Without warp or wormholes, space exploration requires generations of folks to live aboard ship. While technically possible, this isn't realistic. We really need FTL travel. If we can figure out to make negative mass particles, we can make FTL engines. But negative mass particles are still theoretical. We could relatively easily colonize mars though. It would be quite resource intensive, but no less so than what we already spend on warfare. If we as a planet can cooperatively demilitarize, we have a hole world right nearby we could build. And I hope we do, soon.
Sufficiently close to the speed of light will do. With time dilation, a 10,000 year trip earth time could take only a year ship time. But then why bother. And the energy demand is prohibitive.
Why bother? If we can colonize space, conservation and sustainability eventually become moot. We can mine lifeless asteroids, dump pollution into remote stars and eventually terraform endless new earths. With the infinite resources of space we can eliminate poverty. Without resource scarcity, there is no monopoly, no aristocracy. True economic equality. Utopia is out there.
I meant, why bother if 10,000 years pass here before they reach their destination. Mining asteroids doesn't require FTL travel. We can dump crap in our own sun. We need to worry about saving Earth before worrying about other planets. And you have no idea what the cost of those resources might be. They wouldn't get here for free. Right now, the mission to mine an asteroid would cost far more than we could hope to recover. I'm all for a big breakthrough that makes FTL travel possible. But Utopia only exists in your mind. Space is brutal. Space kills. We will be lucky to make practical use of Mars in the next 200 years.
I did say "eventually"... Of course none of those things are viable now. But I think we would be doing future generations a favor by putting more effort into it now. Im not saying trash this planet in the hopes of finding a new one. But staying here forever isn't a good option either. Fortunately we're humans. We can do both
I agree that we need to seriously start worrying about Earth before we start looking for new homes. While an astronomical doomsday event is going to happen to us at some point in the future, it is unfortunately far more likely that we humans will kill ourselves and/or our planet long before a huge meteorite smacks in to us. We are the arbiters of our own destiny here on Earth and humans I believe need to do a better job of understanding the monumental responsibility that we have undertaken as sole gatekeepers of our home here. I was reading an article a few weeks ago about theories of cloud cities in Venus. A scientist wrote a response to the article claiming something like "You know what is much easier and costs a lot less than building blimp cities on Venus? Fixing the Earth. We humans aren't even responsible enough to take care of our home world what gives us the right to go off and start playing God with other ones?" A bit harsh of a tone but I understood his point. Any sort of deep space travel is going to require the cooperation of humanity itself. Not just NASA or the ESA but humanity as a whole. But nonetheless I remain hopeful for the future but I do agree that a lot of folks have a pretty large misconception about space travel. A lot of sci fi shows and movies have put false hope into much of the pubic. The progression of space travel over the past few decades has shown this. We went to the Moon in the late 60s and most thought that the obvious next step would be Mars a few decades later if not sooner. Fast forward 50 years and the Moon is still the only celestial body that humans have set foot on and in terms of space travel the Moon is literally "right there". Space travel gets exponentially more difficult the further you try to go. While many of us will likely be alive to see humans set foot on Mars at some point in the next few decades, that's as far as any of us are going to ever see humans go. Star Trek is one of my favorite shows but there is a reason it's called Sci Fi. It's supposedly set in the 2300s but even that would be pushing it at our current rate. In the 2300s I could possibly see us humans having a world such as the one depicted in the show "The Expanse" with humans having colonies in the asteroid belt and a couple moons of other planets. But as far as us being a complete interstellar civilization zipping around the galaxy in warp capable star ships....I highly doubt it.
all the sci-fi speculation is fun but it would be far simpler and much, much, much less expensive to look after our own planet so we don't need to leave...
The most viable concept with our current technology is an advanced Space Station/Ship with a crew that knows it is leaving Earth forever that is a self sustaining and rotating hybrid of Factory and city. Moving to or terraforming ANY planet makes no sense when gravity and life support are considered. Both of these are well managed in an enclosed free floating habitat in the vacuum of space.
Show me the evidence. We can barely maintain a space station in a low orbit. I knew one of the builders of The Biosphere. What a freaking nightmare that was!!! It was a disaster. One of the more notable facts, beyond the runaway CO2 levels and decreasing oxygen, was that they all wanted to kill each other before they got out of there. And there are some great stories from astronauts, like what happens when you have a sewage system failure and have fecal matter floating all over the station.
