I always dislike it when I click on an article like that and there is a giant artists conception that, for a split second I mistake for an actual photograph. It doesn't seem proper to have an artists conception of something on a scientific article.
I think these sort of artists conceptions really help the public visualize, understand, and get inspired by the research. I imagine it would be a lot harder to get funding for the research without them.
I hate bad pop sci articles and bad artist conceptions, but I actually support it if the depiction is designed to increase reader understanding (rather than just induce the "woah pretty" reaction).
For instance, did you know that Saturn's rings are made of rocks that are separated by very human-scale distances? I find these images valuable in communicating that fact:
It should be intuitively obvious that it's not an actual photograph, since we've only just this year been able to get close photographs of Pluto, and we had to send a spacecraft there to do it.
I mostly agree... but then there is the aspect of this that can be quiet inspiring to help us imagine what it might be like... a perhaps inspire us to get the real picture.
I would love to see a standard set, especially for space photos, that place a label directly on the image with 'artist rendering' or something like that. Its annoying the amount of space "photos" out there, even many on NASA sites that don't attribute this and mislead viewers.
"Red dwarfs therefore develop very slowly, maintaining a constant luminosity and spectral type for trillions of years, until their fuel is depleted. Because of the comparatively short age of the universe, no red dwarfs exist at advanced stages of evolution."
And here I thought because of their small size they'd be LESS suitable for life.
I like to think that there is a tidally locked planet somewhere out there whose inhabitants like to argue about whether life could ever evolve on a rotating planet.
"I mean, it would be so unstable! Even with a thick atmosphere, temperatures at one point would fluctuate by tens of degrees, hundreds of times a year! Plants would be unable to photosynthesise for half the time! Animals would be blinded!"
Habitable planets would orbit so close that they would likely be tidally locked, and one side would always face the star, while the other would always be dark. The temperature variation could pose major problems for habitability.
Red Dwarf stars are prone to intense flares, which could easily drive off an atmosphere.
Red Dwarf stars are likely not where we should look.
They're just red dwarf stars. Red Dwarf stars are stellar radio sources that continuously emit episodes of Red Dwarf. Those too are unsuitable for long term habitation.
This reminds me of when Comedy Central ran a week long Red Dwarf marathon. I think a week is probably the maximum habitable time period. The species known as cat could probably handle watching itself on TV for longer.
It's hypothetically possible that life as we know it could exist in the dim embers of stars a trillion years from now... it would be rare, it would be weird, but it could work.
The key is to remember that you have more than one variable to play with; it's not just overall stellar output, but orbital radius as well.
I wonder how well we'd adapt to living around a star with very different spectra than our own. For example, if it put out less blue light, would daytime suppress melatonin production as well as ours does? Then there's the different day length.
Not that either of those are in the top 1,000 problems of colonizing another system.
They're comparing the age of the universe (on the order of 10 billion years) to the expected lifetime of a red dwarf (on the order of a trillion years).
There is no reason to believe that the universe has a meaningful end, but it appears to have had some kind of origin less than 15 blya. Even if you posit proton decay and use heat death as and endpoint, you’re still talking about many more orders of magnitude of “future” than “past” and... well... what else do we mean when we say young?
If you use the Stelliferous Era [From 10^6 (1 million) years to 10^14 (100 trillion) years after the Big Bang. --wikipedia] as a meaningful period we are still at the very beginning, less than 0.0138% through.
I thought when I got older I would be able to look up at the moon and see expanses of colonies. I don't want to die not knowing whether life exists outside of our tiny little sphere.
Even if the odds of life are astronomically low (one in a billion), there are billions of galaxies, with billions of stars.
The odds are good, but the results are irrelevant. Only 5% of the stars that we see can emit light presently that will ever reach us - they will all recede beyond our cosmological horizon.
There is very likely life elsewhere, and it makes no difference.
Considering the extreme difficulty in getting organic chemistry processes to work in the laboratory, having random chance work to get any pre-biotic sequences is of such low probability that all the hand waving and blackboard erasures of the current biology experts, etc., means nothing.
