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The distance to the moon and Mars is absolutely trivial compared to even the closest star: to Mars is 0.0007% of the way to Alpha Centauri. >We got to the moon

The distance to the moon and Mars is absolutely trivial compared to even the closest star: to Mars is 0.0007% of the way to Alpha Centauri. >We got to the moon, Mars, and several other solar system bodies You're conflating humans and probes, which are vastly different.

dheera 5y ago
> You're conflating humans and probes, which are vastly different. I disagree. Robots can build infrastructure far ahead of human settlement, such that everything already exists when we are ready to travel. We can also potentially re-engineer our own life form, or create an entirely new inorganic lifeform, to withstand various conditions, including radiation and a wider range of temperatures. That will be our successor. We are only beginning to understand genetics in the past decade. We have a long, long way to go, and a lot to understand. Science is still at its infancy. Also, this is something I could never say in an academic context, but deep down I don't believe in conservation of energy, partly because the big bang itself violates it. Yes, I would be ridiculed for saying this in a scientific context, but so would someone in the 1500s for saying that the Earth goes around the sun. I think at some point in the distant future we will not be reliant on stars as our energy source.
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  'we' did not go to Mars, 'we' did not go to pluto. We sent cameras with walky-talkies. That is so vastly different than sending people to the moon, that it's not really something we can disagree on in good faith. If you truly do not believe in the conservation of energy, I think we're done here since none of my arguments will be good enough for such wild speculation.
  - dheera 5y ago
    If we can send cameras with walky-talkies, we can invent and send (possibly silicon-based) life forms that will carry on our legacy while being a lot more resistant to the elements, require much less support along the journey, and can tolerate whatever gases and radiation may be present at the destination while still reproducing and carrying on society just as life does now. Human bodies suck because they need to eat, need to poop, complain if what they eat isn't tasty, fight with each other, and get cancer, but our legacy as intelligent life doesn't need to continue in our current carbon-based meat bag form.
    - OmicronCeti 5y ago
      I can't believe I'm entertaining a reply, but how would a human-invented lifeform sent to the stars carry on human society if it is a) not human, and b) light years spatially distance and thousands of years temporally distant? This reads like an ungrad astronomy major fever dream.
      - dheera 5y ago
        It would carry on our legacy as intelligent life. I don't think maintaining our current iteration in evolution is a condition that should be valued. We can evolve, or invent another life form that carries our civilization forward. Yes, it reads like a dream. Technological breakthroughs of the past were created by people with dreams, not by skeptics.
      - natch 5y ago
        The question “what makes us human” is a deep one that has vexed philosophers for a long time. I don’t have the answer. If you have the answer, forgive me if I take it with a grain of salt. I do think it’s possible that our best hope for navigating the transition beyond the singularity involves transplanting our humanness to another kind of life form. I’m not necessarily talking about uploading… more about a staggered intergenerational transition mixed in with life as we know it. I realize that to some people, this will continue to sound like crazy talk, until one day it isn’t. It’s ok if you are one of those people :-).
valuearb 5y ago
We didn’t land on the moon?
lmm 5y ago
LEO is 0.0005% of the way to the Moon, and yet once we'd done the first it didn't take us long to scale up to the second.
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  That's simply a facile comparison because most of the fuel is needed to get out of the atmosphere. The energy required for that 0.0005% distance is nearly 66% of the total. Let's say it takes ~8 minutes to get to LEO vs 4,380 minutes to get to the Moon. That's a factor of ~550x longer flight time for a distance 2000x further. Alpha Centauri is 1500x further away than Mars. It currently takes ~7 months to go from Earth to Mars (at 25,000 mph), assuming similar scaling that comes out to only 400x the flight time, or just about 230 years.

dheera 5y ago

> You're conflating humans and probes, which are vastly different. I disagree. Robots can build infrastructure far ahead of human settlement, such that everything already exists when we are ready to travel. We can also potentially re-engineer our own life form, or create an entirely new inorganic lifeform, to withstand various conditions, including radiation and a wider range of temperatures. That will be our successor. We are only beginning to understand genetics in the past decade. We have a long, long way to go, and a lot to understand. Science is still at its infancy. Also, this is something I could never say in an academic context, but deep down I don't believe in conservation of energy, partly because the big bang itself violates it. Yes, I would be ridiculed for saying this in a scientific context, but so would someone in the 1500s for saying that the Earth goes around the sun. I think at some point in the distant future we will not be reliant on stars as our energy source.

OmicronCeti 5y ago
'we' did not go to Mars, 'we' did not go to pluto. We sent cameras with walky-talkies. That is so vastly different than sending people to the moon, that it's not really something we can disagree on in good faith. If you truly do not believe in the conservation of energy, I think we're done here since none of my arguments will be good enough for such wild speculation.
- dheera 5y ago
  If we can send cameras with walky-talkies, we can invent and send (possibly silicon-based) life forms that will carry on our legacy while being a lot more resistant to the elements, require much less support along the journey, and can tolerate whatever gases and radiation may be present at the destination while still reproducing and carrying on society just as life does now. Human bodies suck because they need to eat, need to poop, complain if what they eat isn't tasty, fight with each other, and get cancer, but our legacy as intelligent life doesn't need to continue in our current carbon-based meat bag form.
  - OmicronCeti 5y ago
    I can't believe I'm entertaining a reply, but how would a human-invented lifeform sent to the stars carry on human society if it is a) not human, and b) light years spatially distance and thousands of years temporally distant? This reads like an ungrad astronomy major fever dream.
    - dheera 5y ago
      It would carry on our legacy as intelligent life. I don't think maintaining our current iteration in evolution is a condition that should be valued. We can evolve, or invent another life form that carries our civilization forward. Yes, it reads like a dream. Technological breakthroughs of the past were created by people with dreams, not by skeptics.
    - natch 5y ago
      The question “what makes us human” is a deep one that has vexed philosophers for a long time. I don’t have the answer. If you have the answer, forgive me if I take it with a grain of salt. I do think it’s possible that our best hope for navigating the transition beyond the singularity involves transplanting our humanness to another kind of life form. I’m not necessarily talking about uploading… more about a staggered intergenerational transition mixed in with life as we know it. I realize that to some people, this will continue to sound like crazy talk, until one day it isn’t. It’s ok if you are one of those people :-).

valuearb 5y ago

We didn’t land on the moon?

lmm 5y ago

LEO is 0.0005% of the way to the Moon, and yet once we'd done the first it didn't take us long to scale up to the second.

OmicronCeti 5y ago
That's simply a facile comparison because most of the fuel is needed to get out of the atmosphere. The energy required for that 0.0005% distance is nearly 66% of the total. Let's say it takes ~8 minutes to get to LEO vs 4,380 minutes to get to the Moon. That's a factor of ~550x longer flight time for a distance 2000x further. Alpha Centauri is 1500x further away than Mars. It currently takes ~7 months to go from Earth to Mars (at 25,000 mph), assuming similar scaling that comes out to only 400x the flight time, or just about 230 years.