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If you can build and maintain a system capable of sustaining the lives of 1,000 humans for 400 years, why do you care about interstellar travel anymore? “The i

If you can build and maintain a system capable of sustaining the lives of 1,000 humans for 400 years, why do you care about interstellar travel anymore? “The indefatigable spirit of exploration” isn’t the answer. People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity. There are exceptions, but they tend to be thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return and dying on a spacecraft 1/5th of the way through its journey isn’t thrilling and no ticker tape parades await your return. If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems. You could just mine the solar system and build billions of habitats that lazily circle the sun. Hell, you wouldn’t even care about habitable planets anymore and a likely endpoint for any interstellar efforts would likely be a long-lived star with large orbiting gas giants you could turn into solid materials in order to build trillions of habitats orbiting that star, not an insignificant earth-like boulder. Imagine turning all of the methane in a gas giant into carbon strands, using its hydrogen to do it and building a near-infinite number of habitats, each perfectly suited to human existence. An earth-like planet with its quakes and tsunamis and seasonal cycles would seem pathetic.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media. > thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return Everyone on these ships would be a celebrity on Earth. (Ideally, if they so chose.) Again, a simple reading of one-way trip settler-explorers across history similarly rejects this notion. > If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems The first several of these ships are likely to end in catastrophe. The first to succeed will be breaking down on arrival. If we learn to build luxurious space habitats it will be through these endeavours.
- os2warpman 1y ago
  > Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media. A week in Bali is not the same thing as interstellar travel…
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > A week in Bali Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the folks who launch off on their own into the deep wilderness for years on end. Not only for vanity, but largely to do groundbreaking research?
    - urban_winter 1y ago
      Yes. Are you confusing "adventurer" and "explorer"? There are plenty of contemporary adventurers (motivated by ego, fame, personal achievement) but explorers? Not so much.
    - jandrese 1y ago
      Sure, individual weirdos can do that for a few years. But you're talking about literally millennia of travel. Hundreds of generations of people living their entire life on the bus never getting to the destination before they die. Trapped out in the cold empty void of space with literally nothing around, for their entire lives, and the lives of their children, and their children's children, for longer than we have had the written word. Never even knowing if the destination is worth it.
      - ascorbic 1y ago
        In this exercise, it's 400 years. A long time, yes, but nowhere near what you're suggesting.
        jandrese 1y ago
        We don't have anywhere near the engine technology to make it anywhere worth going to in 400 years. That's orders of magnitude more difficult. Anywhere that might sustain life is no closer than a couple thousand years away if we develop ultra-efficient almost magical engines that only bend the laws of physics instead of breaking them outright. Stuff like accelerating the propellent so hard that it picks up enormous amounts of relativistic mass, like every gram of propellant weighs effectively a ton because you've accelerated it so close to the speed of light, which requires some kind of ultra-dense power source that makes mere matter-antimatter annihilation look like burning a match.
mjevans 1y ago
In that timeframe it would by nature need to be capable of full self repair, with the shipped materials and energy, and with no wasted byproducts. We'd have to completely re-think industrial processes. I'm in favor of realized nanotechnology and 3d printers at an atomic level. Evolution stumbled across carbon based lifeforms as it's answer on Earth.
- jamiek88 1y ago
  > full self repair, with the shipped materials and energy, and with no wasted byproducts. Isn’t this impossible? Doesn’t entropy preclude perfect ongoing repair?
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > Isn’t this impossible? Doesn’t entropy preclude perfect ongoing repair? Yes, but we don't actually need "perfect". Also: you can counter a lot of entropy from the energy supply of those engines. Counter-but: we aren't even close to good enough for what we do need.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > it would by nature need to be capable of full self repair Why? If we can accelerate a small city to 0.01g in a year, we can accelerate smaller packages to catch up with it once a year.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    How is that package going to navigate, and then match velocity to dock?
    - m4rtink 1y ago
      Should be doable with beamed propulsion. Basically give each package a lightsail & you can have it maneuver when illuminated by laser arrays either in the home system or on the interstellar craft itself. The beauty of this setup is that if you are really good at keeping the schedule, this can be all pre-computed. With time slots being allocated beforehand when the laser arrays send beams in a given direction & the packages (or the craft itself) just making really sure they stay in the beam & properly oriented when it arrives at the planed place and time.
darccio 1y ago
I didn't expect imagining deep space suburbs this morning.
YurgenJurgensen 1y ago
Because if you don’t, someone else will, and they won’t share your values, and now have access to orders of magnitude more resources than you. We’ve seen how that ends. With exponential growth and the second law of thermodynamics, there’s no such thing as solving resource scarcity, only delaying it.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media. > thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return Everyone on these ships would be a celebrity on Earth. (Ideally, if they so chose.) Again, a simple reading of one-way trip settler-explorers across history similarly rejects this notion. > If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems The first several of these ships are likely to end in catastrophe. The first to succeed will be breaking down on arrival. If we learn to build luxurious space habitats it will be through these endeavours.