We do not know and cannot show any viable means of creating the full sequence of pre-biotic chemicals needed for the first organism to exist. When one of the top organic chemists in the world puts out that challenge and nobody responds, one can then say that all of these experts know full well that they do not have a clue and are just deluding everyone else as to how life even came to be.
Just using probability to say that life came about without at least a semblance of an idea of possible sequences that could work is useless. You need at least some possible viable sequence for the full biotic complement of chemicals to be available. Since the sequence requires processes and solvents that are inimical to previous and follow-on chemicals, this sequence development is a major, major problem that is regularly ignored by those who use probability to say life can arise.
When these things are taken into account, the simple fact that there is life here on this planet can be seen as a unique event throughout all of the universe.
On some estimates of random action giving rise to life anywhere in the universe, the probabilities are so low that the universe would need to exist for many magnitudes of time longer than its apparent age at this time. Your "one in a billion" is oh so many magnitudes of order higher than the probabilities estimated.
Of course, your view can be very different and if you can come up with a viable sequence then simply accept the challenge that has been put out. There will be an awful lot of relief if this could be done.
The simple truth is, we have no idea. Of course we don't. Data points so far: One. Statistics on that kind of basis tend to be rather meaningless.
One thing we do know to be extremely unlikely: That we - exactly we, us, here at this specific point in time - should somehow have arrived at a point where we can confidently secondguess the universe in all its glorious details. We can't, and we don't really even have the foggiest idea what kind of life is possible, or how it comes about in the first place.
All the Drake equations in the world can't hide the fact that we know nothing. Every single galaxy may be bursting with life, or we may the only specimens anywhere in the dark, cold void.
My personal guess - which is no better or no worse than anyone else's - is that life or its functional equivalents is more or less everywhere, but that intelligent critters like ourselves are exceedingly rare.
> We do not know and cannot show any viable means of creating the full sequence of pre-biotic chemicals needed for the first organism to exist. When one of the top organic chemists in the world puts out that challenge and nobody responds, one can then say that all of these experts know full well that they do not have a clue and are just deluding everyone else as to how life even came to be.
There are many more stars than chemsists, and the universe has had much more time to get lucky than our chemists have had. The universe has gone through more chemical permutations than our scientists can dream of.
Your computer ran billions of instructions in the time it takes to read this. Therefore, it probably made a mistake in that time, even if the chance of a mistake in any one instruction is "astronomically low", right? No, many real-life frequencies are way below one in a billion.
That's a good point, but I think it's reasonable to say that the frequency at which planets are similar to Earth is high. Non-tidally locked, geologically active, high-water-content, with enough gravity to trap oxygen/CO2 but not hydrogen/helium, and within a certain distance from a star based on its output planets can't be that uncommon. I'm pretty sure Venus actually fits all those requirements - which isn't to say that there is life on Venus, just that superficially most of what we consider "the requirements" are there. In fact Mars fits all those requirements too, aside from geological activity.
We can't know how probable life is given similar conditions to Earth because our sample size is too small. But there are definitely a lot of Earth-like planets out there.
Yes, there must be a lot of Earth-mass rocky planets out there in habitable zones. Twenty years ago I'd have said we just don't know. There may've been some real progress too on figuring out the origin of life, but our knowledge is still compatible with almost all potentially-habitable planets being lifeless -- it wouldn't badly contradict what we know so far (afaik) and would explain why we haven't seen any advanced aliens taking stars apart, etc.
Well, I think you're assuming intelligent life must be common given that life is common. I'm of the opinion that life in general is pretty common, but that intelligent life is very uncommon, possibly unique. I'm basing this assumption on the fact that life has existed on Earth for ~4b years but intelligent life has only existed for about ~40,000 years, depending on when you consider humanity to have become "intelligent."
Not assuming that -- I'm just uncertain. I was arguing against "life must be common" but not arguing for "life must be uncommon". I think your scenario is plausible, though I wouldn't want to bet that way -- octopuses are very distant relatives of us.
Odds are good that we are the lone source of intelligent life in our galaxy. In the universe? Not so much. The question really comes down to FTL travel. No FTL and we are likely to turn inward and look to artificial environments and virtual realities. If there is FTL then its possible that we could continue to look to the stars for a good long while.
