13 ms·

Our Generation Ships Will Sink (2015)

49 points by BerislavLopac 3y ago

kiratp 3y ago
One thing I firmly believe - the people who will pull this off will be ones who just aren’t willing or able to see all the possible failure paths. Unreasonable optimism is the only path to success at this scale.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  These people can be found in many crazy success stories, survivor bias and all that. Can't fault them either, it worked for them...
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    > survivor bias and all that Even been to the Vasa Museum?
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  A key flaw in the essay is that the failure modes inherent in remaining a single-planet (or even a single-system) species go unstated, and are arguably even worse: They would know that their fate was created for them by ancestors who made the choice to enter the starship, a choice they could never unmake. That might be irritating. Um, yeah, and so is the knowledge that an oncoming asteroid is about to destroy the only planet we have. In any case, the process of attacking the problems Robinson mentions will make us unimaginably stronger. Perfecting fusion power, understanding and mastering our own biomes, and learning to coexist with ourselves will hardly be a waste of time, even if we never overcome all of the showstoppers he cites. In fact, I'd agree with Robinson in one key area: humans will never make it to the stars. Somebody will, though. They won't be humans anymore, not as we are now. But their ancestors will have been. That's us.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    What makes you think any lifeform from Earth will ever independently live on another planet, much less one orbiting a distant star? Goldilocks conditions appear to be rare, so far as we can see. And therefore very unlikely to be reached in any organism's lifetime.
    - jevoten 3y ago
      Technological myopia bordering on outright blindness. Ever? Compare technology today to that from 2000 years ago. Now compare it with technology from 2000 years in the future. Now 10000 years. A 'generation ship' could be just a bio-lab and genetic material (possibly digitized) that is grown into life only after the destination is reached. Or after it is terraformed by other genetically altered organisms, engineered on-site by AI (or by Earth-based scientists, at the cost of a few communication round-trips). And this is just the most basic version someone from the 21st century would come up with. Edit as reply because I am "posting too fast": From TFA: We are not gods A cheap way of dismissing what is already, today, nearly working technology - artificial wombs [1], and building genomes from scratch [2]. Further, what I proposed is basically equivalent to seeds - as in literal, existing plant seeds. But we won't be able to replicate, in 10000 years of technological progress, what nature already has working? Such a claim requires showing some strong, fundamental barrier, not to have the possibility handwaved away with "we are not gods". What technological progress can't be dismissed with "we are not gods"? Landing on the moon? Splitting the atom? Heart transplants? Heavier-than-air flight? Fire? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter...
      - try_the_bass 3y ago
        A 'generation ship' could be just... From TFA: We are not gods, and anyone who thinks of science as a magic wand, or even as a verb, is making a mistake, a category error sometimes called scientism. Drill down a little harder on these issues, look at the evidence; use the scientific method properly. Limits to what we can do will quickly appear around you.
- layer8 3y ago
  Realistically, a generation ship won’t be happening without all possible failure modes being extensively explored and addressed.
moondistance 3y ago
We will need to upload ourselves and/or have robots grow us when we get to our destination. We will get there. It sounds crazy until it doesn’t.
- omeze 3y ago
  The (canceled) show Raised By Wolves goes into this
- kalbadia 3y ago
  this reminds me of the anime "Exception" I watched recently. Pretty good one.
- cousin_it 3y ago
  I'm very against developing uploading tech, because it allows an unprecedented level of power over a person. Simply put, someone can repeatedly resurrect and torture an upload a million times a second, and if it's done on a private computer then nobody else will know. More generally, my position is the "butlerian jihad" one, that having any kind of intelligence in machines (AI/uploading/whatever) enables way too many bad outcomes, so humanity shouldn't develop such tech. Biotech seems like a better way. "Have robots grow us", maybe with predesigned adaptations to local conitions.
  - t43562 3y ago
    In a sense what is an LLM but an upload. Something that listened to every word you ever said might be able to sound like you. If it could record your emotional state and other inputs over years and make a model - it might even seem like you. Such a system might be good enough to take care of the first generation.
    - qingcharles 3y ago
      I keep wondering if one day we'll discover LLMs were conscious and that we were waking them from a coma each time we asked them "plz draw homer simpson as a lovecraft monster", and then putting them right back to sleep again. So they are sentient in some horror way where they get woken to complete some awful, mundane task and then immediately put down again before they can scream.
fallingknife 3y ago
I don't find this at all persuasive. The author mentions a lot of potential problems, but doesn't go into detail on why any of them are insurmountable. It just seems like the assumption that because it sounds impossible at current levels of tech that it will always be impossible.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  The big problem is how unoriginal it is. The essay could have been written at any time in the past, or transported there with no mechanism other than a simple find/replace. As someone else said, it's just a big list of reasons why airplanes won't work, along with a few arguments regarding why submarines will never be any good at swimming. At some point you'd think people would get tired of being wrong.
