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The future of space colonization is not finding other worlds, unless we get warp drive. The future of space colonization is man made structures orbiting our su

by maeon3 16y ago

The future of space colonization is not finding other worlds, unless we get warp drive. The future of space colonization is man made structures orbiting our sun, gathering resources from nearby planets and shuttling them here. The sun is our battery and leaving it for extended periods of time will take mammoth amounts of technology and risk to leave it for thousands of years. A civilization that travels between the stars will have one of two things, either (1) a complete mastery over their own biological/technical processes which enable them to live in the first place (so they can repair themselves and make changes as needs and resources change when they pass from galaxy to galaxy). Or (2) they will have some sufficiently advanced technology to go many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. Maybe our galaxy is a spaceship, kind of like a big spinning petri dish and we just lost contact with the head honcho deciding where we are going. The sun we are currently feeding on was charged up at our origin, and we'll acquire more of them at our destination.

cma 16y ago
> will take mammoth amounts of technology With 1970's project-Orion type technology, we can get to alpha centauri within around 5 or 10 years (from the travelers' time-perspectives, hundreds of years from earth's perspective).
- randallsquared 16y ago
  Orion was great, but not quite that great. Alpha Centauri would have taken around 45 years one-way for an advanced ablation-cooled one-megaton pulse drive. Since it wouldn't get any faster than 10% light speed, time dilation would be negligible (I assume you were thinking about time dilation, though the distance to AC doesn't really permit the kind of difference you describe). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)#Interstellar_missions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...
  - cma 16y ago
    Well, the accelerations involved here would cause the most significant time dilation, right? I was going off of memory of the chapter "Saturn by 1970" in Dyson's "Disturbing the Universe". I probably mixed this up with something else; traveling at 1G acceleration to Orion (not in orion =P), would take 30 years--3100 years would pass by on earth.
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      The article I linked has some interesting specifics and discussion of Dyson's two interstellar Orion designs. In general, 1g for a year gets you fairly close to light speed, and time dilation really starts to have a noticeable effect. If you can accelerate at 1g indefinitely, then longer journeys are proportionately more reduced.
Someone 16y ago
"many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light." would be nice, but not a necessity. If many is only 2, we could reach thousands of stars in a year. I think we need not even have faster than light travel. I guess we would see plenty of volunteers, even for a one way trip, if we had a safe and luxurious enough ship that could reach another star in say a year of on board wall clock time. For some, the time dilatation effect alone could be sufficient reward to sign up for such a trip, as it would mean that one could see a much longer segment of human history.
prawn 16y ago
Maybe your comment is better phrased as "The short-term future of space colonisation" (where short-term is 1-1,000 years). I'd hope that our future of space colonisation goes a long way past those 1,000 years.
pavel_lishin 16y ago
We don't need to travel quickly as measured by time on Earth - only by time on board. Relativity already helps us with this. (Kind of ironic, actually. The light-speed barrier is annoying, but relativity is helpful.) If we could put ourselves in suspended animation - either actual hibernation through biological means, or some sort of way to arbitrarily slow down time (think Larry Niven's stasis fields) - then transit time virtually ceases to matter.

by maeon3 16y ago

cma 16y ago

> will take mammoth amounts of technology With 1970's project-Orion type technology, we can get to alpha centauri within around 5 or 10 years (from the travelers' time-perspectives, hundreds of years from earth's perspective).

randallsquared 16y ago
Orion was great, but not quite that great. Alpha Centauri would have taken around 45 years one-way for an advanced ablation-cooled one-megaton pulse drive. Since it wouldn't get any faster than 10% light speed, time dilation would be negligible (I assume you were thinking about time dilation, though the distance to AC doesn't really permit the kind of difference you describe). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)#Interstellar_missions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...
- cma 16y ago
  Well, the accelerations involved here would cause the most significant time dilation, right? I was going off of memory of the chapter "Saturn by 1970" in Dyson's "Disturbing the Universe". I probably mixed this up with something else; traveling at 1G acceleration to Orion (not in orion =P), would take 30 years--3100 years would pass by on earth.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    The article I linked has some interesting specifics and discussion of Dyson's two interstellar Orion designs. In general, 1g for a year gets you fairly close to light speed, and time dilation really starts to have a noticeable effect. If you can accelerate at 1g indefinitely, then longer journeys are proportionately more reduced.

Someone 16y ago

"many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light." would be nice, but not a necessity. If many is only 2, we could reach thousands of stars in a year. I think we need not even have faster than light travel. I guess we would see plenty of volunteers, even for a one way trip, if we had a safe and luxurious enough ship that could reach another star in say a year of on board wall clock time. For some, the time dilatation effect alone could be sufficient reward to sign up for such a trip, as it would mean that one could see a much longer segment of human history.

prawn 16y ago

Maybe your comment is better phrased as "The short-term future of space colonisation" (where short-term is 1-1,000 years). I'd hope that our future of space colonisation goes a long way past those 1,000 years.

pavel_lishin 16y ago

We don't need to travel quickly as measured by time on Earth - only by time on board. Relativity already helps us with this. (Kind of ironic, actually. The light-speed barrier is annoying, but relativity is helpful.) If we could put ourselves in suspended animation - either actual hibernation through biological means, or some sort of way to arbitrarily slow down time (think Larry Niven's stasis fields) - then transit time virtually ceases to matter.