I was just talking to my mom about this. She was born in the early 1950s, in Bangladesh. She was talking about how she grew up reading science fiction books and when the U.S. made it to the moon, thinking that we'd have space colonies and stuff. But, in her view, technology has progressed much less than she thought it would have by now.
This seems to be a popular position, and I think it's because space rockets and cities on the moon are large-but-simple advances that people can get their heads around. Computer tech is so far past their "magic" threshold that a modern smartphone doesn't seem much different to the original microcomputers.
Maybe you could explain it as "if rockets had advanced as fast as computers, we'd have flying cities that could travel to the moon and back in minutes."
At least for her, computer technology didn’t result in structural change in the way people live. They had television, phones, cameras, etc., when she was a teenager. She uses her iPhone and iPad as a television, a telephone, a camera, and a combination of television and telephone (FaceTime). Neat and convenient, but not life changing in the same way as cars, planes, moon colonization, etc. Certainly not “magic.”
FaceTime is a little magical. How often would she get to see and talk to her grandkids without it?
And would people living on the moon have really changed her life either? Unless she was one of them she'd just end up hearing about it in the news and then going about her day.
TBH if I really had to pick the thing that has most changed her life I'd bet it's the shipping and logistics technology that has dramatically lowered the cost of all the consumer goods she buys.
She lives with us, so every day. She grew up in a society where even extended families all lived in the same town, so better ways to communicate don’t really impress her. (My dad, who went to boarding school, does find it very impresssive.) She was also rich in Bangladesh, so she doesn’t have much positive to say on the consumer goods front either. Obviously that’s a highly specific viewpoint. I do think though, there is something generalizable about the idea that folks of a certain generation don’t find communications technology that amazing because (1) they don’t work in a profession that’s really been changed by it; (2) they’re from communities where families lived in close contact and video chat seems like a step down.
As to people living on the moon: she grew up with America being this frontier that was very inspiring. I think she sees space travel the same way (also, probably bias from reading a lot of sci-fi of the time).
In my view it's an economic issue, not a technological one. If as much money had been spent on space travel as has been spent on computers in the last fifty years then we'd have cities on the moon, no problem. But "we" didn't, because it made no economic sense -- or at least there's a vast technological gulf we need to breach before it starts to make economic sense. Money to develop computers came from the pockets of individuals and companies because they wanted computers -- money for space travel came from government departments for reasons unclear even to themselves.
If progress in space travel seems slow, remember that almost all of the money going into it is spent by a single organisation whose budget is less than 10% of Apple's revenue.
Man doesn't have a great track record of making that much progress in 30 years. The fact we've made so much technological progress in the last 100 is an anomaly.
Humans are attuned to survival not coordinating millions of people to a common goal.
The problem with getting off this earth is the people who are good at conquering other people through politics and emotions.
Von Braun was the first to make a guided rocket (developments like the de Laval nozzle and rocket equation had just been discovered).
The US poached him and sent him to West Texas, then Alabama, without a whole lot to do. Probably to keep him out of enemy hands.
The US government had their money and "intelligence communities" lined up behind the Vanguard rocket.
It was only because the Vanguard rocket failed so embarassingly while the Soviets won the space race that Eisenhower started NASA and gave Von Braun some funding.
So Von Braun wrote a letter to Kennedy, and he got his childhood wish to go to the moon. And he did it. The greatest engineering and technological achievement in history.
All the politics (like cost-plus suppliers) still hurt the program, but they really made a lot of progress.
So then the new NASA bureaucracy pushed him out and went on to do bureaucratic things like build the ridiculously badly conceived STS (they proposed ideas and Nixon picked it), and crash it even when NASA engineers told them before hand that a foam strike was going to happen as was the case with the Challenger Groupthink disaster.
The Soviets also had plenty of childish and embarassing dramas and politics of their own going on as well.
It's all a shame, really. People can do amazing things, but I'm not willing to pretend our shortcomings aren't because of moral failings.
