
Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system. - shalmanese
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html?
======
RomP
A little over 100 years ago the humanity just learned how to overfly one
football field.

In space, today, we're in pre-aviation days: we're still using hot air
balloons for transportation. We make them lighter than air (i.e. shoot them up
in space) and let the wind (i.e gravity) to carry them places.

Imagine the most educated human 120 years ago is being told about planes
heavier than air, air transportation over oceans, jet-powered planes,
autopilots and fly-by-wire, not to mention people on the moon. He would say
it's impossible, due to energy constraints. Today a daily JFK-NRT flight uses
more energy than all the horses which lived two centuries ago would be able to
produce in their lifetimes, combined (my math may be off by one order of
magnitude: it's late here). Today we're this person. Educated enough to have
valid arguments against it, but utterly incorrect.

~~~
netcan
A very valid anti-Darwinian argument was that if the sun was made out of
something similar to coal (densest known energy source at the time) evolution
would not have had the time to take place. Far to many generations are
required. They even allowed a two or three orders of magnitude to account for
possible unknowns (maybe the sun has super coal) and still were didn't have
enough time to make rats into cats, nevermind lizards into birds.

The argment was valid argument till when" The Curies? Einstein?

100 years is a long time to figure stuff out. Thinking in millenia is
impossible for us. "What would William the Norman have thought of all this?"
is a pretty ridiculous thought and that's not even a whole thousand years ago.
Nine year old crack babies today are more literate than most of his learned
advisors and better technology meant sharper swords, less leaky boats and
smoked bread. Their objections to the idea would have involved Loki chasing
you around in a canoe.

Lets not get too cocky.

~~~
randallsquared
_Nine year old crack babies today are more literate than most of his learned
advisors [...]_

 _Lets not get too cocky._

Well, make up your mind. :)

~~~
netcan
not a bad point

------
benwr
"The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are
already dead": I thought one of the implications of evolution was that we have
a vested interest in protecting our genes, rather than acting solely on
individual-level self-interest.

Edit: What on earth would cause you to downvote this?

Edit2: Thanks. I would still appreciate a comment if I'm 'doing it wrong.'

~~~
DavidSJ
Evolution is perfectly "happy" to sacrifice the interests of the species for
those of the individual organism or gene.

That said, we're not slaves to evolution and can make our own choices for our
own reasons.

~~~
demallien
A gene is happy to sacrifice the genes of other individuals - it is _not_
happy to sacrifice copies of itself, no matter where they are found. Hence we
tend to protect mammals more than reptiles, apes more than other mammals,
humans more than other apes, our own countrymen rather than those from other
countries, and our family more than others from our country.

But when it comes to the vexed question of getting those genes to survive
beyond our own mortal shell, the correct genetic strategy seems to be to
protect our offspring, even at the expense of ourselves, so we commonly see
parents sacrificing themselves for children, in many different species.

And that is of course the flow in Stross's argument about there not being any
reason not to colonise. Sure, _you_ can't be on multiple planets, but your
offspring certainly can be, so if one of those planets goes up in smoke, your
genes will continue on through your children on other planets...

------
guelo
As impossible as the physics seems I think the social problems are bigger.
Scientists are currently unable to convince people to act against the
potential catastrophe of global warming. Humans are too stupid to organize a
planet wide self preservation effort that requires any significant amount of
resources. I think the more likely scenario for humanity over the next 10
thousand years is several cycles of civilization and population collapses with
a constant degradation of the environment and fewer and fewer available
resources. This century might be the zenith of human achievement. It might
take a smarter species a few million years from now to escape this rock.

~~~
billswift
Humans are too smart to let a bunch of bureaucrats with their pseudo-
scientific rationalizations destroy the economy in the pursuit of more power
for the bureaucracies.

~~~
itg
And this is exactly the type of short-sighted thinking that dooms us. The vast
majority of scientists have come to a consensus yet you don't like it so label
them bureaucrats with some sinister motive of destroying the economy behind
it.

~~~
drcube
Just because we know there is a problem doesn't really mean anything. That's
just the beginning. Ask yourself these questions:

How much does/will the problem cost us? IS there a solution? How much will the
solution cost?

Then you do cost benefit analysis and decide the best course of action. THEN
you try to talk everybody else into it.

