

Ask HN: Stark Trek - How far are we? - kyro

Seeing Star Trek last night (a great movie, btw), I couldn't help but genuinely feel depressed that I wasn't born 500 years from now.<p>For you physicists, and those knowledgeable about this sort of space development, how far do you estimate we are from becoming a universe like that of Star Trek? Sure, it's just a movie, and apologies if this may come across as a silly post, but I've always been pretty amazed at the thought of a space world.<p>I'm not a physicist by any means, or a person who has any significant grasp on physics theory, but hopefully this post will spark some interesting and educational (for me) discussion about physics, the future of space development, and how far we are from making significant steps towards space societies.<p>EDIT - Just to clarify, I'm speaking more to the technological side of achieving such societies, and less about the social dynamics, etc.
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dkokelley
The biggest inhibitor I think would be the lack of economical justifications
for it. We don't need the space (or rather, what we would like is the space to
be close. Take a plane trip across the U.S. and you'll find a whole lot of
empty), and our natural resources will last us for the foreseeable future.

What benefits are there? What we would need is a space 'gold rush' if we
wanted to realistically expect any sort of real progress in that direction.
Maybe we'll discover that there's oil (for example) on Mars. Maybe we'll see a
lot more space speculators.

That's it for financial issues. Of course finances will drive the technology.
The most prominent pieces of technology we're missing are faster than light
(or warp) engines, and artificial gravity. Warp would let us travel very far
very efficiently, and artificial gravity would allow humans to spend extended
periods of time in space. A couple other things we're missing are materials to
build such starships (not sure if we have anything that would hold such large
ships together in space), replicator and transporter technology, phasers,
shields/forcefields, and last but not least, proton torpedoes. If anyone knows
of technology listed above that exists today, please let me know.

~~~
lionheart
Well, if I understand correctly, 99% of the cost of space travel is getting
out of Earth's gravity well.

Once you're up there, moving around is pretty easy.

So, space elevators that could bring down surface-to-orbit costs would
probably drive a huge boom in space exploration.

No idea how soon we'll have those though.

~~~
Retric
That depends on what you mean by space. LEO to Geosynchronous orbit is still a
lot more than 1% of energy to orbit.

Anyway, orbit is only 17,000 MPH which is way to slow to go travel to the next
star. Traveling at at 17,000 mph would take about 40,000 years to travel one
light year. The good news is you slowly accelerate in space over a long time,
so smaller high efficiency engines would work just fine. The bad news is the
closet star is over 4 light years from earth.

So getting something the size of the space shuttle to the next star in 1,000
years would take 2x (168^2) as much energy as it takes to get to LEO. ~56,500
* 2.2 * 10^12J = ~10^17 jules for comparison that's ~28 thousand megawatt
hours.

------
MichaelApproved
We're still trying to get back to the moon, haven't built a nuclear power
plant in decades (US) and our bodies fall apart in zero G.

I doubt we'll be touring other planets in even the next 100 years.

~~~
ErrantX
And yet we went from the first powered flight to landing on the moon in 66
years.

Its 106 yrs (nearly) now since the wright brothers first took to the air and
barely 40 since Apollo 11 touched down. So I'd suggest that 100 years is an
_age_ to fix those problems in :)

The issue is, I think, that we lost interest in the moon and stars. The space
race was driven by politics and so we got there by sheer force. Then it all
slackened off again. But I think the next generation will have grown up with
enough modern Sci-Fi to think "I wonder if...." and hunger for the sky :)

~~~
MichaelApproved
If star trek taught us anything it's that we're a plucky race that can do
almost anything (provided we overcome our violent history).

But I'm judging the next 100 years on the past 20. We did squat compared to
what we're potentially capable of. NASA lost about 50% of it's unmanned Mars
missions. What a joke.

~~~
rms
But we did the internet. Personally I think it's an accident of human history
that space exploration came before the information age. It would have gone the
other way if not for the Cold War.