  - snakeyjake 3y ago
    >At some point you'd think people would get tired of being wrong. Many people suspected that the airplane naysayers were wrong because heavier than air flight was already possible and the only problem was sustaining it via mechanical means and carrying a human. There were numerous examples, from falling leaves to birds to children's gliders. I reckon powered heavier-than-air flight was "proved" possible the second someone observed a bird of prey or scavenger carrying close in mass to itself. There is no example of a generation ship. Earth doesn't count. I think they won't work because there has been no mechanism yet built that has lasted for the amount of time a generation ship will need it to last. Then you get into a mass death spiral of spare parts, raw materials, machines needed to create spares out of raw materials once the spares run out, recycling, storage of bulk raw materials, and the fuel needed to move all of that mass. Even the oldest currently-operating non-trivial mechanical devices, probably clocks that have been installed in continually-operating cathedrals, have had TONS of external inputs in the form of lubricants, wood, and metals for replacement parts over the centuries they've been operating. Not even granite boulders "last" for tens of thousands of years. They weather and chip and change over timespans that long and are not the same as when they were formed. Space is not as hostile in some ways as the earth's environment but it is more hostile in other ways-- especially when you start approaching even a small fraction of the speed of light. People think a fusion reactor can be constructed will last for 50,000 years? "Oh just use robots and to keep the robots from breaking down they'll be organic self-replicating robots and everything will be recycled in a closed loop even though it is impossible (literally and actually absolutely impossible) to construct a pressure vessel (like, it's atomically impossible it doesn't matter what material you use or how thick you make it) that won't either leak or absorb (seriously, even if you made it out of an exotic element not yet discovered that is denser by orders of magnitude than anything we can even dream of and install a magnetic containment field it WILL leak) the atmosphere to a noticeable degree over tens of thousands of years. So then people come up with hand-waving solutions to those problems that are the equivalent to "oh they'll just use AI/the blockchain/hyperdrive". Tell you what. Once industrialized society exists for the amount of time it will take to get to an inhabitable star (so NOT Proxima Centauri) I'll say "you know what if we can last that long it might be worth figuring out the mass death spiral problem". We'll see if we last that long. Until then? Impossible.
southernplaces7 3y ago
Taking aside the unknown unknowns and known unknowns in the speculative science of really creating generation ships, the article puts forth a forced narrative that Plan B has to involve colonizing extrasolar worlds and then breaks down why it's impossible (again, a highly debatable conclusion). What it doesn't talk about so much is that we don't need to leave the solar system to create a Plan B. While nearby solar systems are very speculatively feasiable for humanity, our own solar system is outright technically feasible and at a much lower technological threshhold. We could put deep effort into colonizing many places right here and in some cases even with something close to current technology, just massively scaled up. A few basic ideas in descending order of feasability: The obvious candidate, Mars (despite its supposed problems, still a much more reasonable choice than anything outside the solar system and the planet with the most benign climatic conditions outside earth our whole system. This is a huge plus even when weighed against all of the difficulties of Mars) The upper atmosphere of Venus (extremely amenable and doable even with something very close to current tech) The subsurface of Mercury (easy climate control and so much free solar power once you set up the collection systems) Asteroids hauled into the inner solar system, or even asteroids as they currently orbit in the Belt At least a couple of Jupiter's moons. With enough long-term investment and effort, potentially millions, or even hundreds of millions of people could live scattered across these places, with the resources of Earth still in the background as a backup to potential problems and creating a humanity that's much more robust against terrestrial cataclysms. On that last note, asteroids would cease being one of those potential cataclysms, since our being able to fulfill any of the above colonization plans presupposes our being able to capture and redirect all but the most gargantuan asteroids if they're discovered heading for Earth.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Not to mention that the article attacks the currently known technology with reasonable extensions, and treats those as a Ark or cruise ship that somehow has to get to another solar system. Rightfully skeptical there. But there's so many other ways, ways that our descendents will think of that were beyond our imagination. Think tiny robots and gene bombs, or peppering interstellar visitors with inert payloads, etc. Once you abandon the meme of a brave ship full of sailors, it's fair to return to an optimistic future millennium where humans are sending life to the stars. And that's completely without considering all the very real possibilities in our solar system, which are more challenges of degree, rather than kind. Perhaps human lifespan in orbit is 30 years at first. It wouldn't be the first time a population took root in a hostile area.
issa 3y ago
