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What would even be the point of existence anymore once FTL is figured out? Just curious. Seems like it would just remove any grandeur about the universe entire
by lgkk 3y ago
What would even be the point of existence anymore once FTL is figured out? Just curious.
Seems like it would just remove any grandeur about the universe entirely.
- MattGaiser 3y agoIt wouldn’t go away. It would just mean we could go see it.
- api 3y agoDoes the fact that you can drive to a national park make it stop being beautiful?
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago"point of existence" To go see it. Why would the ability to visit other planets, and see them, suddenly negate the point of existence, since we can then go see it. Like there is only a point if things can only be imagined, and not actually seen. That would be like. "now that cars exists, and we can visit the Grand Canyon, suddenly there is no point of existence".
- AlexAndScripts 3y agoRemove any grandeur? On the contrary, it would be the beginning of a new era of appreciating its grandeur.
- calamari4065 3y agoThe universe is infinite. FTL just makes it slightly less infinite. FTL means we actually get to see the grandeur of the universe instead of hypothesizing mathematical models of it. Without FTL, we'll never leave this star system. The grandeur of the universe will be nothing but our imagination, instead of a real thing you can see with your own eyes.
- jonhohle 3y agoI was explaining to my kids yesterday that it took 33 years for Voyager to leave the solar system, the next closes star is 2,000x further than it’s already travelled. That would require infrastructure to support 100 generations of humans, 99 of which would be indentured by their ancestors to a life stuck inside a space-ark. And it would only require one of those generations to fail for the whole endeavor to fail. And there’s nothing there, it would take another 50 generations to get to what is hypothesized to be a habitable planet. Human existence doesn’t scale to inter-star system travel.
- seattle_spring 3y agoI see someone's read Project Hail Mary
- jonhohle 3y agoI have, but wasn’t thinking of it consciously. They at least had a plan to get back and not reproduce along the way.
- nrb 3y agoHow big of a lunatic would our great-great-great grandparents have considered us for telling them that soon the several-month trip across the USA will pretty soon take an afternoon, and going to the moon will take 3 days? Sure, traveling at Voyager’s (impressive, but essentially wagon) speed won’t get it done. But betting against technological advancement has made fools of a vast many.
- calamari4065 3y agoGenerally it's taken for granted that the technological problems with generation ships can be solved with sufficient time and resources. We can probably build a metal box that lasts for a thousand years. We can probably design a sustainable closed ecosystem. We could probably build fusion reactors that run on interstellar hydrogen collected with ramscoops. But the real problem with generation ships is not technological. Technology can't solve the fundamental social and psychological problems of locking some humans in a box for a hundred generations. That's the most important problem, and the one that's usually waved away with "oh you just can't imagine future technology"
- throwaway11460 3y agoOn the contrary, nothing would make me excited about existence more than knowing our limits have vastly expanded. Less of unknown, sure. But unimaginably more of grand human civilization, knowledge, diversity...