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I personally subscribe to the school of thought that interstellar travel is impossible, except through some form of suspended animation or generation ships (whi

I personally subscribe to the school of thought that interstellar travel is impossible, except through some form of suspended animation or generation ships (which both have its own problems). So no warp/hyperdrives, no wormholes, no shortcuts to travel between the stars. This article dismisses that notion before it even begins, but this is the only theory that fits the currently observed laws of the universe.

m4rtink 7y ago
Even with no FTL, you can still do interstellar travel just fine if you make people live longer, which is being worked on for other reasons already.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  It's not individual lifespans that are the issue, it's the lifespan of your equipment. If your rocket breaks down in the interstellar void, you have no resources with which to fix it. And then you need to be able to bootstrap the entire industrial base to build a new rocket at your destination without any help whatsoever aside from what you brought with you. Given the history of interoceanic colonization efforts on Earth, this suggests that the difficulty ranges from "insane" to "impossible."
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    I think thats stil managable, even simply by redundancy and sending fleets of ships. Also 3D printing of replacement parts seems pretty promissing and is already being looked into (there is a basic 3D printer or the ISS).
    - tptacek 7y ago
      There is, but it doesn't really do anything, right? They printed some plastic toys with it; it's not operations-critical.
zzzeek 7y ago
the article refers to travel not just by the species itself but by machinery that is not limited by lifespan, which in theory would also be observable. We have probes that have left the solar system through this means. not to mention just the simple example of radio waves.
- BerislavLopac 7y ago
  The lifespan (either longer human, or mechanical) of individual travellers does not affect the speed of colonisation, so any communication would be quite limited. Which means that there be will be no interstellar "empires" or even cultures -- and if any habitable worlds are as rare as it seems to be the case for us, I'm not very optimistic about encountering any alien species any time soon.

m4rtink 7y ago

Even with no FTL, you can still do interstellar travel just fine if you make people live longer, which is being worked on for other reasons already.

jcranmer 7y ago
It's not individual lifespans that are the issue, it's the lifespan of your equipment. If your rocket breaks down in the interstellar void, you have no resources with which to fix it. And then you need to be able to bootstrap the entire industrial base to build a new rocket at your destination without any help whatsoever aside from what you brought with you. Given the history of interoceanic colonization efforts on Earth, this suggests that the difficulty ranges from "insane" to "impossible."
- m4rtink 7y ago
  I think thats stil managable, even simply by redundancy and sending fleets of ships. Also 3D printing of replacement parts seems pretty promissing and is already being looked into (there is a basic 3D printer or the ISS).
  - tptacek 7y ago
    There is, but it doesn't really do anything, right? They printed some plastic toys with it; it's not operations-critical.

zzzeek 7y ago

the article refers to travel not just by the species itself but by machinery that is not limited by lifespan, which in theory would also be observable. We have probes that have left the solar system through this means. not to mention just the simple example of radio waves.

BerislavLopac 7y ago
The lifespan (either longer human, or mechanical) of individual travellers does not affect the speed of colonisation, so any communication would be quite limited. Which means that there be will be no interstellar "empires" or even cultures -- and if any habitable worlds are as rare as it seems to be the case for us, I'm not very optimistic about encountering any alien species any time soon.