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Where did all the starships go?

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Re: Where did all the starships go?

#211

Post by direwolf20 »

WalterBright wrote: post #135
krapp wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river? That "river" is still vast and nothing we want is on the other side. >1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system. It's less the idea that Terran life is toxic and more that we're still hoping to find some forms of primitive life elsewhere in the solar system, and don't want those effor…

> nothing we want is on the other side Wow. > You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community. The odds are heavily stacked against other life existing, and get worse with every probe. Of course, nobody can prove there is no other life. And it's not very credible that Terran life will out-compete locally evolved life. And the idea that preserving some slime mold on Pluto justifies us co…

Ironically, thanks to the recent releases of the Epstein files,now we know that Musk is a pedo–boy.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#212

Post by mmooss »

WalterBright wrote: post #163
mmooss wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds The overwhelming amount of the work is done by NASA, ESA, CNSA (China, going to the Moon), and other space agencies. Musk has built orbital rockets. > routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews. That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims?

> Musk has built orbital rockets. Musk has built lots of cheap orbital rockets. That changes everything. > That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims? See the other responses in this thread.

> lots of cheap orbital rockets

It's valuable for sure. It's nothing like, "The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds". There are many others, and many are doing more (again, NASA, etc.). JPL's homepage says "Our missions have flown to every planet and the Sun ...", and that they've been on Mars for four years, so let's be serious and not throw wild absurd claims at the wall (very Musk-like, though!).

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#213

Post by paulryanrogers »

hdivider wrote: post #41

Wait till the Chinese land on the Moon first in this new space race. There will be a Sputnik moment, massive additional investment, and this will inevitably impact sci-fi. Just like in the previous space race, we had to fall quite a bit behind first before we wake up -- and then , we go all-out. I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always b…

> It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world.

Real world seems to be getting bleaker, especially for the young ones coming up today.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#214

Post by majormajor »

alexitorg wrote: post #201
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…

There are a heap of self published sci-fi and fantasy novels that fill the top selling lists on amazon in their respective niche. These are not included in the database that this analysis used. Space travel, multiple worlds and aliens are all really common tropes in those, even if the book is a pulpy progression fantasy or litrpg. The other top sellers are Romantasy which are published professionally. These have lots…

Poking around on Amazon's Kindle books for Science Fiction and the "popular" list seems to be all established names at this point? Some of them got their start self-publishing, ofc, like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Andy Weir's books but didn't stay that way. They don't make it particularly easy to sort/inspect the popularity stats, and I'm sure there are some super niche sub-genres out there, but for the genre as a whole I'm not seeing any surprises.

(Space travel, of course, is a major part of many of them, like Project Hail Mary or the Pierce Brown stuff. Not nearly as much in the Star Trek utopian vein, of course, as the parent commenter pointed out.)

Feels like folks like Blake Crouch or Mick Herron are filling similar spots as Cussler or Clancy these days, but again shifted to today's general worldview. Not as verbose as Clancy, though.

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#215

Post by andrekandre »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #169
gpm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alpha Centauri is only 4.2 light years away. 0.25c is definitely enough to reach it. You could even do a round trip in only your adult years.

A trip there to do… what? There likely won’t be any planet better than the very low bar of Mars for human habitation, in fact maybe even worse due to binary perturbations.

  > A trip there to do… what?
to play golf, what else?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_jYOubJmfM

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#216

Post by paulryanrogers »

indubioprorubik wrote: post #157

We wont go to space in the forseabe future. The brink archievment we might pull off is longterm civilizational stability, in ressource scarce, chaotic environments. Basically a oldfolkshome where we grow wise and vulcan enough to goto the stars. If we fallback into regressive behaviour call it facism, islamism, polpotism, whateverism and nuke ourselves - or decay into rotting landempires ala 1984, then we will never…

"cloning by cooperations for loyal employee"

corporations?

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#217

Post by throw4847285 »

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…

That doesn't add up. Plenty of Philip K Dick novels and stories have spaceships, while also being existential nightmares of the collapse of human identity. Ursula Le Guin, the quintessential new wave sci-fi author, mostly wrote about space travel (though usually as a mechanism for doing cultural anthropology).

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#219

Post by zamadatix »

kristianp wrote: post #218

I just noticed that russian wikipedia loves that first image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GAX-447.jpg#globalus... Edit: actually it doesn't appear on some of the pages cited there.

I think it's just because the image is used in the common navbax for the "Колонизация космоса" category many of those pages belong to (roughly "Space Colonization" according to some random translation tools).

Re: Where did all the starships go?

#220

Post by ricksunny »

sandworm101 wrote: post #179
ricksunny wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Again, raw LIGO data is sheer noise. They have to interrogate the dataset with their hypothesized candidate signal signature, natural or otherwise, and see if it ‘responds’ with a hit. In the case of black hole mergers, they had an idea - a candidate model - of what to look for. In the case of a warp drive, could they even guess a signature to interrogate the dataset with?

And to the extent that the -1701 patrolling Mars-Venus might manage to ‘stick out like a sore thumb’, what about the relative blip of a Sh'Raan class embarking on some fresh surveying out of 40 Eridani A?

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