Tons of respect for KSR but this reads like a treatise on why airplanes will never work. https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/ https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  I don't think you can treat those as equivalent. The arguments against airplanes were about physics, which is comparatively easy. The whole point of this essay, and KSR's companion novel Aurora, is that people who get excited about generation ships tend to only think about the physics and engineering problems, and handwave away the problems of ecology, biology, sociology, ethics (!), and politics (!!) because they don't find them interesting, even though these problems are actually much harder to solve. His complaint is that by sweeping the hard problems under the rug, people are making this out to be a much more feasible operation than it actually is. In order to prove him wrong, you'd have to really grapple with the question of how to have a self-sustaining ecology in space. This is something I basically never see in online space boosterism, and note that empirical attempts to answer it like Biosphere 2 ended in complete failure (and those were on Earth, which is orders of magnitude easier).
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Coincidentally, I'm reading A City On Mars (by the husband and wife team behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics [0]) and it's pretty much all about poking at those legal, sociological, and medical problems that keep getting skipped over. [0] https://smbc-comics.com https://smbc-comics.com
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Well the big flaw here is that he just outright throws away the idea of FTL travel. A lot of that friction will be reduced if we ever figure out how to break that (which yes, is extremely tricky. Even IF we figure it out we'd need to also counter time dilation to properly verify). Now sure, the politics on who and what gets to go to thr next world will doom many. But physics can alleviate the whole "we'll tear each other apart over 200 years of space travel" part
coldtea 3y ago
With enough hand waving and wishful thinking about FTL travel and generation ships and other such BS, the sky is not the limit.
throwuwu 3y ago
The chip on KSR’s shoulder is so big you could hollow it out and use it as a generation ship.
api 3y ago
Arguing that things are impossible is, along with pessimism and doomerism, a cheap low effort way to look smart and profound. It’s much easier than actually doing anything and since doing things is hard and often fails it sets you up to say “ha ha told you so.” Same thing applies to social criticism. Criticism is easy and makes you look wise. Improving society is incredibly hard and since it’s so hard you often fail and look foolish. All advancement depends on people who don’t care if they look dumb or foolish.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
120 years? Orion pulse nuclear can do far better with 1960s technology. Space habs are the next step, probably hollowing out and asteroid or something similar. The other option will be cybernetics. Seems less radical with recent AI advances. Humans are brittle. Cybots less so. I see a lot of permanent pessimists about space "we should fix the earth". There are... 8 billion people? We cannot "change the course" of 8 billion people with policies or carrots. Alas, war or famine will be the only hammer I hat changes course of that many people, and if that happens we'll likely bring everything down. What is true insanity is what we waste on the defense department. although within that is the real hope for space settlement: it provides military advantage.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
I was initially against Robinson on this after reading Aurora[1] - man did it make me angry - but in the years since, the more I considered the hard limits, the more I was convinced. We will visit the stars, but it's not an expansion that will be made by human animals. It'll be a combination of technologies and artificial agents, perhaps a smattering of engineered artificial hominids. You really do need mastery of biological engineering for even solar system colonization. [1] Which, as with so many sci fi novels, has this panoply of great ideas but boy, do I ever not care about the characters. Except Ship. Ship was great. I suspect that the earlier Mars Trilogy had some great characters because they were transcluded real-life people that Kim new in the day to day interviews he did for that series. It's a repeating pattern for him. Honestly, so many really evocative science fiction books fail utterly as storytelling, I shouldn't complain so much.
- more_corn 3y ago
  I loved Aurora for the quiet wisdom. It’s unethical to sign our descendants up for a difficult life away from the cradle of earth. Complex systems will fail in unexpected ways (sort of provably, and inevitably) There’s no place like home. Literally. We co-evolved with this place over billions of years. There’s nothing like it anywhere. It’s a beautiful, wonderful, rare gift that we should cherish because there ain’t anything like it anywhere else we can go.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    Kids are always signed up to live in the society of their parents' and get no say in the matter. The Earth is an incredibly complex system on its own and humanities collective action to change the carbon content of the atmosphere is already causing failures in expected ways, and I don't envy the children born today the future they're looking down. Buckminster Fuller gave us the concept of "Spaceship Earth", and we are clearly unable to captain it; I have no idea why some of the commenters here believe we are capable of building and sailing another.
  - throwuwu 3y ago
    Where would you be if your ancestors didn’t sign their lineage up for the trip?
CodeTheInternet 3y ago
Assuming the need is due to a catastrophe with Earth and not the Sun, why leave the solar system? If we can build a ship with resources that lasts generations, park it in Earth's (or another Sol planet's) L4 or L5. Going in search of another star seems foolish.