I'm happy to concede global warming is happening and will only get worse.
Hell, I was one of the first people I know to understand and accept that. I
just haven't seen the follow up yet. It's always "Yep, got yourself a problem
there", but no solution offered other than "buy a Prius".

~~~
troutwine
Climate shift implies a necessary change to infrastructure: cities that once
did not have to deal with flash floods will, for example. Municipal trees will
die. Areas that grow colder will have non-insulated water pipes burst. There
is no need to form greater bureaucratic nightmares to adapt for such problems,
only a general willingness to remake our urban environments before it becomes
dreadfully expensive. Note the work Chicago is doing, as a function of it's
normal maintenance; anticipating a hotter and wetter climate alleys and
sidewalks become water permeable, tree species are changed.

> Then you do cost benefit analysis and decide the best course of action. THEN
> you try to talk everybody else into it.

This is overly simplistic. Who is the decision maker? Democracies function as
distributed consensus makers--very little _can_ or _should_ be dictated by
some benevolent cabal. Moreover, for the rather complex problem of adapting
_human civilization itself_ it is hard, if not impossible, to perform a cost
benefit analysis. Where do you even get the possible solutions from if:

    
    
      * no one but a few know about the problem and
      * domain experts you consult with might have implicit
        biases against the problem without significant
        preparation and
      * the hypothetical cabal is composes of like minded
        (hence like-blinded) individuals?
    

> Hell, I was one of the first people I know to understand and accept that. I
> just haven't seen the follow up yet. It's always "Yep, got yourself a
> problem there",

It's entirely possible we've gone past the point of short-term return. Still,
the follow up, as you put it, has been to reduce or eliminate the primary
sources of the problem:

    
    
      * decrease the reliance of Heavy and Light industries on coal/oil
      * decrease and reverse global deforestation
      * decrease and reverse water vapor production from urban areas
    

Each one of these points has large cultural and economic implications. It is,
however, very difficult to discuss them when so many deny the premise, or have
a vested interest in convincing others of the invalidity of the premise. It is
entirely wrong to assert that the follow up, as you put it, has been absent
from the discussion; mostly it's drowned out. Communicating complex ideas is
difficult in a culture with strong debate traditions; God have mercy on us for
our Shouting Heads.

> but no solution offered other than "buy a Prius".

I think that's willfully cynical of you, or uninformed. Even ignoring the
obvious vested interest car manufactures have in misinforming us that a
_different_ kind of car is a viable solution, the perverse effects a Car
Culture has on an Urban environment--heavily paved, strongly lateral
development--is likely unsustainable in the long-term.

~~~
drcube
But how much will forcing those infrastructure and cultural and societal
changes cost NOW, versus letting them happen naturally and gradually the same
way we switched from wood to coal to petroleum and from muscle to steam to
electricity?

Extremely simple illustration: Do you think people in Florida will be living
10 feet under water in 100 years? No, they will move before then. But they
don't have to move now, so why force them?

Similarly, do you think we'll all be driving gas-guzzling SUVs in 100 years?
Hell no. Oil just won't last that long, and our car culture will have died or
switched to electric (or nuclear, or secret ooze) long before then anyway.

So why force the issue? I guess I'm just not seeing the urgency here. And
whatever urgency there is, doesn't seem to be fixable in the short term. Ocean
levels will rise. They already have. So let's focus on mitigation rather than
the already failed task of prevention.

~~~
jberryman
_...to coal to petroleum_

The fact that you think humans have by any means made the technological "leap"
from coal to petroleum (or anywhere really) makes you look wildly ignorant on
this issue.

------
mmaunder
I dislike the word "never". As individuals and as a species we are addicted to
short term gratification measured in years or decades. We also have a narrow
view of the concept of "self" and what constitutes consciousness and
experience.

If we could stand building for the future and experiencing by proxy, a few
more options become available:

e.g. We could transport a set of human "blanks" or a "blank" creating machine
to a distant star at 10% of c. It would take a few hundred years. When it
arrives and deploys, we upload our consciousness at the speed of light with no
acceleration and deceleration into a "blank" human.

Copies of ourselves could be regularly transported to and from a distant star
over a few decades.

A few technological breakthroughs would be required to make this a reality:

* True Artificial Intelligence. A machine that is capable of self-awareness and analysis.

* A complete understanding of the human brain and how to replicate the organism and it's contents.

* A complete understanding of the human body, the life support mechanism for the brain - and how to duplicate it.

* How to turn nuclear fission or fusion into propulsion at a high level of efficiency.

* How to build factories that can stay dormant for a thousand years, wake up and operate as well as the day they were built. This probably will be solved as a result of AI and the ability to create self-repairing and self-improving machines.

Many of these problems are in the CS and Biotech fields. That's what we do.
Now get to work!

~~~
jacobolus
Okay. You just wave 5 or 6 magic wands and then it works out. Isn’t that
precisely what the essay claimed?

~~~
bad_user
Yeah, but give it another 200 years and those magic wands may be possible.

I'm not holding my breath as neither me nor my children or grandchildren are
leaving this planet, but look at the progress in technology we've made since
the industrial revolution happened.

~~~
adrianN
Indeed. Two hundred years ago it seemed impossible to cross the Atlantik in
less than a week, now we can send people to the Moon and back in that time.

~~~
ericb
How unlikely would the iPhone in my pocket have seemed 80 years ago?

Magic wands? 1-computing, 2-wireless data transmission, 3-display
(television), 4-rechargeable batteries, 5-touch interface, 6-price drops.

------
saulrh
I agree with this pretty well, in that it's likely that flesh-and-blood humans
will never physically travel to other planets en masse without some
fundamental discoveries in physics. You'll note, though, that he explicitly
disregards both starwisps and strong AI, and there's a reason for that:
putting human-descended AI out into the universe is a much, much more feasible
endeavor, and one that I personally believe we'll eventually accomplish.

~~~
seanalltogether
I would go so far as to question whether the first "person" to set foot on
mars will be recognizable to us as human. We are simply too fragile.

~~~
adrianN
Getting to Mars is actually not so difficult. I'm fairly confident that we'll
have at least the token human on Mars in my lifetime.

------
redthrowaway
He's already allowed for nanofactories and artificial wombs, so why send
humans at all? Send frozen sperm and eggs and have the robots make the people
once they get there. Now, all of a sudden, the length of the journey doesn't
matter. Fling probes off willy-nilly at nearby and distant stars. If they get
there, great. If not, you've only lost cash.

Edit: The cool thing about this is that, assuming these technologies come to
fruition, the entire project could likely be financed privately by a group of
wealthy backers. You wouldn't need the massive bureaucracy of NASA or their
dependency on Congress. You'd simply develop, test, then manufacture the
(likely quite small) probes, then send them up and out on commercial rockets.

