15 ms·

Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

• jacques_chester 15y ago
  There's two levels of magic wand here. The first is some breakthrough in physics that makes interstellar travel feasible. Not likely, but a staple of sci-fi. The second is a series of improvements in nanotechnology making interplanetary colonies feasible (though less necessary). And the looming confounding factor is that a "singularity" event might make all of this moot.
• syncopated 15y ago
  "That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force." So you're saying there's a chance!
  • Dove 15y ago
    That's what I thought, too. I think the energy examples were supposed to scare me, and if he'd said something like total output of the sun, ever, they would have. But total power output of current civilization for five days garnered more of a "sounds doable" response from me.
    • nkassis 15y ago
      Yeah I don't think it's impossible to build a bomb that big, as far as I understand it, no one felt like building bigger bombs than tsar bomba because it becomes useless, if I'm not mistaken after 400 megaton or so, most of the energy will just be sent to space. From the Tsar Bomba article on wikipedia: "Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds[citation needed], was about 5.4×1024 watts or 5.4 yottawatts (5.4 septillion watts). This is equivalent to approximately 1.4% of the power output of the Sun.[8]" That's a lot of power right there. Now to harness that :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
      • adrianN 15y ago
        You wouldn't build one huge bomb, but instead use lots and lots of tiny bombs in an Orion-type spacecraft. That way you get a better utilisation of your energy.
        • nkassis 15y ago
          Doesn't that make it even easier? But then again I think 400 megaton isn't enough. Last time I calculated it ( I probably made a ton of mistakes ;p) it was in the the 10s of thousands or something like that. Accelerating the space shuttle to 0.10c : (2,030 t * (0.10c)(0.10*c))/210 PJ = 8700 (wolfram alpha) 2,030 mass of space shuttle in metric tons 210PJ the energy from tsar bomba. But then you have to add in the weight of the bombs too. since they are each 27,000kg and then you have to sum it up to get to something that can approach 0.10c (and I don't remmember how I had figured that one out) And what says once you get to the other planet you can't fill the tank with nuclear materials over there for the return trip?
          • adrianN 15y ago
            You might be interested in Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_equation
    • foob 15y ago
      Yeah, it didn't seem like an absolute impossibility to me either (in the distant future). That much energy (9x10^17 Joules) translates to about 400kg of lithium deuteride in a 100% efficient fusion reactor. We're not even close to being able to burn that fuel efficiently at all but it's theoretically possible and I would hesitate to say that we'll never figure it out.
  • DennisP 15y ago
    The fact that we've already built equipment capable of delivering that much energy in a short time makes me think, holy crap, there really is.
• Steko 15y ago
  Spoilers: his reasoning does not involve Vogons.
  • deleted 15y ago
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• hsmyers 15y ago
  What was that limit on data transmission via copper again? 300baud? Or was it 1400? Nice the way science always ends for idiots like this...
  • ubercore 15y ago
    While I think I may agree with your sentiment (though maybe not your tone), I think it's kind of humorous to compare interstellar exploration and colonization with modem speeds. Edit: Curious about downvotes?
  • scott_s 15y ago
    The limits he talks about are fundamental. We would have to be very wrong about much of physics to invalidate his arguments.
    • waterlesscloud 15y ago
      It is virtually certain that we are very wrong about much of physics. Perhaps not in ways that solve these issues. But we're still almost certainly wrong about things we consider very fundamental.
      • sharpneli 15y ago
        At the same time we are very certain on some issues. As an example there will not be a theory which says "You can lift yourself up" and suddenly people grabbing their own belts could lift themselves up into the air. Any future theory will predict exactly the same things as current theories on the cases where current theories have been experimentally verified.
      • scott_s 15y ago
        Whatever we find out has to reduce to what we know now in the conditions we've already looked at. That contrains what we will discover in the future.
  • jodrellblank 15y ago
    Yeah, Charles Stross is such an unimaginative backwards thinking Luddite. Come on, wake up a bit. It's a reasoned essay, explaining his assumptions and exclusions, not just some babbling end-of-scientific-progress scaremongering.
• benwr 15y ago
  "The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead": I thought one of the implications of evolution was that we have a vested interest in protecting our genes, rather than acting solely on individual-level self-interest. Edit: What on earth would cause you to downvote this? Edit2: Thanks. I would still appreciate a comment if I'm 'doing it wrong.'
  • impendia 15y ago
    +1. Indeed, the entire post seems to glibly sidestep the question of what rational humans would do. The author implies that we only have a rational interest in what happens during our lifespan. But many of us, through childbearing or other means, try to leave something of value behind us. Irrational? Perhaps. But there's no reason pure hedonism should be any less irrational.