There is no legitimately good reason for the Challenger disaster, or having to rely on Russians for their superior rocket tech to get into orbit.
I mostly agree. I used to buy into the narrative of human progress over the course of 10,000 years of civilization. Now I see human knowledge/achievement much more as an ebb and flow with some momentum retained across time and societies. I see our current state of progress as a kind of happy accident. Some combination of Secularism, Legalism, Bureaucracy, Entrepreneurship, Socialsim and Education has created the imperfect but better world (mostly better for humans) we inhabit today. Which means to me that none of us really know what's created this progress and we can't be entirely sure what has arrested it at times. There isn't an arrow of human progress but a churning jumble that right now has come out with a relative lull in human suffering and a corresponding bump in personal convenience.
The upside of this is that if we can maintain this cocktail of traits while curbing the more obviously dangerous ones, we may be able to surpass greatly what we've accomplished so far. I hope anyway.
I really think the lesson is one of competition. Without it, we'd never have the V2, and even if we did have the V2 we would still never have had the Saturn rockets. The Russians would never have developed the RD-180, and so SpaceX and BO would never exist.
His past patriotic allegiance to Nazi Germany is a difficult stain on his legacy that can blind one to his technological achievements.
However, during the end of WWII he intentionally surrendered himself, his team and capital into our hands -- the Americans. He came to America, assimilated and oversaw the greatest engineering feat in history when we were losing the space race to Russia, and would have continued to lose without him.
I would also consider, what should he or could he have done in his time? OK, how about what have I or you done to stop the genocide in Darfur? Nobody in the Western world did much, and we didn't do anything at all about the Cambodian genocide. The American Government has also never officially acknowledged the Native American genocide, or paid reparations for it--these would be crimes in Germany today.
In my mind it is important to address these moral questions, which are indeed difficult, but if we are not honest about them then we find can at times be the pot calling the kettle black.
If you can fire pellets out of the well using a mass driver, I'd think that firing whole spacecraft out is going to be a much more viable option than trying to reduce the depth of the well to any noticeable degree.
Yes, spacecraft are more fragile than pellets, and canned primates even more so, but a ludicrously long acceleration track is still going to cost peanuts compared to the kind of planetary liposuction you're talking about.
Seems like a space elevator is a less scattershot approach? Even on rockets the acceleration your passengers and cargo experience is pretty serious, I'd hate to be in a rail gun's bullet.
Building a space elevator involves getting a substantial amount of stuff into orbit, i.e. the cable and counterweight, so this sounds a bit like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
Maybe you could launch materials and construction robots for an elevator using a mass driver then use the elevator for passengers, I dunno. Still need some non-rocket way to get things up there.
True, though in most fictional accounts the construction mostly happens out of the gravity well - e.g. move an asteroid or iceball into orbit as a counterweight, and start building down from it (and up from the surface).
And how do you get your spacecraft up out of the gravity well and out to the asteroid, so you can move it into orbit and start recycling it into elevator? It sounds suspiciously like you're solving the bootstrap problem by tying strings to your bootstraps and pulling those instead.
The clearest answer to the economic question I've seen is asteroid mining. A single asteroid can contain orders of magnitude more platinum than has been mined in all of human history, in a very concentrated form. Which would obviously crash the market for platinum, and could encourage interesting new uses for it when it's no longer ~$1,000 per ounce.
How is that a clear answer? You're still shipping massive amounts of rock through outer space. If it costs you $100M/oz to mine and transport the stuff, then selling it for $1000/oz doesn't even make a dent. And crashing the market doing it is just lose-lose.
Everything is economically viable when you can employ fantasy magic technology to make it happen.
Why would it cost that much to transport it? You've got lots of gravitational potential energy to work with, in terms of shipping down to Earth, so it doesn't take the kinds of fuel that it takes to ship things out of the Earth gravity well. And you don't need to bring back the whole asteroid, just the products, so you're not shipping "massive amounts of rock through outer space".
Are you familiar with the companies that are being set up to do this, and that are backed by Eric Schmidt et al?
Is anyone aware of a reasoning of why a usable planet would be a requirement for space exploration?
