51–60 of 124 posts
Who remembers the Star Trek movie where one of the voyagers came back as v’ger - the humongous sentient entity of accumulated space junk?
Everyone.
Humanity’s greatest journey so far has only reached the closest world to us: the Moon ... in a universe that stretches endlessly in every direction and is seemingly infinite. It's kind of wild to think about: we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system. At this point, I suspect the next real explorers won't be us, but probes carrying intelligent machines..our robotic…
Short terms issues preventing long term gains.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No other place is habitable within a light day of the sun.
A good argument for making sure our planet stays habitable. Caring about the environment isn't just for hippies anymore!
A great long form video on this is "Shouting at stars : A history of interstellar messages". It really highlights just how empty it all is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFI5WpK2sgg
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ISS is one such place.
My understanding is that ISS is not self-sustaining even in principle. It consistently needs to be resupplied with water and breathable air as the station continuously leaks it. These resupplies happen about once every month or two. This article goes into quite a few details about what would be needed for actual self-sustainable human space exploration and it looks like there's quite a few engineering challenges to w…
Humanity’s greatest journey so far has only reached the closest world to us: the Moon ... in a universe that stretches endlessly in every direction and is seemingly infinite. It's kind of wild to think about: we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system. At this point, I suspect the next real explorers won't be us, but probes carrying intelligent machines..our robotic…
We are trapped in the solar system.
There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system. When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside. Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps.…
I remember as a kid seeing the first photos of Uranus and Neptune from the Voyager probes. What's sad to me is they remain to this day the only time we've ever visited these ice giants. There have been a number of proposals over the years but none have been selected and it seems like 2045-2050 is the soonest we could get to Uranus (more for Neptune) but that pretty much requires a launch by 2034 and we've pretty much…
We are trapped in the solar system.
We don’t understand quantum mechanics and we don’t understand gravity. There’s no reason to assume that we won’t find ways to travel the universe, e.g. by manipulating space time. We just don’t know what we don’t know.
If you had to bet based on past achievements, humanity will find a way. Our job is to push the limits as much as we can and build a foundation for future generations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good argument for making sure our planet stays habitable. Caring about the environment isn't just for hippies anymore!
That is it. When you become very aware of just how amazingly far away everything else is, fighting over a speak of dust and the only home we have seems absolutely ridiculous. A great long form video on this is "Shouting at stars : A history of interstellar messages". It really highlights just how empty it all is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFI5WpK2sgg
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No other place is habitable within a light day of the sun.
A good argument for making sure our planet stays habitable. Caring about the environment isn't just for hippies anymore!