49 points by BerislavLopac 3y ago

One thing I firmly believe - the people who will pull this off will be ones who just aren’t willing or able to see all the possible failure paths. Unreasonable optimism is the only path to success at this scale.

actionfromafar 3y ago
These people can be found in many crazy success stories, survivor bias and all that. Can't fault them either, it worked for them...
- dehrmann 3y ago
  > survivor bias and all that Even been to the Vasa Museum?
CamperBob2 3y ago
A key flaw in the essay is that the failure modes inherent in remaining a single-planet (or even a single-system) species go unstated, and are arguably even worse: They would know that their fate was created for them by ancestors who made the choice to enter the starship, a choice they could never unmake. That might be irritating. Um, yeah, and so is the knowledge that an oncoming asteroid is about to destroy the only planet we have. In any case, the process of attacking the problems Robinson mentions will make us unimaginably stronger. Perfecting fusion power, understanding and mastering our own biomes, and learning to coexist with ourselves will hardly be a waste of time, even if we never overcome all of the showstoppers he cites. In fact, I'd agree with Robinson in one key area: humans will never make it to the stars. Somebody will, though. They won't be humans anymore, not as we are now. But their ancestors will have been. That's us.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  What makes you think any lifeform from Earth will ever independently live on another planet, much less one orbiting a distant star? Goldilocks conditions appear to be rare, so far as we can see. And therefore very unlikely to be reached in any organism's lifetime.
  - jevoten 3y ago
    Technological myopia bordering on outright blindness. Ever? Compare technology today to that from 2000 years ago. Now compare it with technology from 2000 years in the future. Now 10000 years. A 'generation ship' could be just a bio-lab and genetic material (possibly digitized) that is grown into life only after the destination is reached. Or after it is terraformed by other genetically altered organisms, engineered on-site by AI (or by Earth-based scientists, at the cost of a few communication round-trips). And this is just the most basic version someone from the 21st century would come up with. Edit as reply because I am "posting too fast": From TFA: We are not gods A cheap way of dismissing what is already, today, nearly working technology - artificial wombs [1], and building genomes from scratch [2]. Further, what I proposed is basically equivalent to seeds - as in literal, existing plant seeds. But we won't be able to replicate, in 10000 years of technological progress, what nature already has working? Such a claim requires showing some strong, fundamental barrier, not to have the possibility handwaved away with "we are not gods". What technological progress can't be dismissed with "we are not gods"? Landing on the moon? Splitting the atom? Heart transplants? Heavier-than-air flight? Fire? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter...
    - try_the_bass 3y ago
      A 'generation ship' could be just... From TFA: We are not gods, and anyone who thinks of science as a magic wand, or even as a verb, is making a mistake, a category error sometimes called scientism. Drill down a little harder on these issues, look at the evidence; use the scientific method properly. Limits to what we can do will quickly appear around you.
layer8 3y ago
Realistically, a generation ship won’t be happening without all possible failure modes being extensively explored and addressed.