    • Jach 15y ago
      It also sidesteps the issue of people who plan/want to live indefinitely through advances in biotech, cryonics, mind uploading, etc. At the risk of distorting 'rational', if one personally cares at all about the future of humanity rather than just oneself in the present and immediate future it's easy to see why a course of action that helps humanity survive rather than hinders is a better, 'rational' course given that person's beliefs. Insert "moral dilemma" of the same flavor as being asked a preference on dying now, with everyone else living on, or living 5 more years then everyone including you dies.
  • DavidSJ 15y ago
    Evolution is perfectly "happy" to sacrifice the interests of the species for those of the individual organism or gene. That said, we're not slaves to evolution and can make our own choices for our own reasons.
    • civilian 15y ago
      Only if that individual or gene is robust enough to found a new species or transfer to a new species. I mean, evolution will end up attempting it anyway, because that's how it works, but the aggregate effect of all the individuals & genes competing only helps the species more.
• cletus 15y ago
  That's a good, grounded assessment of the scale of the problem. I too believe that the human colonization of space, even near-space (ie within the orbit of the Moon) is a long way off. The energy costs are simply too high and resources too cheap on the Earth to make it viable (in spite of typical SF fodder of asteroid mining). This is a problem because with 6.5 billion people we're using up resources. Fast. Anyway, I see two potential solutions to this problem: one not-so-far-fetched and one incredibly far-fetched. The not-so-far-fetched version is... hitch-hiking. Our understanding of the Universe is that it is full of mass wandering between stars. IIRC recently a planet-sized body was detected traveling between the stars. Simple probability dictates that it is only a matter of time before a sufficiently large body travels through the Solar System with sufficient velocity (including direction) to reach somewhere else in sufficient time (but not too fast that we can't perform an orbital intercept) that we can essentially build a colony on it. The far-fetched version is to use back holes as power sources [1] as this is, as far as I've read anyway, the only remotely viable method of providing propulsion without reaction mass to speak of and reaction mass is the death of any form of interstellar propulsion. The answer to the Fermi Paradox [2] may simply be that it's too hard to leave our comfortable gravity wells and most (all?) civilizations simply run out of stuff before they get there. I've also given the thought to "footprints". If you think about, say, a primitive tribesman. What do they need to survive in a sustainable fashion? They need a sufficient sized population (measured in the hundreds or low thousands) to avoid inbreeding and sufficient land area to provide a food source. This is probably measured in the tens or hundreds of square miles. Imagine all they need as the footprint of a sustainable colony as that then dictates the minimum size of any spaceship. Now imagine a more advanced society. 1000 modern humans would need an ENORMOUS footprint. Just think about computer chips. On any long voyage they'd break down so you need to be able to make new ones. That means a sufficient lab, technology, materials (or, in reality, the means to get more materials), all that knowledge and so on. Plus the size of the population goes up given required specializations. This of course assumes that people would do all of these things instead of, say, an AI of some kind (which would actually solve a lot of problems). That footprint is currently way too large to build any kind of interstellar vessel (IMHO). One of the trends I see in coming centuries is that footprint will reach a point of reducing in size. By 2100 I expect we'll be able to keep the sum of all human knowledge (or a close enough approximation) on an essentially mobile device. Advanced manufacturing techniques and materials may solve many of the footprint problems and so on. As the footprint goes down, the viability of any isolated colony being able to survive increases. The hitchhiking idea would also be ideal for the survival of humanity overall. With sufficient isolation, there will be cultural and genetic drift. If we're able to influence each other, that's a recipe for conflict. But a large mass passing through the Solar System is very likely a one-way ticket. There's no way to follow and no way to return (barring astronomically small odds of a repeat or inverse body). [1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803v1 http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803v1 [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
• deleted 15y ago
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• nostromo 15y ago
  I agree that humans will likely never leave the solar system. However, I think it's very possible -- even likely -- that human intelligence will. One interesting thing about sending some future human AI into space is that it could in theory 'power down' higher functions for hundreds or thousands of years as it travels to its destination. Upon reawakening, it would be in a new star system, with the cumulation of human knowledge in memory and enough tech to reproduce and start anew.
• saulrh 15y ago
  I agree with this pretty well, in that it's likely that flesh-and-blood humans will never physically travel to other planets en masse without some fundamental discoveries in physics. You'll note, though, that he explicitly disregards both starwisps and strong AI, and there's a reason for that: putting human-descended AI out into the universe is a much, much more feasible endeavor, and one that I personally believe we'll eventually accomplish.