Sure, if a "clone" of Earth is found, it would make things created here more reusable on the new planet, but seems like a pretty limited way of viewing the potential for ventures in space.
More to the point, is anyone aware of the requirements of non-planet staged space operations would look like and how viable such plans would be compared to planet dependent operations.
I reckon we'll master terraforming worlds here in our solar system by the time practical (or impractical) interstellar travel becomes a thing. We can get to Mars, Venus, Titan, etc. Will it ever be possible to get to another star system in a useful amount of time? Terraforming Venus would be sweet; as soon as you do it, I'll come visit!
Venus is pretty sweet as it is. Go high enough in the atmosphere, and you have about Earth atmospheric pressure and room temperatures. That altitude in the Venus atmosphere is effectively an Earth biosphere sized almost-Earthlike living space.
One convenient circumstance: A breathable Earthlike atmosphere will float at that altitude, so it would be easy to live in floating balloon habitats.
I can see the appeal of doing because it's cool. That's the primary reason I'd consider going into space. I'm not sure roughing it in a balloon would be the my idea of a good time once the novelty wore off. I wonder if there'd be some tangible benefit to colonizing Venus for adventurous entrepreneurial types... "There's gold in and/or on them thar clouds!" There's nothing like bajillions in potential profits to get people excited about moving to the a frontier. Actually...
With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus?
I'm not sure roughing it in a balloon would be the my idea of a good time once the novelty wore off.
What if the small balloons were the size of a Las Vegas resort, and the average ones where something like Manhattan?
I wonder if there'd be some tangible benefit to colonizing Venus for adventurous entrepreneurial types... "There's gold in and/or on them thar clouds!"
The society that might arise in an entirely fluid, borderless geography might have a certain attraction. Venus might wind up being the next Las Vegas, writ large in the 21st century.
With floating cities, the idea of a space elevator isn't that crazy. What could we do with space elevators on Venus?
You could have ultra-high altitude balloons that can act as staging centers for rotorvators. Those would be way cheaper than space elevators to manufacture.
There is zero chance of building viable space elevators or floating cities around Venus without magical 100% scifi technology.
The lower atmosphere of Venus is denser than the surface of Earth’s ocean, but with extremely violent currents. The upper atmosphere - at the “inhabitable” level - has similar but much less dense winds, with the added henefit of a charmingly toxic and aggressive haze of sulphuric acid.
It might just about be possible to build a floating research station, at vast effort and expense, but floating cities are not going to happen without some near-magical breakthroughs in materials science and engineering.
And without access to the surface, there isn’t much to do above Venus anyway.
floating cities are not going to happen without some near-magical breakthroughs in materials science and engineering.
The acid clouds aren't that bad. People have even worked out how to manufacture PTFE out of the Venusian atmosphere, so there's your acid proofing right there. We already know how to build lighter than air craft.
And without access to the surface, there isn’t much to do above Venus anyway.
Access to the surface is perfectly doable using teleoperated robots. You can lower them onto the surface with a store of a phase-change substance for cooling. Dry ice might be suitable for that. When they run out, you haul them back up.
There's wasn't that much to do in the desert where Las Vegas is located, either.
It seems a good deal less convenient when you factor in the clouds of concentrated sulfuric acid. Any habitat is going to have to be just as hermetically sealed from the outside world as if you were on Mars, with the additional caveat that everything be acid-proof (including suits). At least Martian atmosphere won't melt your face off if it ever gets inside!
Your habitat won't float as well once I transport some asteroid-mined calcium and magnesium to Jupiter, turn it all into hydrides, package it with transition-metallic catalysts (Co, Ni, Fe, Ru), and shoot it into Venus.
MgH2 -> Mg + H2 (thermolysis @ 287 degC)
CO2 + H2 --Fe-> CO + H2O (water-gas shift)
CO + H2 --Fe-> C + H2O (Bosch)
CO2 + 4 H2 --Ni-> CH4 + 2 H2O (Sabatier)
2n+1 H2 + n CO --metal--> CnH(2n+2) + n H2O (Fischer-Tropsch)
2 Mg + CO2 -> 2 MgO + C
CaH2 + 2 H2O -> Ca(OH)2 + 2 H2
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 -> CaCO3 + H2O
We might have to switch to double-hulls, with the outer section filled with hydrogen. That would be concerning in an atmosphere with appreciable free oxygen, but I suppose you have a plan for that.
