A wet blanket for Sci-Fi fans

A GREAT read on the problems and improbabilities of settling other planets & solar systems. I'm sure we've all figured it's a monumental task, but this guy lays it out pretty harshly.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-stati...tier_redux.html

that guy is just no fun.

You think that guy is a Buddhist?

The journey of a thousand lifetimes starts with only a single step.....

Atomm wrote:
You think that guy is a Buddhist?

The journey of a thousand lifetimes starts with only a single step.....

I think he's well-read. He makes his living with the written word.

He also lacks the spark that drives us as a race......

I mean, seriously, we all know we can't travel to other stars right now, but at some point we are going to conquer the physics that will allow us to travel long distances in a short period of time. It may be a long time from now, but it is still worth exploring.....

He pretty much summed up his thoughts with the statement of why do we care about the extinction of the human race when we will be long dead and gone anyway. That statement alone shows how this guy thinks....

Atomm wrote:
He also lacks the spark that drives us as a race......

I mean, seriously, we all know we can't travel to other stars right now, but at some point we are going to conquer the physics that will allow us to travel long distances in a short period of time. It may be a long time from now, but it is still worth exploring.....

He pretty much summed up his thoughts with the statement of why do we care about the extinction of the human race when we will be long dead and gone anyway. That statement alone shows how this guy thinks....

Ah well, there will always be people who want to do the impossible, or the improbable. It's an interesting read, and seemingly well-reasoned and informed. As progress marches on, people will revisit the subject over and over - there's no danger of the human race giving up on such things in the long-term.

It seems to me that our biggest hurdle will be energy production, and that's the case for a lot of things we'd like to do. We've got to hold out hope we discover something better than what we've got now. Cheap, safe, reliable, renewable energy would be nearly the revolution that agriculture was.

As for conquering the physics that allow us to travel long distances in a short time. . .well, we might instead make a discovery that, once and for all, shows us we cannot do any better than a large portion of the speed of light. We can hope (and I certainly do), but only the discovery itself, and the transformation of the science from theory to practical use, will tell.

The comment about "why do we care about the rest of humanity when we ourselves will be dead" - well, I imagine many people have had that cross their mind in the course of considering this matter. In the final analysis, the human race is our extended family. We can't let it die any more than we could let our own family die, not if we can do anything about it. Beyond that, the human race is our own immortality, in a way. If the human race dies, than certainly any portion of ourselves that might remain alive - any thoughts, any deeds, any shared beliefs - will surely die with it.

One things this whole conversation makes think about is all the stars we have seen going super nova. How many of those had planets with life on them that we will never know about?

I still think we should be putting all of our money into deep space telescopes. Let's face it, we will have the technology to actually see what is going on in other solar systems and even on other planets long before we can get there.

We just need to figure out the whole wormhole thing. I saw it on Farscape.

Fknrambo wrote:
We just need to figure out the whole wormhole thing. I saw it on Farscape.

I saw it in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure we can pull it off. . . 🙂

I don't know about you, but I would hate to meet the worm that made that whole. Could you imagine? Scary.......

Atomm wrote:
I don't know about you, but I would hate to meet the worm that made that whole. Could you imagine? Scary.......

I'm jumping into this conversation late. I remember reading an article in Popular Science about two years ago about theoretical physicists developing the theory and mathematics to use black holes to travel to the other end. Apparently there is a "path" through the black hole that if traveled correctly can reach the other end. Potentially this could shave hundreds of years off space travel. Several problems with that though where the calculations had to be so exact that any error would cause a person to be crushed by the gravity instantly. Another is that Black Holes don't exactly co-operate in their placement. So really you only get to go to the other end. This leads to what consider the biggest problem. We don't know where black holes end up. All the light gets sucked in so they can't tell the destination.

Skorch wrote:
I'm jumping into this conversation late. I remember reading an article in Popular Science about two years ago about theoretical physicists developing the theory and mathematics to use black holes to travel to the other end. Apparently there is a "path" through the black hole that if traveled correctly can reach the other end. Potentially this could shave hundreds of years off space travel. Several problems with that though where the calculations had to be so exact that any error would cause a person to be crushed by the gravity instantly. Another is that Black Holes don't exactly co-operate in their placement. So really you only get to go to the other end. This leads to what consider the biggest problem. We don't know where black holes end up. All the light gets sucked in so they can't tell the destination.

The whole "black hole as a wormhole" thing is so odd, so fantastic that it grabs the imagination. Unfortunately, according to the scenario you set up, whatever we sent through, we'd NEVER know whether it goes through successfully, or gets ripped to pieces. Probes would take decades or hundreds of years to report back, if they could at all. And if we sent people though, we'd have to send them on one hell of a nice ship. It would have to be large, self-sustaining, fast moving (who knows if the other end puts them anywhere near a planetary system) - essentially a generation ship.

It's fascinating stuff, but in the final analysis, we'll never know what's on the other side of a wormhole, as we have to go too far to find one (why not just go to another planetary system directly if we can travel that far?), and who would ever throw anything bigger than a probe into such a crapshoot? Even if they did that, the probe would take way too long to report back, if it could at all.

Truly a wet blanket, eh?