
The 100 Year Starship - mmhsieh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Year_Starship
======
EA
What if Country X starts building a starship in, say, 40 years and it works
and off they go.

Then Country Y invests in new technology and starts building their new ship
in, say, 100 years.

It's possible and likely that Country Y's starship is more capable and faster
than Country X's ship as they would have waited for and capitalized on
scientific breakthroughs that make interstellar travel better.

~~~
JNRowe
There is a fair amount of thought that has gone in to that, often referred to
as the Wait Calculation.

An interesting example was "Interstellar Travel - The Wait Calculation and the
Incentive Trap of Progress"¹, which somehow isn't on libgen [yet?].

1\.
[http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.php?p=2006.59.239](http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.php?p=2006.59.239)
\- The incentive trap of linking to a £5 download for fifteen year old paper
is another paper entirely.

~~~
marbs
The "incentive trap" has also been referred to as the "incessant obsolescence
postulate", in this paper from 2011 titled "Energy, incessant obsolescence,
and the first interstellar missions":

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066](https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066)

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allochthon
Interesting. 100 years is a long time. Would this be a generation ship [0]? If
so, I'm curious about their discussion of the moral and ethical considerations
of committing children to such a journey.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship)

~~~
cptaj
The project aims to study how we can develop interstellar travel technologies
in 100 years.

Not to develop a ship that can travel for 100 years. (Even though that might
be the case)

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scrumper
Is this program dead? I had a look through the website and couldn't see much
to suggest otherwise other than their writing prize in July last year. The
list of partners too was a bit weird, all branding consultants and design
agencies.

~~~
close04
> the endeavor was meant to excite several generations to commit to the
> research and development of breakthrough technologies to advance the
> eventual goal of interstellar space travel

It doesn't seem that the purpose is to come up with a working concept but
rather a concept that's interesting enough to push the topic forward and
tickle the imagination of scientist, engineers, etc. for generations until the
practical implementation is achievable. So I expect right now branding and
design are more useful in popularizing this.

~~~
cptaj
So, where is that? That branding and design they made?

Seems like this was a big scam.

~~~
zentiggr
Sometimes when humans try to get a hand-wavy initiative started, all you get
is hand waving.

My uninformed take on it: if the initiative was more on the level of "Here's
my amazing ship design, prove me wrong" they would have gotten way more
involvement. Even if Version 0 was a Jules Verne design...

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viach
I hope the future of interstellar travel is not these gigantic starships. It's
like starting a project of building a gigantic Zeppelin in 1900 in order to
get able to get to moon in 100 years. Teleportation seems more convinient to
me and much less financially and socially devastating.

~~~
naravara
>Teleportation seems more convinient to me and much less financially and
socially devastating.

Sure, but there is that pesky problem where the solutions need to be
theoretically possible.

~~~
viach
Both teleportation and Death Star are impossible with current technology, but
the folks anyway are building the Death Star?

~~~
naravara
a.) Who is building a Death Star?

b.) Death Star isn't _theoretically_ impossible. We know you just need to
direct a massive amount of energy at a planet to blow it up, the only question
is figuring out how to get that kind of energy. Teleportation though, we
literally have no idea how it would work or what it even means.

~~~
m4rtink
Engeneration is an interesting very high tech "teleportation" alternative:

[https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-
article/4a3d78dc77e6f](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a3d78dc77e6f)

You basically send your digitized DNA & personality copy to the target (needs
to have reasonably high tech infrastructure already in place), where a blank
body is grown & "flashed" by your personality. And voila, you are now walking
the surface of another world couple light years away from your destination.
(And you likely also now effectively exist at least twice, but oh well.)

There are serious ethical and security issues with this technique, but it
might still be useful none the less. :)

~~~
grotsnot
>And voila, you are now walking the surface of another world couple light
years away from your destination

No I'm not, my clone is. My consciousness is right where it started, making
this an extremely limited form of "travel"

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dfilppi
There should only be one Manhattan style project now: figure out how to
download consciousness into a machine. Besides conferring immorality, this
would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant.

~~~
icandoit
If we could do this wouldn't we spin up minds-in-machines to do all sorts of
cognitive tasks on demand and shut them off when the task is done (or they
abandon their task) like a virtual machine.

Imagine making a copy of someone like Fabrice Bellard [1] and spinning up 100
of them to write your flappy bird clone for you and then shutting them off.

Would this be a terrible crime, or a paradise? This is an idea known as
Hansons "ems" [2].

\-
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard)

\- [https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-
of...](https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of-robots/)

~~~
wonderwonder
This is a pretty serious question and something that really should be
answered. Is a digital conscious alive, and if so what rights does it have?

Ian Banks' Culture novels look at this a few times.

Appreciate the article links, will read them after work today.

~~~
nradov
It's not at all a serious question. It's entirely speculative and there is
zero hard scientific evidence that such a thing is even possible. Science
fiction.

~~~
TomMarius
Philosophy definitely can contemplate theoretical scenarios

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PaulHoule
"Did jesus die for Klingons?" can be answered the way that Mormons answer the
question for Americans.

That is, Quetzalcoatl came to the middle east to offer the good word.

(I always tell Mormon missionaries about Quetzalcoatl and they haven't heard
of him, but the Quetzalcoatl cult did start around the same time as when Jesus
came +/\- 100 years or so.)