The chemical intervention is only sufficient to get the excess of CO2 out of the atmosphere, which would get the surface pressure down to maybe 3 bar of mostly N2. From there, we'd still have to cool the atmosphere down far enough to support thermophilic autotrophic microbes in the new surface lakes. They would produce oxygen, but slowly, so there wouldn't be any appreciable free oxygen available for a long time.
The primary concern would be that Earth-gas would not be a good enough lifting gas in the CO2-depleted Venus atmosphere to keep the floating habitat at a cool enough altitude. Hydrogen-filled chambers would certainly work for that, but you would have to bring that hydrogen with you to Venus. By the time atmospheric oxygen becomes a risk, you would just land the dirigible and burn the hydrogen in a controlled fashion.
Because that would involve bringing along a reactive metal, bringing one H2 molecule with you is less mass than any of the metal atoms that would react with H2SO4 to give you the same amount of hydrogen. But perhaps more difficult to handle as a gas.
You could bring along MgH2, then once you hit the atmosphere, you can thermally decompose it into Mg and H2, then react the Mg with sulfuric acid to get MgSO4 and another H2.
Escaping radiation? Scenery? Proximity to lots of other people? There's a good chance that the barrier of a gravity well is going to go the way of the barrier of mountainous terrain.
Also, exchanging the fixed geography of land for the fluid geography of fluid might result in changes to the underlying nature of society. In hunter gatherer days, dissenters could simply walk to a different part of the environment. Farmer's fields and defensive walls anchored people to particular pieces of land. If everyone lived in mobile floating habitats, everyone would be free to move. This is quite likely to change the nature of government.
You also get this in a Dyson Swarm, but there's a matter of scale. A minimum viable space colony is likely to be larger and more expensive than a minimum viable floating Venusian compound.
O'Neill was overoptimistic about launch prices coming down in the near term and about the economic case for solar power satellites and for people in space to mine the materials and build and maintain the powersats, etc. But as I remember it this community made a good case that you don't need planets to live on; with their gravity wells and atmospheres and night/day cycles they're mostly a big nuisance compared to free-space habitats built with lunar and asteroid materials.
1. If we're already going to do the journey to a far off planet, it'd be nice if we didn't have to have a huge amount of infrastructure to stay alive on the planet.
2. I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life. The only life we know is on Earth. Earth-like planets are a good place to start.
I feel like one of the ultimate goals of space travel is to find other life.
Dangerous assumption. That's like saying the purpose of science is to unify nature. If nature isn't unified, the goal won't make it so.
The most likely outcome is probably that we will become our own aliens. Once we send out colony ships, those people will form their own branches of the evolutionary tree. Over millennia, that will equal aliens. It doesn't really matter that they're our ancestors when they end up looking, talking, and acting completely alien.
This seems far more likely than running across other life in the local group. We're forever imprisoned to our local group, which is something like 0.001% of the observable universe. And for all we know, the total universe could be infinite. This requires strange assumptions, like running into your own doppelgangers, and infinite energy. But we can't know it's not true. And in such a circumstance, we have to face the unsettling half-empty truth that we're simply alone.
We'd have to be totally separated from those colonies for an unthinkable amount of time for stuff like that to happen - I'd imagine we'd at least keep contact with our own colonies and the Native Americans were largely separated from Eurasia for thousands of years and crazy stuff didn't happen aside from a gap in immune system prep.
Not with the distances and times involved unless we develop FTL communication. At first we may not diverge biologically, but culturally, and that is quite enough to close most doors... after all how many Norwegians do you find that marry bushmen or aborigines and vice versa?
A lot of sci fi seems to somehow overlook our cultural/social baggage and yet those are precisely what are crippling us now, and likely to retard our progress in the future too, if not outright destroy us.