  • seanalltogether 15y ago
    I would go so far as to question whether the first "person" to set foot on mars will be recognizable to us as human. We are simply too fragile.
    • adrianN 15y ago
      Getting to Mars is actually not so difficult. I'm fairly confident that we'll have at least the token human on Mars in my lifetime.
• pers3us 15y ago
  I guess i have heard this kind of argument before. In the movie book "Around the world in 80 days". Its not possible or you can't do travel all around the globe in 80 days. Still someone did it, sooner or later someone will do it, and see it takes us nearly 24 hours to make a complete rotation around the earth. Some day we will even reach to Proxima Cetauri.
  • wladimir 15y ago
    Indeed. I like the OP as a SF writer, but I have to disagree with him in this case. All you can say for sure is "With our current knowledge of science and level of technological development we will never leave the solar system". If you would have said a man would walk on the moon 100 years ago, you'd be regarded as crazy. What happens in the far future is impossible for us to predict right now. 100 years ago we didn't know everything there is to know, and now we don't either. History is full of these kind of closed-minded extrapolations. Appropriate other post on the frontpage right now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639701 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639701
• scott_s 15y ago
  I reach for this whenever someone mentions the inevitability of humans colonizing other planets - which I did earlier today. Nice to see others thinking it's worth highlighting.
• wolfrom 15y ago
  I agree with the notion that no human society will purposely invest money in a trek to another solar system, but I strongly disagree with the notion that humanity is stuck in this solar system for eternity. There seem to be two common misconceptions about the colonization of space: 1. People will colonize other planets. The notion that future generations will desire to burrow into other planets is as strange as expecting people to build a new city by digging caves in a cliff wall. Just as we now build apartment blocks and ranch houses, we will someday build custom habitats that aren't continually ravaged by earthquakes, tornados and spring floods. 2. Reaching the next solar system will be momentous. People will populate neighbouring solar systems just as our ancestors moved from Africa to other parts of the world... gradually from one generation to the next, each one drifting a little further into the Oort. One day a habitat that has its own artificial star within will move from the most recent piece of raw material to the next, not realizing that the one orbits our distant sun while the other orbits another star entirely. Barring catastrophe at home, this future is likely. It's just the same story that's been happening since Lucy's family left the Great Rift Valley.
  • scott_s 15y ago
    Note that you didn't actually address his arguments.
    • wolfrom 15y ago
      Please elaborate. His arguments are related to interstellar travel as an endeavour that is undertaken as a gravity well to gravity well transit. My argument is that planetary colonization and travel from Earth to the close orbit of Proxima Centauri or any other star is not the only method by which humankind will reach beyond this solar system. Does that not address his arguments?
      • scott_s 15y ago
        He makes specific arguments regarding the time and energy requirements of interplanetary and interstellar travel. You don't address those. What you do say is too vague for me to figure out exactly what you mean.
• thematt 15y ago
  I'm actually okay with humans never leaving the solar system. Our robotics and technology is advancing at a fast enough pace to satisfy my curiosity about what's out there. Look at the amazing stuff we've gotten back from a couple of Mars rovers, without ever having set foot on the surface. Let's just send robots out. It's much cheaper, comparatively easier...and can certainly be done much sooner.
• nazgulnarsil 15y ago
  don't care. give me a thorium reactor and a holodeck and I'll explore the universe from the safety of cave a mile beneath the earth's surface. alternatively upload me and I'll put myself in a more suitable interstellar body.
• apedley 15y ago
  Quantum entanglement, zero point energy, just to name a few things. While I agree these technologies might not be viable for a while, saying we are never going to leave the solar system is fairly short sighted. We always find a way :)
• liquids 15y ago
  While the author makes a good point about how humans will never leave the solar system, there are a few possibilities to continue human legacy. Ethics aside, sending seeded capsules to a habitable exoplanet could one day (millions of years) evolve into an intelligent species. Although not human, a DNA signature or some other artifact could be engineered to validate it as a human colonization. Additionally you could explore the possibilities of fleets of nano sized probes, which over the course of thousands of years, confirm the habitality of an exoplanet, and build a crude nursery for sperm (which could be sent at a later date). This method makes the energy/momentum problems slightly less impossible.