~~~
rsaarelm
If you can build robots smart enough to keep babies alive and raise them not
to end up stone-age level feral children, you could probably save some effort,
skip the human part entirely, and just send the robots to do colonist stuff.

~~~
yeahsure
That would not preserve our species, should planet Earth become inhabitable.

~~~
rsaarelm
If you have robots that can raise babies into grown-up humans, the robots need
to be pretty much the same as humans themselves at that point.

~~~
redthrowaway
Not at all. You need sufficiently advanced AI, but the purpose is to preserve
humanity. It's a one-way trip. You aren't doing anything on another planet
that will affect Earth, just spreading the seed.

~~~
rsaarelm
The sufficiently advanced AI is going to have to be able to do pretty much the
same things humans can do for the thing to work, so it'd be a game-changer in
itself, not something that gets waved off as an aside.

Re. the preservation thing, the question is exactly what counts as humanity.
If you have limited resources and can only pick one, would you choose a planet
colonized by biological humans who have lost all of the present civilization
and language, and are reduced to stone-age conditions (assuming for the moment
that the alien environment wouldn't kill them instantly), or synthetic beings
with the sufficiently advanced AI with all human cultural knowledge and skills
they'd need to survive on an alien planet and a cognitive and psychological
makeup very close to actual humans they'd need to be able to raise babies into
sane adults, and the ability to build more of themselves?

Basically, is humanity more about a culture or about being made of the correct
chemicals?

~~~
iwwr
Desperate times may require desperate measures. Robotic parents won't have to
be close to human parents, just good enough to teach language and reading. The
result may be psychologically unstable or mentally deficient children, but
that may be corrected in a few generations.

~~~
redthrowaway
>but that may be corrected in a few generations.

Or not, as the case may be. That's why you send out many such probes. You
would have to assume that most attempts would fail. You are, after all,
attempting to transplant human life with no human oversight.

Either way, it's merely prolonging the inevitable. The Sun has about 5 billion
years of fuel left, which is coincidentally about the time the Milky Way will
collide with Andromeda, ruining everyone's day. The Sun would be far too hot
to support life on Earth long before that, but let's assume we've moved to a
more gentrified suburb. Even were humanity to somehow escape the Milky Way in
the next 5 billion years, we'll still just be building sandcastle walls in an
attempt to hold back the tide. I'm reminded here of Asimov's _The Last
Question_ , an excellent short story:

<http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html>

~~~
iwwr
That scenario is impossible in an expanding universe. Regions of space
eventually become disconnected from each other. There wouldn't be one
computational entity overall, although there may be little dominant AIs inside
these disconnected space bubbles.

~~~
redthrowaway
It's a science fiction story written in 1956.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Oh, the ego, what a marvelous thing!

Believing that what we currently know is applicable to humans in the future,
that our current limits are immutable.

We know all the laws of physics, right? We know if the universe is finite or
infinite(because we had traveled there and seen the limits), we know what
creates gravity and exactly how electromagnetic attraction really works... the
same way the people Socrates asked 2500 years ago knew it all, and Socrates
himself did not knew anything(in his own words).

The same way people already knew everything about the small things before
microscope invention(in their own words it was unnecessary because "why we
want to see what we already know smaller?").

That someone develops better ways to control active fission(atom by atom) and
fusion reactions, that someone discovers something new about the universe,that
someone discovers how to create antigravity because understands what gravity
really is, that someone discover the way to crack the code on aging on our
DNA, that someone discovers why the light limit on vacuum is what it is and
some way of going faster, all of this impossible, because we know it all.

~~~
khafra
Making predictions grounded in supremely well-tested physics is not
egotistical. Making specific predictions about the content of as-yet
undiscovered science without any evidence is egotistical.
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/gq/the_proper_use_of_humility/>

~~~
zyfo
Who's making the specific predictions here?

------
DennisP
"Ever" is a pretty strong word, and I think he's going to look pretty silly in
a century or so. For example, here's an estimate of travel costs with boron
fusion rockets: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/fusion-propulsion-if-
bussar...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/fusion-propulsion-if-bussard-iec-
fusion.html)

If either Bussard's polywell fusion or focus fusion turn out to work, that'll
be achievable within a couple decades. As Moore's Law continues and we get
better at simulating plasma, it's not that unlikely that some form of fusion
will work out.

There are a lot of possibilities for non-rocket launch, including various
space-elevator-like schemes, laser launch, and mass drivers. Even without
fusion, thorium fission could provide plenty of power.

It'd be pretty expensive and slow to travel to another star with fusion...but
eventually, with large solar panels in close orbit around the sun, we'll have
an awful lot of energy to play with, and just maybe we'll figure out efficient
laser or microwave power transmission sometime in the next thousand years.

On the other hand, maybe we'll just colonize the Oort Cloud and gradually
migrate to other stars over the next million years or so without really
trying.

(And, not that I'm holding my breath for this one, but if Woodward's right
about the Mach effect we'll get to other stars pretty quickly.)