The real breakthrough would be FTL travel [which btw is also time travel as far as we know] or even transdimentional travel. You can also try things like bending spacetime, but that takes more energy than we can ever hope to generate or capture for millenia to come. That is a type IV civilization gig - perhaps millions of years beyond us, if ever. Note: You can actually make a guess at when this [things like folding space] might be possible by considering the amount of power produced or captured at any moment, over the history of the human race. It began with manual labor, then burning wood. And now we have to total the sum of all the power produced in nuclear power plants, by gasoline and diesel, natural gas, and coal, in addition to solar, wind, and alternative fuels, on the planet. In the future we might build a dyson's sphere around the sun and capture most of it's energy. Far beyond that, we might control the energy of a black hole. But these latter feats seem to be perhaps millions of years in the future, based on our energy history. The best bet is to pour money into fundamental research and the most advanced concepts in cutting edge physics - wormholes, concepts from General Relativity and String Theory [and Loop Quantum Gravity], concepts in time travel and advanced propulsion concepts et al. Only with a fundamental breakthrough in physics can we hope to reach the stars in a practical manner. And while we don't know if such things ever will be possible, there are real cracks in the door in some of the most advanced concepts from physics. Also, we don't have a comprehensive or unified theory of physics. Unless and until we do, we don't know what the true limits of physics may be, even the physics we know.
The real cause for the slow rate of progress since the start of the space program is stagnation, in contrast to the progression/transition rates of past technological means of travel. Going from horse/buggie and horse/plow to the full potential of car and tractor did not take anywhere near as long as chemical-fueled rocket propulsion has persisted. The truth of this pattern is shown in a book that analyses numerous such comparisons. We are being duped for the sake of maintaining the status quo. We should have progressed far beyond fuel-burning space travel by now, and we actually are, but it's all tied up in black projects.
I haven't seen any evidence of anyone being duped or of technology being "tied up in black projects." Building tractors was not the same kind of a problem as finding new propulsion for space travel. Plus, we knew very well why we needed tractors. And, faster space travel requires far higher investment with no similar demand.
Then Bob Lazzar never worked towards reverse engineering of recovered alien spacecraft powered by element 115, and Werner Von Braun never had technological help from "them."
Bob Lazzar never attended Cal Tech - not unless they went back and removed his photo from all the year books. He attended a city college where he was a mediocre student. He never got a Ph.D. in physics. And he produced one pay stub from area 51 for about $500. My theory is that he cleaned the toilets at area 51. It seems he may have been there once. And he talks a good line. But he is certainly no physicist. He has also promoted crackpottery with free energy nonsense.
When you can't speak to the facts, then come the personal attacks - the refuge of cowards. I'm a physicist. LOL! I've invested far more time in science than you have wasted with this mental masturbation crap [sorry, you call it studying] online. But I will say, you are SURE threatened by my sex life. You should really lose the obsession. Once again, it is impossible to discuss any topic without you obsessing on my sex life.
If it gets us to Mars it'll be worth every penny, even if we all die on arrival because there's no air to breathe.