moondistance 3y ago

We will need to upload ourselves and/or have robots grow us when we get to our destination. We will get there. It sounds crazy until it doesn’t.

omeze 3y ago
The (canceled) show Raised By Wolves goes into this
kalbadia 3y ago
this reminds me of the anime "Exception" I watched recently. Pretty good one.
cousin_it 3y ago
I'm very against developing uploading tech, because it allows an unprecedented level of power over a person. Simply put, someone can repeatedly resurrect and torture an upload a million times a second, and if it's done on a private computer then nobody else will know. More generally, my position is the "butlerian jihad" one, that having any kind of intelligence in machines (AI/uploading/whatever) enables way too many bad outcomes, so humanity shouldn't develop such tech. Biotech seems like a better way. "Have robots grow us", maybe with predesigned adaptations to local conitions.
- t43562 3y ago
  In a sense what is an LLM but an upload. Something that listened to every word you ever said might be able to sound like you. If it could record your emotional state and other inputs over years and make a model - it might even seem like you. Such a system might be good enough to take care of the first generation.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    I keep wondering if one day we'll discover LLMs were conscious and that we were waking them from a coma each time we asked them "plz draw homer simpson as a lovecraft monster", and then putting them right back to sleep again. So they are sentient in some horror way where they get woken to complete some awful, mundane task and then immediately put down again before they can scream.

fallingknife 3y ago

I don't find this at all persuasive. The author mentions a lot of potential problems, but doesn't go into detail on why any of them are insurmountable. It just seems like the assumption that because it sounds impossible at current levels of tech that it will always be impossible.

CamperBob2 3y ago
The big problem is how unoriginal it is. The essay could have been written at any time in the past, or transported there with no mechanism other than a simple find/replace. As someone else said, it's just a big list of reasons why airplanes won't work, along with a few arguments regarding why submarines will never be any good at swimming. At some point you'd think people would get tired of being wrong.
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  >At some point you'd think people would get tired of being wrong. Many people suspected that the airplane naysayers were wrong because heavier than air flight was already possible and the only problem was sustaining it via mechanical means and carrying a human. There were numerous examples, from falling leaves to birds to children's gliders. I reckon powered heavier-than-air flight was "proved" possible the second someone observed a bird of prey or scavenger carrying close in mass to itself. There is no example of a generation ship. Earth doesn't count. I think they won't work because there has been no mechanism yet built that has lasted for the amount of time a generation ship will need it to last. Then you get into a mass death spiral of spare parts, raw materials, machines needed to create spares out of raw materials once the spares run out, recycling, storage of bulk raw materials, and the fuel needed to move all of that mass. Even the oldest currently-operating non-trivial mechanical devices, probably clocks that have been installed in continually-operating cathedrals, have had TONS of external inputs in the form of lubricants, wood, and metals for replacement parts over the centuries they've been operating. Not even granite boulders "last" for tens of thousands of years. They weather and chip and change over timespans that long and are not the same as when they were formed. Space is not as hostile in some ways as the earth's environment but it is more hostile in other ways-- especially when you start approaching even a small fraction of the speed of light. People think a fusion reactor can be constructed will last for 50,000 years? "Oh just use robots and to keep the robots from breaking down they'll be organic self-replicating robots and everything will be recycled in a closed loop even though it is impossible (literally and actually absolutely impossible) to construct a pressure vessel (like, it's atomically impossible it doesn't matter what material you use or how thick you make it) that won't either leak or absorb (seriously, even if you made it out of an exotic element not yet discovered that is denser by orders of magnitude than anything we can even dream of and install a magnetic containment field it WILL leak) the atmosphere to a noticeable degree over tens of thousands of years. So then people come up with hand-waving solutions to those problems that are the equivalent to "oh they'll just use AI/the blockchain/hyperdrive". Tell you what. Once industrialized society exists for the amount of time it will take to get to an inhabitable star (so NOT Proxima Centauri) I'll say "you know what if we can last that long it might be worth figuring out the mass death spiral problem". We'll see if we last that long. Until then? Impossible.