As for the reasons...the resources of the solar system are millions of times
what's available on Earth. Once launch is cheap it'll be a no-brainer to start
mining the asteroids.

~~~
maratd
This is exactly right. It is not possible to predict technological
advancement. 250 years ago, the idea of traveling between London and New York
within a few hours would have seemed ludicrous ... and yet, that technology is
easily available to most people today. We may never leave the solar system,
but then again, we just might.

------
mikk0j
This one is gold:

"As Bruce Sterling has put it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about
the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about
a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and
easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's
just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and
live."

~~~
hackermom
The significant difference is that we have colonized this planet already. It's
in the nature of our species to increase our reach and breadth, and settling
in the Gobi Desert simply doesn't pander towards this call. The perspective
put forward by Sterling is very naive and narrow-minded, as it entirely
disregards this human trait. Remember, we went to the moon, and we want to go
to Mars, too, for reasons that we all know can't be fulfilled by a trip to the
Gobi Desert.

~~~
SamReidHughes
> It's in the nature of our species to increase our reach and breadth,

It is? Maybe it's in the nature of some individuals, but three boats ain't no
rocketship.

------
weavejester
Given that several Stross novels deal with uploaded intelligence, I was
surprised that no mention of this was made. In Accelerando, for instance, his
characters travel three light years in a coke-can sized spaceship powered by a
laser stationed around Jupiter.

It seems unlikely at best that we'll ever attempt interstellar travel in our
current organic bodies. The idea of taking along an atmosphere, food, water,
and enough space to move around just seems ridiculous when you could stuff a
human consciousness into a volume that, at worst, is the size of a melon, and
at best considerably smaller. You'd also be able to add error correcting and
redundancy to make the ship robust from radiation damage.

I suspect that any future spaceship will consist of perhaps 100 tons of
computer and memory, designed with considerable redundancy and error
correction. Perhaps 200,000 tons of shielding/fuel will be required,
sufficient to protect the core computers and memory from interstellar
particles, but also from the radiation from the ship's drive. Finally, you'd
have a 1 million ton black hole sitting at the tail end of the ship,
sufficiently large not to explode, but sufficiently small to have hardly any
gravity. This would be fed by taking matter from the shielding to keep the
black hole stable.

For further redundancy the ships might travel in small fleets, each acting as
a backup store for each of the others. If one ship gets taken out by a stray
piece of matter, at least you'd have a few more containing the same colonists.

------
tluyben2
I too believe we will (unfortunately) never leave the solar system. But for a
quite different reason; consumerism. People are much more interested in
stuffing burgers into their faces, living comfortably to a very old age while
living unhealthy, buying tons of inane crap which they will never use.
Downloading ringtones, spending 99% of their working day glued to Facebook,
not cooking but ordering in every single day. Having a nicer car and house
than the neighbors and getting their education while preferably not spending
more than a month a year with their noses in books.

The smart/educated few are not enough to offset the masses and for the masses
it's simply not 'comfortable' to work on space travel; why would you, you
already have a pool? Maybe poorer countries where people are not comfortable
could be of use? Nah; you see around the world; when GDP gets over a certain
level, out come the gadgets, mobile phones, ringtones, bentleys and other
useless crap.

A very small (fractional) % of humans is busy with the problem of energy and
space travel. If it would be a few actual %s of humanity we might stand a
chance, unfortunately, the rest of the collective brainpower is spent arguing
if the latest X Factor was won fairly.

I don't think we'll ever meet aliens either; after a certain time in the
evolution, every race of 'intelligent' beings will invent paid ringtones,
after that all chances of interstellar travel are gone.

------
liquids
While the author makes a good point about how _humans_ will never leave the
solar system, there are a few possibilities to continue human legacy. Ethics
aside, sending seeded capsules to a habitable exoplanet could one day
(millions of years) evolve into an intelligent species. Although not human, a
DNA signature or some other artifact could be engineered to validate it as a
human colonization.

Additionally you could explore the possibilities of fleets of nano sized
probes, which over the course of thousands of years, confirm the habitality of
an exoplanet, and build a crude nursery for sperm (which could be sent at a
later date). This method makes the energy/momentum problems slightly less
impossible.

------
jacques_chester
There's two levels of magic wand here.

The first is some breakthrough in physics that makes interstellar travel
feasible. Not likely, but a staple of sci-fi.

The second is a series of improvements in nanotechnology making interplanetary
colonies feasible (though less necessary).

And the looming confounding factor is that a "singularity" event might make
all of this moot.

------
nostromo
I agree that humans will likely never leave the solar system. However, I think
it's very possible -- even likely -- that human intelligence will.

One interesting thing about sending some future human AI into space is that it
could in theory 'power down' higher functions for hundreds or thousands of
years as it travels to its destination. Upon reawakening, it would be in a new
star system, with the cumulation of human knowledge in memory and enough tech
to reproduce and start anew.

------
cletus
That's a good, grounded assessment of the scale of the problem. I too believe
that the human colonization of space, even near-space (ie within the orbit of
the Moon) is a long way off. The energy costs are simply too high and
resources too cheap on the Earth to make it viable (in spite of typical SF
fodder of asteroid mining).

This is a problem because with 6.5 billion people we're using up resources.
Fast.

Anyway, I see two potential solutions to this problem: one not-so-far-fetched
and one _incredibly_ far-fetched.

The not-so-far-fetched version is... hitch-hiking. Our understanding of the
Universe is that it is full of mass wandering between stars. IIRC recently a
planet-sized body was detected traveling between the stars.

Simple probability dictates that it is only a matter of time before a
sufficiently large body travels through the Solar System with sufficient
velocity (including direction) to reach somewhere else in sufficient time (but
not too fast that we can't perform an orbital intercept) that we can
essentially build a colony on it.

The far-fetched version is to use back holes as power sources [1] as this is,
as far as I've read anyway, the only remotely viable method of providing
propulsion without reaction mass to speak of and reaction mass is the death of
any form of interstellar propulsion.

The answer to the Fermi Paradox [2] may simply be that it's too hard to leave
our comfortable gravity wells and most (all?) civilizations simply run out of
stuff before they get there.

I've also given the thought to "footprints". If you think about, say, a
primitive tribesman. What do they need to survive in a sustainable fashion?
They need a sufficient sized population (measured in the hundreds or low
thousands) to avoid inbreeding and sufficient land area to provide a food
source. This is probably measured in the tens or hundreds of square miles.

Imagine all they need as the footprint of a sustainable colony as that then
dictates the minimum size of any spaceship.

Now imagine a more advanced society. 1000 modern humans would need an ENORMOUS
footprint. Just think about computer chips. On any long voyage they'd break
down so you need to be able to make new ones. That means a sufficient lab,
technology, materials (or, in reality, the means to get more materials), all
that knowledge and so on. Plus the size of the population goes up given
required specializations.

This of course assumes that people would do all of these things instead of,
say, an AI of some kind (which would actually solve a lot of problems).

That footprint is currently way too large to build any kind of interstellar
vessel (IMHO). One of the trends I see in coming centuries is that footprint
will reach a point of reducing in size. By 2100 I expect we'll be able to keep
the sum of all human knowledge (or a close enough approximation) on an
essentially mobile device. Advanced manufacturing techniques and materials may
solve many of the footprint problems and so on.

As the footprint goes down, the viability of any isolated colony being able to
survive increases.

The hitchhiking idea would also be ideal for the survival of humanity overall.
With sufficient isolation, there will be cultural and genetic drift. If we're
able to influence each other, that's a recipe for conflict. But a large mass
passing through the Solar System is very likely a one-way ticket. There's no
way to follow and no way to return (barring astronomically small odds of a
repeat or inverse body).

[1]: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803v1>

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox>