• mmaunder 15y ago
  I dislike the word "never". As individuals and as a species we are addicted to short term gratification measured in years or decades. We also have a narrow view of the concept of "self" and what constitutes consciousness and experience. If we could stand building for the future and experiencing by proxy, a few more options become available: e.g. We could transport a set of human "blanks" or a "blank" creating machine to a distant star at 10% of c. It would take a few hundred years. When it arrives and deploys, we upload our consciousness at the speed of light with no acceleration and deceleration into a "blank" human. Copies of ourselves could be regularly transported to and from a distant star over a few decades. A few technological breakthroughs would be required to make this a reality: * True Artificial Intelligence. A machine that is capable of self-awareness and analysis. * A complete understanding of the human brain and how to replicate the organism and it's contents. * A complete understanding of the human body, the life support mechanism for the brain - and how to duplicate it. * How to turn nuclear fission or fusion into propulsion at a high level of efficiency. * How to build factories that can stay dormant for a thousand years, wake up and operate as well as the day they were built. This probably will be solved as a result of AI and the ability to create self-repairing and self-improving machines. Many of these problems are in the CS and Biotech fields. That's what we do. Now get to work!
  • jacobolus 15y ago
    Okay. You just wave 5 or 6 magic wands and then it works out. Isn’t that precisely what the essay claimed?
    • bad_user 15y ago
      Yeah, but give it another 200 years and those magic wands may be possible. I'm not holding my breath as neither me nor my children or grandchildren are leaving this planet, but look at the progress in technology we've made since the industrial revolution happened.
      • adrianN 15y ago
        Indeed. Two hundred years ago it seemed impossible to cross the Atlantik in less than a week, now we can send people to the Moon and back in that time.
• guelo 15y ago
  As impossible as the physics seems I think the social problems are bigger. Scientists are currently unable to convince people to act against the potential catastrophe of global warming. Humans are too stupid to organize a planet wide self preservation effort that requires any significant amount of resources. I think the more likely scenario for humanity over the next 10 thousand years is several cycles of civilization and population collapses with a constant degradation of the environment and fewer and fewer available resources. This century might be the zenith of human achievement. It might take a smarter species a few million years from now to escape this rock.
  • billswift 15y ago
    Humans are too smart to let a bunch of bureaucrats with their pseudo-scientific rationalizations destroy the economy in the pursuit of more power for the bureaucracies.
    • itg 15y ago
      And this is exactly the type of short-sighted thinking that dooms us. The vast majority of scientists have come to a consensus yet you don't like it so label them bureaucrats with some sinister motive of destroying the economy behind it.
      • drcube 15y ago
        Just because we know there is a problem doesn't really mean anything. That's just the beginning. Ask yourself these questions: How much does/will the problem cost us? IS there a solution? How much will the solution cost? Then you do cost benefit analysis and decide the best course of action. THEN you try to talk everybody else into it. I'm happy to concede global warming is happening and will only get worse. Hell, I was one of the first people I know to understand and accept that. I just haven't seen the follow up yet. It's always "Yep, got yourself a problem there", but no solution offered other than "buy a Prius".
        • troutwine 15y ago
• RomP 15y ago
  A little over 100 years ago the humanity just learned how to overfly one football field. In space, today, we're in pre-aviation days: we're still using hot air balloons for transportation. We make them lighter than air (i.e. shoot them up in space) and let the wind (i.e gravity) to carry them places. Imagine the most educated human 120 years ago is being told about planes heavier than air, air transportation over oceans, jet-powered planes, autopilots and fly-by-wire, not to mention people on the moon. He would say it's impossible, due to energy constraints. Today a daily JFK-NRT flight uses more energy than all the horses which lived two centuries ago would be able to produce in their lifetimes, combined (my math may be off by one order of magnitude: it's late here). Today we're this person. Educated enough to have valid arguments against it, but utterly incorrect.
  • netcan 15y ago
    A very valid anti-Darwinian argument was that if the sun was made out of something similar to coal (densest known energy source at the time) evolution would not have had the time to take place. Far to many generations are required. They even allowed a two or three orders of magnitude to account for possible unknowns (maybe the sun has super coal) and still were didn't have enough time to make rats into cats, nevermind lizards into birds. The argment was valid argument till when" The Curies? Einstein? 100 years is a long time to figure stuff out. Thinking in millenia is impossible for us. "What would William the Norman have thought of all this?" is a pretty ridiculous thought and that's not even a whole thousand years ago. Nine year old crack babies today are more literate than most of his learned advisors and better technology meant sharper swords, less leaky boats and smoked bread. Their objections to the idea would have involved Loki chasing you around in a canoe. Lets not get too cocky.