Earth would keep contact with colony A which would be slightly different. Colony A would keep contact with colony B which would be slightly more different. It would only take a few tens of hoops to get to something different enough that would classify as alien. At interstellar distances, this is a definite possibility. Isaac Asimov's empire, foundation and robot series have some fascinating (hypothetical) examples of this.
You don’t need evolution to make your aliens, cultural separation would immediately begin and do it for you.
To clarify, I believe that within a generation or two, people on another planet will hardly relate to their originating culture and will see it as an other. This change will at first be benign, merely based on differences of day-to-day life on a developing colony, but later, after initial material support largely dissipates, would see it as something to cast off or, should they not openly revolt or request a plebiscite, will treat it diplomatically as if it were another country, or as it is in this case, as literally another world.
Consider that when traveling between a host and colony settlement takes literal weeks, months, or years, sending information would likely also similarly be costly and would take prohibitively long times for many real time applications: latency up to several hours or days to arrive could be expected for even small downloads. This borderline resets communication the era of writing letters, if I may be a bit dramatic, because this absolutely neuters a huge amount of modern culture.
Cultural products made on earth would be costly and difficult to ship, so we’d find that earth films, games, internet, are mostly not going to bridge the gap. Even after infrastructure for communication improves, the latency problem of “space is big” isn’t going to go away. For example, would you read 15 HN pages if each page, no images, no modifications, took 15 minutes to load? I suspect not, and you’d fill that time with something else that an earthling software engineer might not.
It’s all elements of culture. The earth news cycle? Almost wholly irrelevant, besides economics and space-related news, which impacts what is sent and relations with home.
Celebrities? People will find it hard to care about celebrities who will never visit them, and who have works they’re not hearing until weeks, months, or years after they stopped being relevant on Earth.
To fill this gap, people on the colonies will be making their own, and however bad the gap is earth -> space culture wise, due to the difficulty that limited resources will impose, culture from space -> earth will likely be rather rare.
So, culture is going to start diverging, relatively hard and rapidly. Separated from leaders, most current cultural information, old national borders, credible risk of counterattack from earth for anything short of armed revolution (space war or military pacification against one’s own people would likely be an economic and political Vietnam, and you definitely can’t launch a surprise attack when people can see the weapons or troops launching), people will mostly stop giving a shit about their home world and will become naturalized on their new ones.
Two or three more generations like that and you’ll eventually be talking about people on Mars, for example, as if they were from Australia.
Imagine we had some hypothetical technology allowing us to send away a perfectly fine sleeper ship at the speed of the voyager probes. How would you decide on when to wake the crew? Ten years out, a hundred years out, a hundred thousand years out? "Exploring" the void is just pointless. Those poor souls could not even indulge themselves in the joys of flag-planting!
Do we have the technology yet that could even discover a planet the same size and distance as earth from a star similar to the sun?
From these discoveries, it seems that truly earth-like planets around sun-like stars are rare, but i think it might be more of a drunk under a lamp-post looking for his keys because that’s where the light is.
Not sure if we'd be sun-transiting to them, but perhaps they can get a highly sensitive atmospheric spectral line chart.
Then they can start debating whether the CO2 level going from 0.03% to 0.04% indicates we're entering another extinction period. If they're within a few light-decades then the next century will be a very exciting time for their astro-xeno-biologists. Lucky them!
We would not be sun-transiting to them, at least at the moment: the current declination of Ross 128 happens to be less than 1 degree [1], meaning it's near the celestial equator rather than near the ecliptic. Since the ecliptic plane is at 23.5 degrees to the equator, they would see the Sol-Earth system tilted at that angle: much too large to be sun-transiting.
I wouldn't place too many hopes on a device that relies on violating the conservation of momentum to work. Special relativity and Noether's theorem place conservation of momentum on the same footing as conservation of energy and the constancy of the laws of physics itself.
EM Drive never was proved to have provided thrust on a rigorous test, the theoretical explanation for it also doesn't have any basis on current standard physics.
I recommend this video for a good explanation [0].