~~~
Detrus
Black holes spaceships are the ticket with our current understanding of
physics. They can carry a large and heavy cargo in ship form or can push small
planets slowly in a desired direction. The travel times for black hole ships
are reasonable too, about six years to Proxima Centauri. It beats the other
sci-fi concepts like fusion, Orion, anti matter and solar sails.

Funny how solar sails seem like the easier option to build, but for
interstellar travel you need enormous lasers near the home star to push the
sail as it gets further away. Might as well build black holes with the lasers
and solar collectors.

~~~
0x44
How exactly does one build a black hole without obliterating ones host
species/planet/solar system?

~~~
Detrus
Most of their science paper is in layman English
<http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803v1> and explains such questions.

The black holes they would build are very very tiny, about the size of a
proton. They are relatively light, about 600,000 tons. Such a body doesn't
have noticeable gravity, it's too light to attract anything and too small to
absorb it. The big danger from these are explosions at the end of their life.
The explosions are serious if they happened near Earth, but safe at the
distance of Earth to Sun. They're built near the host star anyway.

~~~
troels
? I thought it was the _mass_ that made a black hole - not the _density_?

~~~
Confusion
There is a minimum amount of mass necessary for an object to be able to
collapse upon itself and form a black hole, such as a large star does when the
outward pressure due to the internal fusion reaction stalls.

However, any amount of mass can (in classical theory) be compressed far enough
to obtain a Schwarzschild radius, from which light cannot escape. This has
only to do with the density, not the total mass: a very small mass can still
cause a large curvature of space, though only in a very small region of space.

~~~
troels
OK, now that we're already discussing this topic. I just read this quote from
Wikipedia:

"""If one accumulates matter at nuclear density (the density of the nucleus of
an atom, about 1018 kg/m3; neutron stars also reach this density), such an
accumulation would fall within its own Schwarzschild radius at about 3 solar
masses and thus would be a stellar black hole."""

I take that to mean that if I wanted to create a black hole of something with
less mass than 3 suns, I would have to compress it beyond the density of an
atom nucleus? Is this - even in theory - possible to do? Wouldn't you need
some kind of "magic wand" (to stick with the articles authors choice of
words?)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I have strep throat and may not be at my best right now, but iirc the
chandrasekhar limit is 1.5 solar masses - it's enough to form a black hole
because not only is there a lot of mass, but it's also falling into the
center, compressing everything further. So one of your "magic wand" options is
acceleration, I think.

------
pers3us
I guess i have heard this kind of argument before. In the movie book "Around
the world in 80 days". Its not possible or you can't do travel all around the
globe in 80 days. Still someone did it, sooner or later someone will do it,
and see it takes us nearly 24 hours to make a complete rotation around the
earth. Some day we will even reach to Proxima Cetauri.

