeoclash wrote: post #103
WJW wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time dilation and space contraction only matter if you can reasonably achieve speeds of a significant portion of the speed of light. AFAIK nobody has even come up with a reasonable way to achieve this for lightweight probes, let alone for hundred-ton ships capable of carrying humans. And let's not forget the practical problems like all photons incoming from the front being blueshifted into ultrahard radiation that wo…

Laser accelerate a lightweight probe, probe lands on alien planet and self replicates a receiver and basic robot body. Send mind in the form of information at speed of light and download into robot body. Something roughly along these lines was believable enough for the Altered Carbon universe.

"lightweight probe" and "self replicates" don't go together. Nanobots are just as much fantasy physics as FTL is.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#110

Post by davedx »

chasil wrote: post #15
delichon wrote: post #7

The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…

Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…

> the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.

Spoken like someone who's never read Tau Zero

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