~~~
MichaelApproved
The internet is mainly a set of protocols and business rules humans created.
Space exploration has to tackle rules the universe created. Much different
story.

~~~
netsp
If a set of rules is created (or emerges for you Hayekians) whereby there is
significant incentive for the creation of increments contributing to overall
advancement, we will advance in space exploration.

The cold war was such system. The next one will (hopefully) be more peaceful &
market driven. Space flights for tourism provide a few of these increment.
Asteroid-mining might be another. Military probably has a few more to play.

None of these have been paying much dividends in the last 30-40 years.

The _of protocols and business rules humans create_ may be capitalism (or some
sort of cousin). The _rules the universe created_ need to be tackled no matter
what we do.

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stcredzero
We already have all of the technology we need for a spacefaring society, and
probably have had it for some decades. Our economy is stuck in a local
maximum, where there is no short-term economic benefit to going there.

Read Zubrin's _Entering Space_ for details.

[http://www.amazon.com/Entering-Space-Creating-Spacefaring-
Ci...](http://www.amazon.com/Entering-Space-Creating-Spacefaring-
Civilization/dp/1585420360)

For example, the original Orion project had a means of traveling to Saturn in
a year. (Using nuclear bombs to power a spacecraft.)

The various studies on space colonization are also interesting. T.A.
Heppenheimer summarizes some of them (in particular, the famous Stanford
Summer Study) in his book "Colonies in Space."

Interstellar travel is another thing entirely, though.

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byrneseyeview
The future is weird. Asking how many discoveries away from reaching _Star
Trek_ is like asking how many Ivy League degrees you need before you turn into
Obama.

The whole space opera thing is fairly unlikely. It's more likely that the
world we'll be able to simulate in our own solar system will be much more
interesting than any world we'd be able to visit outside of it.

The future depends on what you extrapolate; _Star Trek_ goes from trains to
planes to space; right now, lots of interesting fiction goes from PCs to
ubiquitous computing to uploads. Whatever's next is unlikely to resemble any
of that in any way.

~~~
trapper
"It's more likely that the world we'll be able to simulate in our own solar
system will be much more interesting than any world we'd be able to visit
outside of it."

Good point, I had never thought of it like that.

------
gcv
We need to solve the problem of producing energy. I think that human progress,
even in the short term, depends entirely upon "breaking" the first law of
thermodynamics. Clearly, no one will successfully create energy out of
nothing, but I hope that physics will one day invent a way to cheaply and
cleanly tap into energy sources which produce a huge yield. We have nuclear
reactors today, but they are enormously large, expensive, and difficult to
maintain. The day that you can buy a car --- or a wristwatch --- powered by
atomic energy, you can say that the future arrived.

This energy source does not have to be atomic, except we don't know of a fuel
more densely packed with energy than atoms. E = mc^2 and all that. In most
science fiction, this problem has been solved using mumbo-jumbo technology,
such as matter-antimatter reactors. Whatever; maybe someone will one day think
of a way to make that work. Solving the energy problem means that the vast
amount of effort currently directed at, e.g., oil production, stable trade
with parts of the world which produce and sell hydrocarbon fuels, and climate
maintenance can free up to really push things forward.

Just think of the rockets we could build if they didn't need to use awful
rocket propellants (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_propellant>) or
nuclear explosions for fuel. And I'll try to make sure the controlling
software for those rockets uses Lisp. :)

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mpk
> I couldn't help but genuinely feel depressed that I wasn't born 500 years
> from now.

The thing is - we have no way of knowing what life in the future will be like.
There might not be anything we recognize as human life there in the first
place.

I'm continuously amazed by the here and now. I've been all around the world. I
have friends all over this planet. I communicate with people all over the
world via the net every single day. And my friends? Ha! They could be anywhere
and all I have to do is pick up my cell phone and call them. ('Uh, can I call
you back, I'm in Singapore for some work thing and it's 4 am here..').

I love speculative sci-fi, but not to the extent that I want to not be born in
this age. Put things into perspective if not living in the super-happy-fun
sci-fi future gets you depressed.

~~~
radley
Agreed. I'm happy to live in this future where we can at least play around
with this caliber of imagination.

I'm not cut out for farming or the floppy wigs of the past.

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troystribling
Space exploration as portrayed in "Accelerando" by Charles Stross,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(novel)>, seems far more practical
than portrayed in Star Trek. In Accelerando interstellar spaceships are the
size of beer cans and full of electronics.

------
pookleblinky
I also found Star Trek to be disappointing in its depiction of technological
change. It is, at base, little different than all the other sci-fi depictions
of housewives in space and Colossal-sized vacuum tube intelligences.

It's a common bias to overestimate technological and societal change in the
short term, and underestimate them in the long term. Think of those McCarthy-
era AI guys promising GAI in a decade: I bet you $100 that their vision for
the next 4 decades was surprisingly conservative and unimaginative. The same
men who imagined GAI in their lifetimes were most likely the same men who
could not imagine the full societal implications of civil rights legislation.

I should expect the world in 500 years to be as unimaginable, complex, and
alien as the world now is to someone from the 16th century. I hate to make an
argument from fictional evidence, but there is no reason at all to prefer a
Rodenberry future as opposed to an Egan future. The former is refuted by
witnessing how pervasive and tempting it is to anchor future change on the
present.

If Charlemagne and Shakespeare could understand the future, it's a bad
indication for how realistic you are being.

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vaksel
you never know, the thing with physics, is that a single discovery can turn
everything upside down and lead to millions of inventions