~~~
wladimir
Indeed. I like the OP as a SF writer, but I have to disagree with him in this
case. All you can say for sure is "With our current knowledge of science and
level of technological development we will never leave the solar system".

If you would have said a man would walk on the moon 100 years ago, you'd be
regarded as crazy.

What happens in the far future is impossible for us to predict right now. 100
years ago we didn't know everything there is to know, and now we don't either.
History is full of these kind of closed-minded extrapolations.

Appropriate other post on the frontpage right now:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639701>

------
Eliezer
Seriously? Who would be dumb enough to try sending proteins to another star in
the first place? See you at Proxima, and I don't mean in the flesh.

------
rsaarelm
The stirred-up crazy in the comment thread there is almost more interesting
than the post itself. I never realized how religion-like this stuff has ended
up being for a lot of people before seeing that.

------
syncopated
"That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force."

So you're saying there's a chance!

~~~
Dove
That's what I thought, too. I think the energy examples were supposed to scare
me, and if he'd said something like _total output of the sun, ever_ , they
would have. But _total power output of current civilization for five days_
garnered more of a "sounds doable" response from me.

~~~
nkassis
Yeah I don't think it's impossible to build a bomb that big, as far as I
understand it, no one felt like building bigger bombs than tsar bomba because
it becomes useless, if I'm not mistaken after 400 megaton or so, most of the
energy will just be sent to space.

From the Tsar Bomba article on wikipedia: "Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the
average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting
around 39 nanoseconds[citation needed], was about 5.4×1024 watts or 5.4
yottawatts (5.4 septillion watts). This is equivalent to approximately 1.4% of
the power output of the Sun.[8]"

That's a lot of power right there. Now to harness that :)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba>

~~~
adrianN
You wouldn't build one huge bomb, but instead use lots and lots of tiny bombs
in an Orion-type spacecraft. That way you get a better utilisation of your
energy.

~~~
nkassis
Doesn't that make it even easier? But then again I think 400 megaton isn't
enough. Last time I calculated it ( I probably made a ton of mistakes ;p) it
was in the the 10s of thousands or something like that.

Accelerating the space shuttle to 0.10c : (2,030 t * (0.10 _c)_ (0.10*c))/210
PJ = 8700 (wolfram alpha)

2,030 mass of space shuttle in metric tons 210PJ the energy from tsar bomba.

But then you have to add in the weight of the bombs too. since they are each
27,000kg and then you have to sum it up to get to something that can approach
0.10c (and I don't remmember how I had figured that one out)

And what says once you get to the other planet you can't fill the tank with
nuclear materials over there for the return trip?

~~~
adrianN
You might be interested in Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_equation>

------
Groxx
> _Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches_
> [in their relative scale - e.g., Voyager probes]

What? No it doesn't. We can do _massively_ better than this, right now. As in,
today's technology. No problem.

Why haven't we? It's frickin' expensive.

But the long-range probes we've launched have been pretty damn near _coasting_
their entire trip, with a few course corrections. They were pushed, and now
they float until they gain sentience and come back to say "hi". If they had a
huge-ass rocket attached to them, such as would _likely_ be on anything
interested in going any distance at any kind of speed (ie, human-carrying
ships), they'd get where they're going a _lot_ faster.

Next up, to get to proxmia centauri in 42 years with some hand-waving to make
things simpler and 100% efficient energy usage:

> _To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of
> mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs
> me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield).
> So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear
> armageddon ..._

Where did 400 megatons come from, if it's equivalent to 21.6? And if 400 is
"the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force", I say
that's a _miniscule_ amount of energy, especially once it's divided by 20.
Crank it up another 10-fold beyond 400, and we're still talking modern-day
terrestrial-level achievable energy without breaking a sweat.

> _So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of
> half a million seconds — roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-
> voom._

Not bad, really. We're pretty inefficient right now. Make it cost a few times
that - we'll be producing that in a week before we can even get a lame v0.1
ship built and in trials.

\---

All in all, an interesting read. But it feels more like a half-accurate rant.
We're waving magic wands to get 100% efficiency and 2000kg, but we're not
waving magic wands to get away from conventional rockets and today's energy
production levels?

I'm entirely on their side that our tech today can't get us to the stars.
Totally. I agree, the energy needed is quite literally astronomical, and we're
not even close to it. But we keep finding weird things with our science - I'm
not writing it off entirely. And I don't see why people seem to imply that we
_must_ leave from Earth - why not mine the asteroid belt to provide the fuel
at our leisure, and build a truly massive ship? We're not going to aim for the
stars on our first go, we'll be _living_ in space for a long time before then.

~~~
maxerickson
The 400 megatons comes from the estimate that the trip would require 2e18
joules (which is about 22x the 9e16 joules up there).

And he is getting away from conventional rockets, the 2e18 estimate assumes
that the energy required to move the ship is coming from elsewhere, not
carried along with the ship.

So he assumes a very small ship and mysterious ways of propelling it in order
to sketch an estimate of the minimum amounts of energy involved. Ripping an
even bigger hole in physics might throw acceleration and momentum out the
window, but assuming 100% efficient transmission of energy across 24 light
years already requires something pretty strange to us.