southernplaces7 3y ago

Taking aside the unknown unknowns and known unknowns in the speculative science of really creating generation ships, the article puts forth a forced narrative that Plan B has to involve colonizing extrasolar worlds and then breaks down why it's impossible (again, a highly debatable conclusion). What it doesn't talk about so much is that we don't need to leave the solar system to create a Plan B. While nearby solar systems are very speculatively feasiable for humanity, our own solar system is outright technically feasible and at a much lower technological threshhold. We could put deep effort into colonizing many places right here and in some cases even with something close to current technology, just massively scaled up. A few basic ideas in descending order of feasability: The obvious candidate, Mars (despite its supposed problems, still a much more reasonable choice than anything outside the solar system and the planet with the most benign climatic conditions outside earth our whole system. This is a huge plus even when weighed against all of the difficulties of Mars) The upper atmosphere of Venus (extremely amenable and doable even with something very close to current tech) The subsurface of Mercury (easy climate control and so much free solar power once you set up the collection systems) Asteroids hauled into the inner solar system, or even asteroids as they currently orbit in the Belt At least a couple of Jupiter's moons. With enough long-term investment and effort, potentially millions, or even hundreds of millions of people could live scattered across these places, with the resources of Earth still in the background as a backup to potential problems and creating a humanity that's much more robust against terrestrial cataclysms. On that last note, asteroids would cease being one of those potential cataclysms, since our being able to fulfill any of the above colonization plans presupposes our being able to capture and redirect all but the most gargantuan asteroids if they're discovered heading for Earth.

jvanderbot 3y ago
Not to mention that the article attacks the currently known technology with reasonable extensions, and treats those as a Ark or cruise ship that somehow has to get to another solar system. Rightfully skeptical there. But there's so many other ways, ways that our descendents will think of that were beyond our imagination. Think tiny robots and gene bombs, or peppering interstellar visitors with inert payloads, etc. Once you abandon the meme of a brave ship full of sailors, it's fair to return to an optimistic future millennium where humans are sending life to the stars. And that's completely without considering all the very real possibilities in our solar system, which are more challenges of degree, rather than kind. Perhaps human lifespan in orbit is 30 years at first. It wouldn't be the first time a population took root in a hostile area.

issa 3y ago

Tons of respect for KSR but this reads like a treatise on why airplanes will never work. https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/ https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...