You'd think with as many people calling if fake as there are, we'd at least get some of them rubbing it in. Eh, it's probably just the media realizing that those stories aren't very engaging (the title gives you all you need to know), so they only get traction on really slow news days. :/
We have no operational space ships, so with current technology we will never get there.
The fastest feasible technology for human-carrying ships is the fission fragment rocket, with a burnout velocity of about 0.1c. That's 40 years to Proxima b. An 11 ly trip to this world would not be feasible, because a multi-generational ship with the payload fraction needed to hit 0.1c is not feasible.
Probes can be much lighter, enabling higher payload fractions and faster trips.
Depends what you mean by "current technology" - Orion style ships (i.e. throw H-bombs out the back and hang on tight) were estimated to be able to get to 0.1c. So perhaps 110 years?
You see a few replies mentioning 0.1c... I suppose that's as good a fantasy as any. Given a 0.1c peek velocity you need about 150 years to traverse 11ly assuming a linear acceleration/deceleration curve with some sort of high efficiency electric propulsion. How one powers such a drive for a century is a problem. Another is dealing with interstellar dust you collide with at 30,000 km/s. Just engineering a complex machine reliable enough to continue functioning that long is seriously tough problem. It's not feasible at this point.
I wonder how much dust in-between solar systems is travelling at arbitrary speeds relative to our galaxy. In other words, even at lower speeds what are the chances some specks of dust are travelling at dangerous speeds? That's a lot of distance to cover.
The article states the planet is 11 light-years away from our solar system. Assuming you travel at around 60K km/h / 40K mph (roughly the speed of the New Horizons probe), it would take about 220,000 total Earth years to arrive.
Do you want to build a colony there? Send back pictures? or just hit it with a rock?
Right now, between 10,000 and 100,000 years.
Under 100 years is probably outside of possible without some fundamental breakthrough which we can't forsee. (and at this point it matters from whose perspective the time is measured)
Between 100 and 10,000 is the realm of at least plausible science fiction.
We don't _have_ any technology for interstellar travel because nobody has developed it.
Serious question. If we are going to discover or invent a "warp drive" or similar, what are we doing currently that will lead us to that knowledge? CERN?
You don't actually need a "warp drive" to get there in a reasonable amount of time. If you can - somehow - invent a drive that'll accelerate you at 1g without stopping for as long as you want, you can get anywhere in the galaxy within your lifetime due to time dilation. To an earth-bound observer, your trip takes approximately 1 year + the distance in light years.
Admittedly it's a big ask. But not as big as bending space.
Currently, a warp drive is forbidden by relativity. So I would say, all research trying to find where relativity breaks. So I reckon the gravity wave detectors like LIGO and LISA are more relavant than CERN.
My understanding is that it's not forbidden (wormholes would explicitly allow FTL travel, for example), but that in Einstein's model, FTL travel or communication would break causality, because it would effectively allow one to send messages into one's own past.
That may seem like "equivalent to forbidden", but some of the interesting surprises of quantum physics were originally theorized by Einstein and company as a way to disprove quantum physics because they were clearly too weird to be true. Maybe not as weird as "Oh, you thought an event's cause had to precede its effect? LOL.", but bizarre and non-intuitive nonetheless.
In my mind I imagine warp to mean actually warp space not fly through space, the theoretical Alcubierre drive may warp space. Space is shrunk in front of the Alcubierre spacecraft and expanded behind it.
The spacecraft doesn't actually move through space it pulls the space where it needs to go towards the spacecraft and pushes away the space behind it.
Actually Zephan. Zephan Cochran is close to Zefram Cochrane but at least I can tell my wife I didn't name him after a Star Trek character. Maybe it is close enough get him through admissions at MIT or something... :)
Can you please try to instead tell him to just broadcast in all directions "VULKAN HIGH COMMAND WE HAVE AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR YOU" so they can just visit us and give us the technology to save time?
After all, clearly Star Trek the series has time traveled from the future and is aware of the Vulkans thereby satisfying the prime directive.
Firefox has a read mode for this. It displays only the relevant content, in a very eye-friendly font. It does not look very pretty in that mode, but it very easy to read. I love this feature.