(his comparisons to present day production levels seem more illustrative than
pessimistic)

------
rbanffy
In the 20th century we went from thinking that heavier-than-air flight was
impossible to it being a major economic activity and the dominant form of
medium-distance travel. We went from conventional explosives to nuclear
explosives. We landed people on the Moon. We went from dying of dental caries
to antibiotics and (very limited) genetic therapies.

In one short century we published more books and amassed more knowledge than
all centuries past. Together. And we built the tools to search it and process
it into meaning.

Traveling to another star is a formidable problem and doing it Newton style is
not impractical. But if the past century teaches us something, we are a
species prone to invent magic wands.

Besides that, we all know how futile is to try to predict the future. We can
only see and express it in our own terms. The future is as alien to us as
Twitter would be to my grandmother (who would be turning a century if she were
alive).

------
chaostheory
“Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”

James Arthur Baldwin

That being said, I don't disagree with most of the post.

------
justin_vanw
Because we'll fall off the side! Oh, that's why we can't circumnavigate.

Some other things man will never do: <http://www.rense.com/general81/dw.htm>

------
scott_s
I reach for this whenever someone mentions the inevitability of humans
colonizing other planets - which I did earlier today. Nice to see others
thinking it's worth highlighting.

------
wolfrom
I agree with the notion that no human society will purposely invest money in a
trek to another solar system, but I strongly disagree with the notion that
humanity is stuck in this solar system for eternity.

There seem to be two common misconceptions about the colonization of space:

1\. People will colonize other planets. The notion that future generations
will desire to burrow into other planets is as strange as expecting people to
build a new city by digging caves in a cliff wall. Just as we now build
apartment blocks and ranch houses, we will someday build custom habitats that
aren't continually ravaged by earthquakes, tornados and spring floods.

2\. Reaching the next solar system will be momentous. People will populate
neighbouring solar systems just as our ancestors moved from Africa to other
parts of the world... gradually from one generation to the next, each one
drifting a little further into the Oort. One day a habitat that has its own
artificial star within will move from the most recent piece of raw material to
the next, not realizing that the one orbits our distant sun while the other
orbits another star entirely.

Barring catastrophe at home, this future is likely. It's just the same story
that's been happening since Lucy's family left the Great Rift Valley.

~~~
scott_s
Note that you didn't actually address his arguments.

~~~
wolfrom
Please elaborate.

His arguments are related to interstellar travel as an endeavour that is
undertaken as a gravity well to gravity well transit. My argument is that
planetary colonization and travel from Earth to the close orbit of Proxima
Centauri or any other star is not the only method by which humankind will
reach beyond this solar system. Does that not address his arguments?

~~~
scott_s
He makes specific arguments regarding the time and energy requirements of
interplanetary and interstellar travel. You don't address those. What you do
say is too vague for me to figure out exactly what you mean.

------
rsheridan6
The problem with this analysis is that it assumes people will only do things
that make economic sense, and only if it will benefit themselves or their
descendants in a short time frame. In fact, we've done all sorts of useless,
expensive things "because it's there," and we spend money on things like
radiation shielding for nuclear waste that will last thousands of years.

Granted, space colonization would be much more expensive than any very long-
term or symbolic project we do now, but it's not out of the question that
future societies would be more inclined to do stuff like that than 21st
century anglophones. If so, none of Stross's barriers are necessarily deal-
breakers.

For example, I don't think Hitler would have spared any expense to seed
another world with Aryans, regardless of whether it made any economic sense
(since when do humans only do things that make sense?), and the 420 year time
frame wouldn't seem like much to a man who thought he founded a 1000 year
Reich.

------
Kilimanjaro
Phoenicians circa 1000bc:

"We won't make it to america unless we build ships as large as a stadium and
can put a thousand slaves with oars in them. But then, where are we going to
put all the food to feed them? Well, we let them die and throw them in the
ocean, only the stronger will deserve to be called the first american
settlers"

We don't know yet what the future may teach us.

------
suprgeek
It comes down to which side of the human spirit you are betting on. Do you
think that no matter how hard and how smart we try in the next 200-300 years
we will never overcome some of the fundamental challenges of space and time?
Then yes, what Stross says would make sense.

Personally I am an optimist on these things - in 1711 you could not have
imagined regular Aircraft - something we take for granted today much less
Spacecrafts. Electricity, Computers, Cell-phones, Internet, etc would have
been inconceivable. Today we have been to the moon ~40 years ago. Villagers in
India use cellphones and electricity and a fifth of humanity is interconnected
via the net.

So I have to believe that by 2311 we will have cracked the problems around
Interstellar travel and be living around a different Sun than our Sol.

Anything else is just underestimating the Human Spirit.

~~~
cstross
You're also assuming that this hypothetical Human Spirit is immune to E. O.
Wilson's biophilia hypothesis:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis>