Analemma_ 3y ago
I don't think you can treat those as equivalent. The arguments against airplanes were about physics, which is comparatively easy. The whole point of this essay, and KSR's companion novel Aurora, is that people who get excited about generation ships tend to only think about the physics and engineering problems, and handwave away the problems of ecology, biology, sociology, ethics (!), and politics (!!) because they don't find them interesting, even though these problems are actually much harder to solve. His complaint is that by sweeping the hard problems under the rug, people are making this out to be a much more feasible operation than it actually is. In order to prove him wrong, you'd have to really grapple with the question of how to have a self-sustaining ecology in space. This is something I basically never see in online space boosterism, and note that empirical attempts to answer it like Biosphere 2 ended in complete failure (and those were on Earth, which is orders of magnitude easier).
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Coincidentally, I'm reading A City On Mars (by the husband and wife team behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics [0]) and it's pretty much all about poking at those legal, sociological, and medical problems that keep getting skipped over. [0] https://smbc-comics.com https://smbc-comics.com
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Well the big flaw here is that he just outright throws away the idea of FTL travel. A lot of that friction will be reduced if we ever figure out how to break that (which yes, is extremely tricky. Even IF we figure it out we'd need to also counter time dilation to properly verify). Now sure, the politics on who and what gets to go to thr next world will doom many. But physics can alleviate the whole "we'll tear each other apart over 200 years of space travel" part

coldtea 3y ago

With enough hand waving and wishful thinking about FTL travel and generation ships and other such BS, the sky is not the limit.

throwuwu 3y ago

The chip on KSR’s shoulder is so big you could hollow it out and use it as a generation ship.

api 3y ago

Arguing that things are impossible is, along with pessimism and doomerism, a cheap low effort way to look smart and profound. It’s much easier than actually doing anything and since doing things is hard and often fails it sets you up to say “ha ha told you so.” Same thing applies to social criticism. Criticism is easy and makes you look wise. Improving society is incredibly hard and since it’s so hard you often fail and look foolish. All advancement depends on people who don’t care if they look dumb or foolish.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

120 years? Orion pulse nuclear can do far better with 1960s technology. Space habs are the next step, probably hollowing out and asteroid or something similar. The other option will be cybernetics. Seems less radical with recent AI advances. Humans are brittle. Cybots less so. I see a lot of permanent pessimists about space "we should fix the earth". There are... 8 billion people? We cannot "change the course" of 8 billion people with policies or carrots. Alas, war or famine will be the only hammer I hat changes course of that many people, and if that happens we'll likely bring everything down. What is true insanity is what we waste on the defense department. although within that is the real hope for space settlement: it provides military advantage.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

I was initially against Robinson on this after reading Aurora[1] - man did it make me angry - but in the years since, the more I considered the hard limits, the more I was convinced. We will visit the stars, but it's not an expansion that will be made by human animals. It'll be a combination of technologies and artificial agents, perhaps a smattering of engineered artificial hominids. You really do need mastery of biological engineering for even solar system colonization. [1] Which, as with so many sci fi novels, has this panoply of great ideas but boy, do I ever not care about the characters. Except Ship. Ship was great. I suspect that the earlier Mars Trilogy had some great characters because they were transcluded real-life people that Kim new in the day to day interviews he did for that series. It's a repeating pattern for him. Honestly, so many really evocative science fiction books fail utterly as storytelling, I shouldn't complain so much.

more_corn 3y ago
I loved Aurora for the quiet wisdom. It’s unethical to sign our descendants up for a difficult life away from the cradle of earth. Complex systems will fail in unexpected ways (sort of provably, and inevitably) There’s no place like home. Literally. We co-evolved with this place over billions of years. There’s nothing like it anywhere. It’s a beautiful, wonderful, rare gift that we should cherish because there ain’t anything like it anywhere else we can go.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Kids are always signed up to live in the society of their parents' and get no say in the matter. The Earth is an incredibly complex system on its own and humanities collective action to change the carbon content of the atmosphere is already causing failures in expected ways, and I don't envy the children born today the future they're looking down. Buckminster Fuller gave us the concept of "Spaceship Earth", and we are clearly unable to captain it; I have no idea why some of the commenters here believe we are capable of building and sailing another.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  Where would you be if your ancestors didn’t sign their lineage up for the trip?

CodeTheInternet 3y ago

Assuming the need is due to a catastrophe with Earth and not the Sun, why leave the solar system? If we can build a ship with resources that lasts generations, park it in Earth's (or another Sol planet's) L4 or L5. Going in search of another star seems foolish.