    • randallsquared 15y ago
      Nine year old crack babies today are more literate than most of his learned advisors [...] Lets not get too cocky. Well, make up your mind. :)
      • netcan 15y ago
• deleted 15y ago
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• redthrowaway 15y ago
  He's already allowed for nanofactories and artificial wombs, so why send humans at all? Send frozen sperm and eggs and have the robots make the people once they get there. Now, all of a sudden, the length of the journey doesn't matter. Fling probes off willy-nilly at nearby and distant stars. If they get there, great. If not, you've only lost cash. Edit: The cool thing about this is that, assuming these technologies come to fruition, the entire project could likely be financed privately by a group of wealthy backers. You wouldn't need the massive bureaucracy of NASA or their dependency on Congress. You'd simply develop, test, then manufacture the (likely quite small) probes, then send them up and out on commercial rockets.
  • rsaarelm 15y ago
    If you can build robots smart enough to keep babies alive and raise them not to end up stone-age level feral children, you could probably save some effort, skip the human part entirely, and just send the robots to do colonist stuff.
    • yeahsure 15y ago
      That would not preserve our species, should planet Earth become inhabitable.
      • redthrowaway 15y ago
        Right, that's the whole point. It's not an economic venture, it's a backup plan.
        • chii 15y ago
          There is no economic value in funding this backup plan by the private sector (which is defined by profits). Its not like they will "own" the new colony - unless, of course, if they actually do. I.e., if the corps are allowed to use those colonists raised as slaves for the corp's gains, then there would be economic value and hence, the private sector will attempt to do this. Though i doubt that is ever going to pass, so the only alternative for this "backup" plan is gov't funded expeditions.
• chaostheory 15y ago
  “Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.” James Arthur Baldwin That being said, I don't disagree with most of the post.
• deleted 15y ago
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• rsaarelm 15y ago
  The stirred-up crazy in the comment thread there is almost more interesting than the post itself. I never realized how religion-like this stuff has ended up being for a lot of people before seeing that.
• VB6_Foreverr 15y ago
  I was watching a documentary about the wright brothers recently and right up until they actually did it many bright people doubted it would ever be possible to have powered human flight. Like it always has, something will come along that will change everything.
• shin_lao 15y ago
  I can't spot any flaw in the reasoning. But one could sum up the essay as such: "A man from the XXIst century said it it's impossible to leave the solar system" Perhaps we should wait for what the man of the XXIInd century might have to say? We'll need a couple of magic wands, but we've already built a lot of them. Remember that in the early XXth century going into space was still science fiction.
• yaix 15y ago
  I remember an article here on HN a few days ago about the storage of antimatter for about half an hour. In a few decades from now, the energy necessary for such a long distance space flight could come from half a ton of anti-hydrogen.
• mikk0j 15y ago
  This one is gold: "As Bruce Sterling has put it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live."
  • kitsune_ 15y ago
    Well, actually, people do live in the Gobi Desert (for example in Erenhot - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erenhot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erenhot - a city with 16'000 inhabitants).
  • rsheridan6 15y ago
    I would be very surprised if the Gobi Desert, and Antarctica, and any other inhospitable place you care to name, was not colonized and exploited in the distant future. Right now we aren't doing that because we don't need to, but we could. As for space colonization, there's enough of a romantic interest in it that I wouldn't think that the fact that it doesn't make economic sense would necessarily be a deal killer. There's also the possibility that some group would want to escape Earth at any expense. It didn't make a lot of economic sense for the Puritans to go to America, but they wanted out of the mother country.
  • hackermom 15y ago
    The significant difference is that we have colonized this planet already. It's in the nature of our species to increase our reach and breadth, and settling in the Gobi Desert simply doesn't pander towards this call. The perspective put forward by Sterling is very naive and narrow-minded, as it entirely disregards this human trait. Remember, we went to the moon, and we want to go to Mars, too, for reasons that we all know can't be fulfilled by a trip to the Gobi Desert.
    • SamReidHughes 15y ago
      > It's in the nature of our species to increase our reach and breadth, It is? Maybe it's in the nature of some individuals, but three boats ain't no rocketship.
• Groxx 15y ago
  >Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches [in their relative scale - e.g., Voyager probes] What? No it doesn't. We can do massively better than this, right now. As in, today's technology. No problem. Why haven't we? It's frickin' expensive. But the long-range probes we've launched have been pretty damn near coasting their entire trip, with a few course corrections. They were pushed, and now they float until they gain sentience and come back to say "hi". If they had a huge-ass rocket attached to them, such as would likely be on anything interested in going any distance at any kind of speed (ie, human-carrying ships), they'd get where they're going a lot faster. Next up, to get to proxmia centauri in 42 years with some hand-waving to make things simpler and 100% efficient energy usage: >To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon ... Where did 400 megatons come from, if it's equivalent to 21.6? And if 400 is "the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force", I say that's a miniscule amount of energy, especially once it's divided by 20. Crank it up another 10-fold beyond 400, and we're still talking modern-day terrestrial-level achievable energy without breaking a sweat. >So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a million seconds — roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-voom. Not bad, really. We're pretty inefficient right now. Make it cost a few times that - we'll be producing that in a week before we can even get a lame v0.1 ship built and in trials. --- All in all, an interesting read. But it feels more like a half-accurate rant. We're waving magic wands to get 100% efficiency and 2000kg, but we're not waving magic wands to get away from conventional rockets and today's energy production levels? I'm entirely on their side that our tech today can't get us to the stars. Totally. I agree, the energy needed is quite literally astronomical, and we're not even close to it. But we keep finding weird things with our science - I'm not writing it off entirely. And I don't see why people seem to imply that we must leave from Earth - why not mine the asteroid belt to provide the fuel at our leisure, and build a truly massive ship? We're not going to aim for the stars on our first go, we'll be living in space for a long time before then.
