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I'm confused... What's causing your despair? Do you think we'll never be able to visit Uranus in human-compatible travel times? Assuming we (organic humans) sur

I'm confused... What's causing your despair? Do you think we'll never be able to visit Uranus in human-compatible travel times? Assuming we (organic humans) survive this century, I'd consider it almost certain we'll find a way to make travel within the solar system a normal thing eventually.

mrguyorama 3y ago
>travel within the solar system a normal thing eventually. How? Science isn't magic. If you want to get to places in the solar system on human time scales, you have to go FAST. Mars already is about 6 months away in the IDEAL circumstances. We don't have a good idea of how to go faster than we can now without literally blowing up nukes behind our ship, and hoping we can magically ride the waves reliably, and even that is not exactly revolutionary in terms of speed. So now you're literally hoping for some scientific advancement that either bends space so that most things are "closer", allows humans to not die after a significant amount of down time but also makes humans not care about missing out on family and friends and making a brand new life anytime you want to go somewhere else, or a way to magically reach insane speeds. This is ignoring the fact that we don't even think massless propulsion is possible, let alone useful, so we would be stuck with using electricity to accelerate the lightest particles we can manage to as near light speed as physically possible. People keep acting like science is some magic world and it's only a matter of time until science somehow does science fiction, but that's just as absurd as thinking it's only a matter of time until psychologists unlock the secret of telekinesis. It's fantasy. Reality has put very rough boundaries on everything, and while there is some wiggle room for new things to refine our understanding of the universe, any effects and forces we have yet missed would have to be so small or inconsequential as to be meaningless. If you think some future discovery would NOT be inconsequential, now you have to explain how it has hidden from us for all this time. Even "revolutions" in the field of physics that changed how we understand reality itself, like quantum anything, didn't totally change the math. Newton's equations are still mostly valid at human scales! The "wrong" model that caused the very Ultraviolet Catastrophe that lead to the discovery and building of quantum mechanics is still mostly correct for low frequency radiation!
- digging 3y ago
  > any effects and forces we have yet missed would have to be so small or inconsequential as to be meaningless This is a level of unwarranted confidence far exceeding my own, in my opinion :) Uranus is 2.66 light-hours from the sun. At 0.01% light-speed, that's about 3 years. 3 years is a long time to travel, especially in the modern age, but not a long time to be alive, even for a human today. Is it possible we dramatically extend our lifespans or achieve technological immortality in the future? I certainly think so. Can we reach 0.01c traveling between Earth and Uranus? Maybe not, because we have to accelerate half way and decelerate the second half. But I would feel much sillier saying that sub-decade interplanetary travel is absolutely impossible than saying that it's possible. Than saying we'll unlock new materials and techniques that make it possible eventually. I'm not even saying to expect them within a century. Think about millennia of uninterrupted technological advancement driven by superhuman AI - you're saying with certainty that it's not possible we'll figure out how to travel within our own solar system on human timespans after all that time? It'll be a boring future if we're already hitting the absolute limits of space travel and we've just started. > Science isn't magic. No, magic is just science we haven't figure out yet.
- deleted 3y ago
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- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  > allows humans to not die after a significant amount of down time Death appears inevitable, but there's little difference between a century and a millennium as far as physics is concerned. I don't think it's far-fetched to assume we'll crack this one eventually. > and making a brand new life anytime you want to go somewhere else This has been the norm for travellers for most of human history. The modern two-day circumnavigation / perceptually-instant transatlantic broadband is nice, but not necessary. The solar system is a light-day in diameter (order of magnitude), so a round-trip by radio is faster than letters used to be.
- mr_toad 3y ago
  > We don't have a good idea of how to go faster than we can now without literally blowing up nukes behind our ship, and hoping we can magically ride the waves reliably, and even that is not exactly revolutionary in terms of speed. There are other, better, designs for nuclear rockets beside the Orion drive. Some proof of concept devices have already been built. And if we could get our hands on sufficient quantities of anti-matter there are even better designs for anti-matter rockets. It’s an engineering problem not a problem of fundamental physics.

mrguyorama 3y ago

>travel within the solar system a normal thing eventually. How? Science isn't magic. If you want to get to places in the solar system on human time scales, you have to go FAST. Mars already is about 6 months away in the IDEAL circumstances. We don't have a good idea of how to go faster than we can now without literally blowing up nukes behind our ship, and hoping we can magically ride the waves reliably, and even that is not exactly revolutionary in terms of speed. So now you're literally hoping for some scientific advancement that either bends space so that most things are "closer", allows humans to not die after a significant amount of down time but also makes humans not care about missing out on family and friends and making a brand new life anytime you want to go somewhere else, or a way to magically reach insane speeds. This is ignoring the fact that we don't even think massless propulsion is possible, let alone useful, so we would be stuck with using electricity to accelerate the lightest particles we can manage to as near light speed as physically possible. People keep acting like science is some magic world and it's only a matter of time until science somehow does science fiction, but that's just as absurd as thinking it's only a matter of time until psychologists unlock the secret of telekinesis. It's fantasy. Reality has put very rough boundaries on everything, and while there is some wiggle room for new things to refine our understanding of the universe, any effects and forces we have yet missed would have to be so small or inconsequential as to be meaningless. If you think some future discovery would NOT be inconsequential, now you have to explain how it has hidden from us for all this time. Even "revolutions" in the field of physics that changed how we understand reality itself, like quantum anything, didn't totally change the math. Newton's equations are still mostly valid at human scales! The "wrong" model that caused the very Ultraviolet Catastrophe that lead to the discovery and building of quantum mechanics is still mostly correct for low frequency radiation!

digging 3y ago
> any effects and forces we have yet missed would have to be so small or inconsequential as to be meaningless This is a level of unwarranted confidence far exceeding my own, in my opinion :) Uranus is 2.66 light-hours from the sun. At 0.01% light-speed, that's about 3 years. 3 years is a long time to travel, especially in the modern age, but not a long time to be alive, even for a human today. Is it possible we dramatically extend our lifespans or achieve technological immortality in the future? I certainly think so. Can we reach 0.01c traveling between Earth and Uranus? Maybe not, because we have to accelerate half way and decelerate the second half. But I would feel much sillier saying that sub-decade interplanetary travel is absolutely impossible than saying that it's possible. Than saying we'll unlock new materials and techniques that make it possible eventually. I'm not even saying to expect them within a century. Think about millennia of uninterrupted technological advancement driven by superhuman AI - you're saying with certainty that it's not possible we'll figure out how to travel within our own solar system on human timespans after all that time? It'll be a boring future if we're already hitting the absolute limits of space travel and we've just started. > Science isn't magic. No, magic is just science we haven't figure out yet.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wizzwizz4 3y ago
> allows humans to not die after a significant amount of down time Death appears inevitable, but there's little difference between a century and a millennium as far as physics is concerned. I don't think it's far-fetched to assume we'll crack this one eventually. > and making a brand new life anytime you want to go somewhere else This has been the norm for travellers for most of human history. The modern two-day circumnavigation / perceptually-instant transatlantic broadband is nice, but not necessary. The solar system is a light-day in diameter (order of magnitude), so a round-trip by radio is faster than letters used to be.
mr_toad 3y ago
> We don't have a good idea of how to go faster than we can now without literally blowing up nukes behind our ship, and hoping we can magically ride the waves reliably, and even that is not exactly revolutionary in terms of speed. There are other, better, designs for nuclear rockets beside the Orion drive. Some proof of concept devices have already been built. And if we could get our hands on sufficient quantities of anti-matter there are even better designs for anti-matter rockets. It’s an engineering problem not a problem of fundamental physics.