(Otherwise it's not just human colonization you're talking about -- it's
_Terrestrial biosphere colonization_ , which is a vastly more complex matter
than most people seem to be willing to contemplate.)

~~~
suprgeek
Thanks for the link. The hypothetical human spirit is the same mindset that
drives the likes of this chap <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes>
or the early (American) settlers. So barring an extinction level event there
is better than even odds that Humanity will overcome the Gravity well of the
sun en-mass to colonize another Solar system.

------
chmike
I had the same conclusion initially and called it the horizont of space
reachability principle. There is a limit to the travel distance defined by the
energy consumption. Reducing the energy consumption to the minimum would allow
to extend this horizont limit. Pushing this reasonning to its limit I noticed
that we have plenty of examples on earth of live forms able to extend this
limit to infinity by mean of seeds or spores form. In such form the organism
is totally passive and consumes no energy. It has a trigger which induces
reactivation of life and development that may be activated by external energy
and appropriate condition.

So it is possible for a life form, human or extraterrestrial, to build such a
civilization seed which contains enough energy reserve and machinery to
sustain life activity restoration and live form rebirth. Throw such
civilization seed vessel like a bullet toward a distant solar system so that
the energy of the target can be used to trigger start of development and we
have our space travel capacity.

This is not how we'd naturally imagine interstellar travel, but the important
point is that this proves that it is possible without relying on exotic or
hazardous hypothesis. We should also keep in mind that there is still the
possibility to tap into the dark matter as source of energy. While this is
still very uncertain, it should be known and well accepted By now that
interstellar travel and space colonization is possible.

I would like to add to this that if human life is a result of a natural
process, there is a very high likelyhood that we are not alone in the univers
and that other entities are likely to have started colonization already a long
time ago. As we can see from earth civilization history a key factor to
perserve its liberty and life autodetermination is the mastering of science
and technology, intelligence and defense capacity. While there is still a need
to protect ourselves from oher humans, in which we spend and waste a lot of
ressource, the clock is ticking, and other civilizations may be developping
much faster and efficiently than humans. It is no hard to see what it all
implies.

------
vorg
Just 5 days ago...

"Kiwi developer Glenn Martin, who has been working on his flying machine for
30 years, intends to make it available on the market in 2012 at a cost of
about US$100,000. Last month, the jetpack made its first high-altitude test
flight, taking a dummy pilot to 1,500 meters under remote control while Mr
Martin watched from a helicopter."

For more, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8566096/Martin-
Jetpack...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8566096/Martin-Jetpacks-
jetski-for-the-skies-to-go-on-sale-in-2012.html)

Humans will make it to the asteroids, to the rest of the Milky Way, and fill
the Universe.

------
yaix
I remember an article here on HN a few days ago about the storage of
antimatter for about half an hour.

In a few decades from now, the energy necessary for such a long distance space
flight could come from half a ton of anti-hydrogen.

------
thematt
I'm actually okay with humans never leaving the solar system. Our robotics and
technology is advancing at a fast enough pace to satisfy my curiosity about
what's out there. Look at the amazing stuff we've gotten back from a couple of
Mars rovers, without ever having set foot on the surface. Let's just send
robots out. It's much cheaper, comparatively easier...and can certainly be
done much sooner.

------
Joakal
Interestingly, a non-profit [charity] foundation is dedicated to interstellar
travel: <http://www.tauzero.aero/>

Brief article summary:
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Breakthrough_...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Breakthrough_Propulsion_Physics_Program#Legacy)

------
shin_lao
I can't spot any flaw in the reasoning.

But one could sum up the essay as such:

"A man from the XXIst century said it it's impossible to leave the solar
system"

Perhaps we should wait for what the man of the XXIInd century might have to
say?

We'll need a couple of magic wands, but we've already built a lot of them.

Remember that in the early XXth century going into space was still science
fiction.

------
SkyMarshal
_> The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are
already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern._

Nor should the future bankruptcy of your country concern you as long as it
happens after you're dead. Even if your descendents have to pay the piper for
it.

------
civilian
The Lifeboat Foundation, <http://lifeboat.com/ex/main> is relevant. They're a
(religious?) organization promoting humanity's colonization beyond Earth.

------
Apocryphon
I will take the man at his challenge, become a multi-trillionaire, and start
building a domed city in the Gobi and a floating base in the North Atlantic.

------
apedley
Quantum entanglement, zero point energy, just to name a few things. While I
agree these technologies might not be viable for a while, saying we are never
going to leave the solar system is fairly short sighted. We always find a way
:)

------
VB6_Foreverr
I was watching a documentary about the wright brothers recently and right up
until they actually did it many bright people doubted it would ever be
possible to have powered human flight.

Like it always has, something will come along that will change everything.

------
hackermom
There's one great flaw in this article: the gross underestimation of man's
potential, drive and constant progress.

~~~
sgt
Exactly, there will always be naysayers...

------
mkramlich
the points he made are old and well-known to anyone into space and SF and not
too young

------
Steko
Spoilers: his reasoning does not involve Vogons.

------
nazgulnarsil
don't care. give me a thorium reactor and a holodeck and I'll explore the
universe from the safety of cave a mile beneath the earth's surface.

alternatively upload me and I'll put myself in a more suitable interstellar
body.

------
hsmyers
What was that limit on data transmission via copper again? 300baud? Or was it
1400? Nice the way science always ends for idiots like this...

~~~
scott_s
The limits he talks about are fundamental. We would have to be _very wrong_
about much of physics to invalidate his arguments.

~~~
waterlesscloud
It is virtually certain that we are very wrong about much of physics.

Perhaps not in ways that solve these issues. But we're still almost certainly
wrong about things we consider very fundamental.

~~~
sharpneli
At the same time we are very certain on some issues.

As an example there will not be a theory which says "You can lift yourself up"
and suddenly people grabbing their own belts could lift themselves up into the
air.

Any future theory will predict exactly the same things as current theories on
the cases where current theories have been experimentally verified.

