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Where did all the starships go?

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Re: Where did all the starships go?

#171

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets.

A species with that kind of capability would be able to visit another solar system in 10,000 or so years but might care less to mess around with dry little solar system bodies like the Earth. The case against "grabby" aliens is that Ceres and Pluto are still here, not that we can't find evidence of them on Earth.

I like to imagine that if that kind of interstellar traveler were to visit Earth it might take them a few decades to perfect a "reverse space-shuttle" because they'd gone 10,000 years without doing anything like that... And they can't just 3-d print one out of 10,000 year old plans because they've improved their 3-d printers to print the stuff they've been printing all that time better.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#172

Post by danny_codes »

johngossman wrote: post #90

I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea" and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when nuclear weapons and energy was top of m…

I don't see how anything substantive has changed vis-a-vis space. There are some hard sci-fi recently, like the Expanse, that tackle a more realistic space expansion. But fundamentally nothing has changed tech-wise in space technology since chemical rockets, at least not for people-sized space-endeavours.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#173

Post by PaulHoule »

krapp wrote: post #114
boothby wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that quetzocoatlus nothropi [1] was big enough. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus

"Dragon" as a classification is odd, because when you look at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays, sometimes from cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept, you find that they have little in common beyond some vaguely reptilian vibe and being scary. And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.

Dragons are dinosaurs, that is, closer to birds then contemporary reptiles.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#174

Post by PaulHoule »

nephihaha wrote: post #129
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…

I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. There would have to be considerable R&D, and willpower, and it would be very expensive but I think it is within our powers. Humans would have to live underground and deal with dust, maybe microbes in the case of Mars, but we could do it. The spaceships to go to Mars would have to be big but they could more easily be built on the Mo…

It's easy if you can build some kind of machine like what Eric Drexler talked about that could manufacture absolutely everything. Otherwise it's impossible.

The best hope for that is to send the one thing to Mars that people absolutely refuse to send to Mars which is bacteria and yeast and microbes. That could be a synthetic biology platform that could make pretty much all the molecules you need and then you assemble them with 3D printing or something like that.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#175

Post by WalterBright »

devmor wrote: post #168
WalterBright wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't support Musk if he was a fascist nazi. My personal views are libertarian.

I don’t think he is a fascist nazi either. But I do think he is happy to support them as long as they make him feel special, and that’s bad enough. The man is deeply unwell and desperate for approval and accolades. From anyone.

I think we can agree that Musk is strongly motivated. He works insanely hard and takes huge personal risks with his fortune.

He says why he does it - over and over - to save humanity by spreading it out into space.

> desperate for approval and accolades. From anyone.

If true, it is rather common behavior, not deeply unwell. Politicians 100% fall into that category. So do movie stars. So does every Olympic athlete. So what.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#176

Post by tialaramex »

wat10000 wrote: post #115
rybosworld wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of an off-topic observation: Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.

The part where superintelligent computers keep humans around as pets in a powerful and happy civilization is plausible. The part where there’s hyperdrive and energy grids and fields and effectors, less so.

IIRC Banks insisted in interviews that the culture's citizens aren't pets. The exact relationship is, like the FTL travel and indeed teleportation, very vague and only sketched in where needed to advance the plot.

We have no experience with the extremely asymmetrical relationships which would result. Lem tries to imagine this in Golem XIV - what happens when humans who are used to thinking of themselves as smart are talking with a categorically more intelligent machine - and it doesn't work very well even though it's only a sketch.

"Tatja Grimm's World" has a neat trick where Vinge is able to sidestep this because [[SPOILER]] although Tatja is much smarter than everybody else from her world, that's not because she's smarter than we are, almost everyone born on her planet is an idiot for reasons the story justifies.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#177

Post by coldtea »

davedx wrote: post #110
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…

> 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

Nothing about Tau Zero refutes what the parent wrote. It reinforces it.

Plus, even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#178

Post by coldtea »

bot403 wrote: post #66
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…

Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic? Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.

30s to 60s, sci-fi wasn't just driven by the "makes for great stories", but by the optimism for scientific advacements and the idea that these could get within reach in the future.

It was "science fiction" and not merely "space fiction".

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#179

Post by sandworm101 »

ricksunny wrote: post #112
sandworm101 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. • The LIGO methodology is to look for hyper-specified patterns in voluminous reams of apparent 'noise'. It wouldn't be unfair to call it an extensively aggravated search for what one is looking for. That's okay, so long as they provide the stats to back…

If LIGO can detect mergers at billions of lightyears, i doubt they could ignore the "sound" of the NCC-1701 passing through our solar system. Proper access or not, there are enough scifi geeks with access to LIGO data that someone would get the word out.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#180

Post by alexitorg »

Here are a few ideas trends that are affecting this: -Publishing is getting less profitable so there are less books being published by the big companies. -Publishing companies are grow 70-80% woman and are choosing female preferred books -Most published fiction readers are female (I'm not sure what came first women reading more books or publishes publishing less male friendly books) -Romance is the biggest genre fiction and that has heaps of dragons, werewolves and vampires (hence why those terms haven't dropped off) -Self published books aren't included in isfdb, lots of male authors self publish -Amazon best selling sci/fi, cyberpunk lists now have heaps of self-published books (maybe most) -Most of this stuff is pretty pulpy, but it is really common to have starships and space travel in these books.
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