Well you have to understand that there is a huge difference between advancing technology here on Earth vs space travel. Just look at airplanes for example. Outside of improving comfort the design of aircraft hasn't changed much at all in 5 decades. We can make jets more maneuverable, stealth, upgrade avionics, etc but at the end of the day the fundamental basics of an airplane are the same as they were in the 60s. A fuselage, wings, tail, and turbine engines. We can/have improved the design of these engines to make them go a bit faster but the cost of that makes in impractical, IE Concord. The reason these technologies have progressed so rapidly is because of a breakthrough in technology. Once the combustion engine was designed engineers were able to modify it and put it in a variety of applications. The key here was the combustion engine. The fundamental technology of that machine hasn't changed in 100 years. The Ford Model T and the 2018 Ford Mustang Cobra are basically the same machine at the base level. A box while wheels on it powered by an engine and a drivetrain. Sure a 2018 Super Cobra is a hell of a lot better car than the Model T but it's the same concept. Problem is we haven't found a "combustion engine" yet in modern times to catapult technology forward the way we did during the industrial revolution. We are still using the same base technology of 100 years ago because we haven't figured out a better way to do it. Star Trek actually depicted this pretty well. Humanity was basically where it is now slowly advancing space travel until somebody made a crude warp engine and shot his little rocket out past the Moon. Once humanity figured out that it worked it became the "combustion engine" of the 21st century and we went from "horse and buggy to cars". In the 2060s humans built the first crude working warp drive and less than 100 years later they finished and launched the first USS Enterprise and sent it warping around the galaxy (with Vulcan's helping). Problem is that all of the things mentioned (besides the fictional Star Trek stuff) is actually possible in real world physics. Humanity has sort of reached a point where we are limited by what is actually even possible to build. Combustion engines, powered flight, breaking the sound barrier, etc are all possible within the laws of physics. Warp drives aren't. In theory engineers know how to build something like that but the problem is that in order to function it needs ridiculous amounts of energy that is so improbably that it's impossible. I mean the Alcubierre Drive on paper requires something like the entire Sun's energy output over it's entire lifespan in order to work. They "modified" it a bit and I think now the new theory is that it will "only" require the planet Jupiter to run. Once human engineers figure out the 21st century's "combustion engine" then you'll see space flight rapidly progress. Until that day, if it ever comes, we will continue on at this snails pace because nothing we can come up with makes any practical sense to use in space. We had folks flying around the entire planet of Earth a mere 30 years after the first powered flight. Using our own human advancement timelines you would think that by now we'd have humans zipping around the Solar System, I mean hell we went to the Moon in the 60s we should have at least been able to go to Mars by now. Problem....space is ridiculously huge and dangerous. It's hard to even comprehend how far away stuff in our own Solar System is, no scales or simulations really do it justice. Once that actually sinks in it becomes much more clear as to why we still haven't managed to get humans past the Moon.
The spear was eclipsed by the bow and arrow. The bow and arrow were eclipsed by the gun. The horse/ox was eclipsed by the car/tractor. The automobile was eclipsed by the airplane. The airplane was eclipsed by the rocket. Eclipse of the rocket is overdue.
True but all of the things you mentioned were exponentially easier to achieve than eclipsing the rocket. Technology advances rapidly but then it slows sometimes. I mean think throughout history, this explosion in technological advancement is a very new human trait as the result of the industrial revolution that, in terms of human timelines, just happened. Technology moved along at a slow and steady pace for thousands of years until then. Take a random Egyptian from the time the Great Pyramids were built then fast forward 2000 years and drop them off in Egypt and they wouldn't be that out of place. Few things changed here and there but they'd fit in. Take a Roman from the era of Marcus Aurelius and drop them off in Medieval Europe and they'd be in shock at some changes in society but nothing would really be THAT crazy to them. Now take a farmer from Medieval Europe and fast forward 1000 years in the future and drop them off in London in 2018. They'd have a panic attack. Humanity has basically been walking for our entire existence with a few bouts of running here and there. Then all of a sudden we just took off at a dead sprint and haven't stopped since. We've gotten used to technology advancing at such a rapid pace that we've accepted that as the new normal because throughout all of our lifetimes that's the way it has been. But it hasn't always been like this, not even close. The leaps in technology can't keep doubling every couple of years eventually we will hit a brick wall which is what we are seeing right now.
Technological advances need to have some benefit in order for them to be exploited. The concept of a battery dates back 2000 years but what practical purpose was there at the time? We have seen the explosion in information technology today, including the use and advance of battery technology, because it could be exploited. I am old enough to have programmed the machine code for 2nd generation computers that were housed in entire buildings and experienced the entirety of the advent of personal computers. That it happened within my lifetime is indeed remarkable. Had I been born 100 years earlier the telegraph and typewriters would have been cutting edge and yet now they are found in museums. What is interesting is that our ability to communicate has been revolutionized to the point where scientists can learn about the latest research in their field virtually rather than having to wait for publications to be printed and physically delivered to them. This reduces the "wait time" and makes for more efficient research and discovery. This accounts for a lot of our expectations of progress today. We see a need and wonder why it has not been addressed already and then discover that there is a phone app that can handle it for us. But that is all virtual rather than physical. The laws that govern the universe are not going to step aside just because we want to visit those planets we only just discovered exist a mere 25 years ago. Unless we can establish a benefit to visiting those other worlds there is nothing that will drive that technology forwards at the same rate.