  • maxerickson 15y ago
    The 400 megatons comes from the estimate that the trip would require 2e18 joules (which is about 22x the 9e16 joules up there). And he is getting away from conventional rockets, the 2e18 estimate assumes that the energy required to move the ship is coming from elsewhere, not carried along with the ship. So he assumes a very small ship and mysterious ways of propelling it in order to sketch an estimate of the minimum amounts of energy involved. Ripping an even bigger hole in physics might throw acceleration and momentum out the window, but assuming 100% efficient transmission of energy across 24 light years already requires something pretty strange to us. (his comparisons to present day production levels seem more illustrative than pessimistic)
• Joakal 15y ago
  Interestingly, a non-profit [charity] foundation is dedicated to interstellar travel: http://www.tauzero.aero/ http://www.tauzero.aero/ Brief article summary: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Breakthrough_Propulsion_Physics_Program#Legacy https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Breakthrough_...
• civilian 15y ago
  The Lifeboat Foundation, http://lifeboat.com/ex/main http://lifeboat.com/ex/main is relevant. They're a (religious?) organization promoting humanity's colonization beyond Earth.
• hackermom 15y ago
  There's one great flaw in this article: the gross underestimation of man's potential, drive and constant progress.
  • sgt 15y ago
    Exactly, there will always be naysayers...
• tluyben2 15y ago
  I too believe we will (unfortunately) never leave the solar system. But for a quite different reason; consumerism. People are much more interested in stuffing burgers into their faces, living comfortably to a very old age while living unhealthy, buying tons of inane crap which they will never use. Downloading ringtones, spending 99% of their working day glued to Facebook, not cooking but ordering in every single day. Having a nicer car and house than the neighbors and getting their education while preferably not spending more than a month a year with their noses in books. The smart/educated few are not enough to offset the masses and for the masses it's simply not 'comfortable' to work on space travel; why would you, you already have a pool? Maybe poorer countries where people are not comfortable could be of use? Nah; you see around the world; when GDP gets over a certain level, out come the gadgets, mobile phones, ringtones, bentleys and other useless crap. A very small (fractional) % of humans is busy with the problem of energy and space travel. If it would be a few actual %s of humanity we might stand a chance, unfortunately, the rest of the collective brainpower is spent arguing if the latest X Factor was won fairly. I don't think we'll ever meet aliens either; after a certain time in the evolution, every race of 'intelligent' beings will invent paid ringtones, after that all chances of interstellar travel are gone.
• suprgeek 15y ago
  It comes down to which side of the human spirit you are betting on. Do you think that no matter how hard and how smart we try in the next 200-300 years we will never overcome some of the fundamental challenges of space and time? Then yes, what Stross says would make sense. Personally I am an optimist on these things - in 1711 you could not have imagined regular Aircraft - something we take for granted today much less Spacecrafts. Electricity, Computers, Cell-phones, Internet, etc would have been inconceivable. Today we have been to the moon ~40 years ago. Villagers in India use cellphones and electricity and a fifth of humanity is interconnected via the net. So I have to believe that by 2311 we will have cracked the problems around Interstellar travel and be living around a different Sun than our Sol. Anything else is just underestimating the Human Spirit.
  • cstross 15y ago
    You're also assuming that this hypothetical Human Spirit is immune to E. O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis (Otherwise it's not just human colonization you're talking about -- it's Terrestrial biosphere colonization, which is a vastly more complex matter than most people seem to be willing to contemplate.)
    • suprgeek 15y ago
      Thanks for the link. The hypothetical human spirit is the same mindset that drives the likes of this chap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes or the early (American) settlers. So barring an extinction level event there is better than even odds that Humanity will overcome the Gravity well of the sun en-mass to colonize another Solar system.
• forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
  Oh, the ego, what a marvelous thing! Believing that what we currently know is applicable to humans in the future, that our current limits are immutable. We know all the laws of physics, right? We know if the universe is finite or infinite(because we had traveled there and seen the limits), we know what creates gravity and exactly how electromagnetic attraction really works... the same way the people Socrates asked 2500 years ago knew it all, and Socrates himself did not knew anything(in his own words). The same way people already knew everything about the small things before microscope invention(in their own words it was unnecessary because "why we want to see what we already know smaller?"). That someone develops better ways to control active fission(atom by atom) and fusion reactions, that someone discovers something new about the universe,that someone discovers how to create antigravity because understands what gravity really is, that someone discover the way to crack the code on aging on our DNA, that someone discovers why the light limit on vacuum is what it is and some way of going faster, all of this impossible, because we know it all.
  • khafra 15y ago
    Making predictions grounded in supremely well-tested physics is not egotistical. Making specific predictions about the content of as-yet undiscovered science without any evidence is egotistical. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gq/the_proper_use_of_humility/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gq/the_proper_use_of_humility/
    • zyfo 15y ago
      Who's making the specific predictions here?
  • zyfo 15y ago
    I fully agree. Ask the leading scientist a couple of hundred years ago what they thought of going to moon. They too could've demonstrated how preposterous the proposition is by imagining all kinds of sci-fi energy sources and it would still seem impossible to them. That's not the same as saying that space colonization is going to happen or that it's remotely within reach anytime soon.
  • 15y ago
• chmike 15y ago
  I had the same conclusion initially and called it the horizont of space reachability principle. There is a limit to the travel distance defined by the energy consumption. Reducing the energy consumption to the minimum would allow to extend this horizont limit. Pushing this reasonning to its limit I noticed that we have plenty of examples on earth of live forms able to extend this limit to infinity by mean of seeds or spores form. In such form the organism is totally passive and consumes no energy. It has a trigger which induces reactivation of life and development that may be activated by external energy and appropriate condition. So it is possible for a life form, human or extraterrestrial, to build such a civilization seed which contains enough energy reserve and machinery to sustain life activity restoration and live form rebirth. Throw such civilization seed vessel like a bullet toward a distant solar system so that the energy of the target can be used to trigger start of development and we have our space travel capacity. This is not how we'd naturally imagine interstellar travel, but the important point is that this proves that it is possible without relying on exotic or hazardous hypothesis. We should also keep in mind that there is still the possibility to tap into the dark matter as source of energy. While this is still very uncertain, it should be known and well accepted By now that interstellar travel and space colonization is possible. I would like to add to this that if human life is a result of a natural process, there is a very high likelyhood that we are not alone in the univers and that other entities are likely to have started colonization already a long time ago. As we can see from earth civilization history a key factor to perserve its liberty and life autodetermination is the mastering of science and technology, intelligence and defense capacity. While there is still a need to protect ourselves from oher humans, in which we spend and waste a lot of ressource, the clock is ticking, and other civilizations may be developping much faster and efficiently than humans. It is no hard to see what it all implies.
• weavejester 15y ago
  Given that several Stross novels deal with uploaded intelligence, I was surprised that no mention of this was made. In Accelerando, for instance, his characters travel three light years in a coke-can sized spaceship powered by a laser stationed around Jupiter. It seems unlikely at best that we'll ever attempt interstellar travel in our current organic bodies. The idea of taking along an atmosphere, food, water, and enough space to move around just seems ridiculous when you could stuff a human consciousness into a volume that, at worst, is the size of a melon, and at best considerably smaller. You'd also be able to add error correcting and redundancy to make the ship robust from radiation damage. I suspect that any future spaceship will consist of perhaps 100 tons of computer and memory, designed with considerable redundancy and error correction. Perhaps 200,000 tons of shielding/fuel will be required, sufficient to protect the core computers and memory from interstellar particles, but also from the radiation from the ship's drive. Finally, you'd have a 1 million ton black hole sitting at the tail end of the ship, sufficiently large not to explode, but sufficiently small to have hardly any gravity. This would be fed by taking matter from the shielding to keep the black hole stable. For further redundancy the ships might travel in small fleets, each acting as a backup store for each of the others. If one ship gets taken out by a stray piece of matter, at least you'd have a few more containing the same colonists.
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  • felipemnoa 15y ago
    Honestly, if we have uploaded intelligence why would you send it via a spaceship. Just transmit it via an extremely powerful laser. May want to transmit it multiple times to account for errors. Of course, there should already be some strong AI waiting for you on the other side.