~~~
MichaelApproved
My lucky lotto numbers are 1,11,17,21,44,69

~~~
vaksel
That doesn't look that lucky, I've never seen a lotto drawing that had 1 in it

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lesbianmonad
Interesting question. In the developed world, the last three decades seem to
have only entrenched class power and moved us further from a post-monetary
society; however there are many encouraging developments in the periphery that
could bear much fruit over the next quarter century. History, as always, will
be written from the future.

------
evgen
You need to take Star Trek and the reality it posits within the context of its
time. Star Trek was initially pitched as "Wagon Train to the stars"; think
back to the westerns of the 50s/60s and you will see a lot of similarities in
narrative structure as well as the idea of roving "law enforcement" wandering
around a lawless frontier dispensing "justice." The basic problem is that if
technology progresses along a line similar to what the TV shows and movies
suggest then there is no way that society will remain in a late-20th century
stasis to match the shows/movies.

There is some good "hard" sci-fi out there that you should read if you want
some interesting suggestions regarding "what will life look like in X years"
and I will let others jump in with some of their favorites (e.g. Vinge, Bear,
Stross, etc)

------
marketer
What are the market forces driving deeper space exploration? There aren't any
I can think of except recreation and science experiments.

What's hot right now in aeronautics seems to be better communication and
navigation satellites. Maybe these will push the boundaries of space
technology?

~~~
SapphireSun
Asteroids. No corporation driven by quarterly returns will spring for that,
but there is an enormous amount of raw material there. If we had a very cheap
source of propulsive energy, it might be profitable to transport it back.

------
eugenejen
I think physics is not the only answer to this. The following technologies and
organization maybe more useful in certain case.

1\. The capability to have all my DNA sequences stored.

2\. The capability to create an organism that has exact DNA sequence as me.

3\. The capability to have all my memory inside my brain read out.

4\. The capability to restored all my memory to the organism created in step
2.

5\. The capability to remove aging effect on my brain and body.

6\. An organization that is willing to keep the technology and data above
passed down by time without errors and is willing to teach the resurrected me
what the new world is and help me to fit in without questions and still grant
me freedom or treat me as a 2nd class citizen.

If there exists such technologies and organizations, we are all endowed with
eternal life and are capable of seeing all new possible technologies in Star
Trek to show up...

~~~
jlof
A solution to (trans)personal space exploration might be synaptic level brain
imaging with blue brain -simulation and becoming V-ger yourself. But what
comes to capability of seeing all the possible new Star Trek technologies, the
only good solution is eternal life as movie audience. ;)

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simanyay
There is a very interesting book Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku
([http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Impossible-Scientific-
Explorat...](http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Impossible-Scientific-Exploration-
Teleportation/dp/0385520697)). It is exactly about those questions.

------
jodrellblank
_I've always been pretty amazed at the thought of a space world._

Great! 'cos you're living on one :)

Very far. We can't travel faster than light and at the moment not even close
to it. We have vague ideas that warp drives might be possible, but generating,
containing and manipulating enough energy to work in some of the suggestions
is also currently unthinkable. We're at the stage of needing multiple
unpredictable breakthroughs to get anywhere close, and that leaves travel to
the nearest extra-solar _anything_ taking many years.

Also, the Star Trek technology is very inconsistent, I don't think we are
going that way. I haven't seen the new film (yet) but from the TV series,
there are numerous questions. How come nobody else ever has Geordie-style
visors as an option? Or any kind of optical or neural enhancement or display?
Or any kind of body armour?

Why is there no nanotechnology anywhere except when the Borg turn up? Why
isn't there an anti-Borg good cyborg species? They destroy entire star ships
so frequently and inconsequentially that they must have tremendous
manufacturing capability, but wouldn't that have more ramifications somehow?
How come Picard has a replacement heart and Geordi a brain-connected
replacement vision, and everyone can be rebuilt by the teleporter, but they
all have wrinkles and age and die? Why don't they throw half the Enterprise
away and replace it with a much smaller holodeck with simulated rooms? Why
does nobody ever ask the computer anything interesting? Why can't Data improve
himself or replicate himself? Or merge with the ship's computer? Why has
nobody built a machine to pick up what Deanna Troi's empathic sense does and
done away with the whole "Computer, where is x?" "x's badge fell off so I
can't find them" thing?

Why is nobody sitting at home on Earth and using the magical instantaneous
subspace communication to explore with unmanned spacecraft?

So, yeah - space: big, cold, empty. planet bankruptingly expensive.