os2warpman 1y ago
> Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media. A week in Bali is not the same thing as interstellar travel…
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > A week in Bali Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the folks who launch off on their own into the deep wilderness for years on end. Not only for vanity, but largely to do groundbreaking research?
  - urban_winter 1y ago
    Yes. Are you confusing "adventurer" and "explorer"? There are plenty of contemporary adventurers (motivated by ego, fame, personal achievement) but explorers? Not so much.
  - jandrese 1y ago
    Sure, individual weirdos can do that for a few years. But you're talking about literally millennia of travel. Hundreds of generations of people living their entire life on the bus never getting to the destination before they die. Trapped out in the cold empty void of space with literally nothing around, for their entire lives, and the lives of their children, and their children's children, for longer than we have had the written word. Never even knowing if the destination is worth it.
    - ascorbic 1y ago
      In this exercise, it's 400 years. A long time, yes, but nowhere near what you're suggesting.
      - jandrese 1y ago
        We don't have anywhere near the engine technology to make it anywhere worth going to in 400 years. That's orders of magnitude more difficult. Anywhere that might sustain life is no closer than a couple thousand years away if we develop ultra-efficient almost magical engines that only bend the laws of physics instead of breaking them outright. Stuff like accelerating the propellent so hard that it picks up enormous amounts of relativistic mass, like every gram of propellant weighs effectively a ton because you've accelerated it so close to the speed of light, which requires some kind of ultra-dense power source that makes mere matter-antimatter annihilation look like burning a match.

mjevans 1y ago

In that timeframe it would by nature need to be capable of full self repair, with the shipped materials and energy, and with no wasted byproducts. We'd have to completely re-think industrial processes. I'm in favor of realized nanotechnology and 3d printers at an atomic level. Evolution stumbled across carbon based lifeforms as it's answer on Earth.

jamiek88 1y ago
> full self repair, with the shipped materials and energy, and with no wasted byproducts. Isn’t this impossible? Doesn’t entropy preclude perfect ongoing repair?
- ben_w 1y ago
  > Isn’t this impossible? Doesn’t entropy preclude perfect ongoing repair? Yes, but we don't actually need "perfect". Also: you can counter a lot of entropy from the energy supply of those engines. Counter-but: we aren't even close to good enough for what we do need.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> it would by nature need to be capable of full self repair Why? If we can accelerate a small city to 0.01g in a year, we can accelerate smaller packages to catch up with it once a year.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  How is that package going to navigate, and then match velocity to dock?
  - m4rtink 1y ago
    Should be doable with beamed propulsion. Basically give each package a lightsail & you can have it maneuver when illuminated by laser arrays either in the home system or on the interstellar craft itself. The beauty of this setup is that if you are really good at keeping the schedule, this can be all pre-computed. With time slots being allocated beforehand when the laser arrays send beams in a given direction & the packages (or the craft itself) just making really sure they stay in the beam & properly oriented when it arrives at the planed place and time.

darccio 1y ago

I didn't expect imagining deep space suburbs this morning.

YurgenJurgensen 1y ago

Because if you don’t, someone else will, and they won’t share your values, and now have access to orders of magnitude more resources than you. We’ve seen how that ends. With exponential growth and the second law of thermodynamics, there’s no such thing as solving resource scarcity, only delaying it.