• rbanffy 15y ago
  In the 20th century we went from thinking that heavier-than-air flight was impossible to it being a major economic activity and the dominant form of medium-distance travel. We went from conventional explosives to nuclear explosives. We landed people on the Moon. We went from dying of dental caries to antibiotics and (very limited) genetic therapies. In one short century we published more books and amassed more knowledge than all centuries past. Together. And we built the tools to search it and process it into meaning. Traveling to another star is a formidable problem and doing it Newton style is not impractical. But if the past century teaches us something, we are a species prone to invent magic wands. Besides that, we all know how futile is to try to predict the future. We can only see and express it in our own terms. The future is as alien to us as Twitter would be to my grandmother (who would be turning a century if she were alive).
• rsheridan6 15y ago
  The problem with this analysis is that it assumes people will only do things that make economic sense, and only if it will benefit themselves or their descendants in a short time frame. In fact, we've done all sorts of useless, expensive things "because it's there," and we spend money on things like radiation shielding for nuclear waste that will last thousands of years. Granted, space colonization would be much more expensive than any very long-term or symbolic project we do now, but it's not out of the question that future societies would be more inclined to do stuff like that than 21st century anglophones. If so, none of Stross's barriers are necessarily deal-breakers. For example, I don't think Hitler would have spared any expense to seed another world with Aryans, regardless of whether it made any economic sense (since when do humans only do things that make sense?), and the 420 year time frame wouldn't seem like much to a man who thought he founded a 1000 year Reich.
• DennisP 15y ago
  "Ever" is a pretty strong word, and I think he's going to look pretty silly in a century or so. For example, here's an estimate of travel costs with boron fusion rockets: http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/fusion-propulsion-if-bussard-iec-fusion.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/fusion-propulsion-if-bussar... If either Bussard's polywell fusion or focus fusion turn out to work, that'll be achievable within a couple decades. As Moore's Law continues and we get better at simulating plasma, it's not that unlikely that some form of fusion will work out. There are a lot of possibilities for non-rocket launch, including various space-elevator-like schemes, laser launch, and mass drivers. Even without fusion, thorium fission could provide plenty of power. It'd be pretty expensive and slow to travel to another star with fusion...but eventually, with large solar panels in close orbit around the sun, we'll have an awful lot of energy to play with, and just maybe we'll figure out efficient laser or microwave power transmission sometime in the next thousand years. On the other hand, maybe we'll just colonize the Oort Cloud and gradually migrate to other stars over the next million years or so without really trying. (And, not that I'm holding my breath for this one, but if Woodward's right about the Mach effect we'll get to other stars pretty quickly.) As for the reasons...the resources of the solar system are millions of times what's available on Earth. Once launch is cheap it'll be a no-brainer to start mining the asteroids.
  • maratd 15y ago
    This is exactly right. It is not possible to predict technological advancement. 250 years ago, the idea of traveling between London and New York within a few hours would have seemed ludicrous ... and yet, that technology is easily available to most people today. We may never leave the solar system, but then again, we just might.
• Kilimanjaro 15y ago
  Phoenicians circa 1000bc: "We won't make it to america unless we build ships as large as a stadium and can put a thousand slaves with oars in them. But then, where are we going to put all the food to feed them? Well, we let them die and throw them in the ocean, only the stronger will deserve to be called the first american settlers" We don't know yet what the future may teach us.
• justin_vanw 15y ago
  Because we'll fall off the side! Oh, that's why we can't circumnavigate. Some other things man will never do: http://www.rense.com/general81/dw.htm http://www.rense.com/general81/dw.htm
• Apocryphon 15y ago
  I will take the man at his challenge, become a multi-trillionaire, and start building a domed city in the Gobi and a floating base in the North Atlantic.
• Eliezer 15y ago
  Seriously? Who would be dumb enough to try sending proteins to another star in the first place? See you at Proxima, and I don't mean in the flesh.
• mkramlich 15y ago
  the points he made are old and well-known to anyone into space and SF and not too young
• vorg 15y ago
  Just 5 days ago... "Kiwi developer Glenn Martin, who has been working on his flying machine for 30 years, intends to make it available on the market in 2012 at a cost of about US$100,000. Last month, the jetpack made its first high-altitude test flight, taking a dummy pilot to 1,500 meters under remote control while Mr Martin watched from a helicopter." For more, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8566096/Martin-Jetpacks-jetski-for-the-skies-to-go-on-sale-in-2012.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8566096/Martin-Jetpack... Humans will make it to the asteroids, to the rest of the Milky Way, and fill the Universe.
• SkyMarshal 15y ago
  >The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern. Nor should the future bankruptcy of your country concern you as long as it happens after you're dead. Even if your descendents have to pay the piper for it.