~~~
ewiethoff
"Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence." -- Leonard
"Bones" McCoy, 2009

------
kqr2
I think the main problem with the Star Trek scenario is "faster than light
travel". Of course, traveling faster than light really isn't possible however
most of the alternate mechanisms proposed, e.g. worm holes, etc. don't seem
that feasible either.

I think more realistic is that man gets a toehold on space by being able to
harness resources from other planets / asteroids. If people can become self-
sufficient in space, perhaps generation after generation, we can creep out
further into space.

But it takes a big initial commitment and it's unlikely we'll ever resolve all
the problems on earth so I'm not sure how much of a priority it will be.

~~~
MichaelApproved
You're not trying to travel faster than light, you're tying to bend space.

To understand, take a piece of paper and imagine you're on one end of it
trying to get across. Instead of traveling the length of the paper just fold
it in half and jump to the other side.

~~~
eugenejen
I hated this example of folding space. This example just shows us how confused
we are about "folding".

When you folding a paper. Your reference frame is outside that piece of paper.
You also possess energy supply outside the paper to exert the deformation of
the material on the paper. But you did not posses the energy to fold the
"space" around that paper.

In fact, even you fold it, you and that piece of paper are still in the same
4-d space time. Unless you are the lucky intelligent beings that are living on
that piece of paper such as a colony of bacteria. Now it is the time to jump
to the other side the paper!

So I guess the first step to construct a warp drive is to figure out
questions:

1\. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper evoke help from extra
dimensional source and energy from it?"

2\. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper control this mechanism?"

3\. "Can the above mechanism to be achieved without ruining basic physics laws
such as law of matter energy conservation, laws of thermodynamics in
marcophysics scale".

As long as we figure the possibility for those questions in physics, then we
will know can we travel like Star Trek.

Don't get me wrong. I love Star Trek. And my undergraduate major was physics.
But I know very few general relativity theory and problems. What I just said
is just consider what is necessary if we want to fold the space time.

~~~
MichaelApproved
I'm happy you edited your reply to try and clarify your point but you're still
over complicating an attempt at a simple explanation.

My original point was that going faster than light in a straight line isn't
the goal. The goal is to bend/fold/warp space around you and get to another
physical point is space before light does.

Edit: I'm saying bending space, which happens all around us, is more likely a
scenario than traveling faster than light. Is this statement wrong?

~~~
dandelany
Yes, but eugenejen's point is that you're vastly oversimplifying a complicated
concept. It's easy to use paper as a metaphor for our universe, but unless
you've got any practical ideas for how we, as members of it, can use
technology to accomplish this bending, it's not really very useful.

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kaffeinecoma
I'd say about 20-30 years away:
[http://markii.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/kurzweils-
singularity...](http://markii.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/kurzweils-singularity-
time-line/)

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stevedekorte
Our society isn't nearly as hierarchical, militaristic, conformist and fascist
as that depicted in Star Trek but I could see us there in a few hundred years.

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kineticac
we barely know enough about what's on this planet and how it works let alone
go anywhere else. 500 years might not be enough.

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jodrellblank
_> I couldn't help but genuinely feel depressed that I wasn't born 500 years
from now._

What does it mean to say you wish you were born 500 years from now?

Explain: what would have to happen for that to be so?

~~~
dhughes
Maybe we were all born 500 years later, only it was 2009 instead of 1509.

------
Devilboy
Be happy you weren't born 500 ago instead!

