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Future Musing: What if we can not reach the Stars?


Christopher

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I have been thinking about a few things regarding history and the people before us. And what that might say for our future.

 

When talking about past people, we have a tendency to look down on them. They knew less about the world. They were more bound up in superstition. They made stupid mistakes. But maybe the sum of thier knowledge is not significantly less then ours? Maybe thier knowledge just a had a different focus?

 

See, a peasant lived in a time where farming communities had to be self sufficient. Limited travel for people, messages and goods meant that no real specialisation could take place.

The average peasant needed to know about stuff like farming, building, animal husbrandy, making clothng, heating, treefelling, etc. Maybe even medicine (or what approximation they had at those times). They needed religion just to make any sense of all those parts of the world they did not understood (illness, weather, natural disaster).

I do not know how to do any of those things. I can not even sow to save my life. The modern person does not need to know how to farm, build, raise animals or make clothing. We have specialists to do that for us. People who know one of these jobs really well, but nothing about the other 15 in return.

 

If I and a peasent of long gone times were stranded in the wilderness without technology, I would be the helpless idiot that knwos nothing and he would be the specialist that knows more.

 

What does that mean for our future?

If there is some form of hard cap on what sum of knowledge we can aquire, then that also means there is a hard cap on wich knowledge we can aquire. If you need to know A+B to get to C but A, B and C do not fit into your mind fully, you have a problem.

Even including some breakout minds like Newton, Hawkins or Einstein, there might simply be a cap on knowledge we can aquire as a species.

If FTL or interstellar travel is even possible/feasible, who says we will be able to aquire the nessesary knowledge to do so?

 

Now we do have some hopes/fears regarding singularity level AI's. But there is the same caveeat there:

First we need to understand that there is a massive difference between "Engineering AI" or Smart Technologies and "Cognitive AI":

A Cognitive AI is what we would need for the Singularity. And so far we failed utterly at that. And what if our knowledge cap is below what is needed to make Cognitive AI in the first place? Much less a Cognitive AI smart enough to actually improove itself?

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If we can't get out of the Solar System, we'll be functionally restricted to the sort of Interplanetary society developed by Niven and Pournelle's Moties, becoming ruthlessly efficient at the use of non-replenishable resources (there's a finite, large, but finite tonnage of any given metal within the Solar System) and subject to some pretty draconian restrictions on population. Whether we'll specialise quite as hard, is a question; a lot of fictional transhuman settings involve significant bioware and cyberware augmentation to fulfill specific niches more effectively. Assuming we manage to hold it together long enough to get a functioning infrastructure outside the Terran gravity well, and that's by no means a given.

 

Even agrarian societies had specialists: the smith, the charcoal burner, the Lord of the Manor; most pre-industrial societies had a sharp demarcation between the roles of the genders. The apparent greater diversity in any individual's skills is, I think, an illusion. A modern human's "Everyman Skill" list would have as many entries as a feudal serf's, easily.

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I think that, should we be limited to non-FTL travel we will still expand outwards. If there is an Oort cloud out there, it may well have enough metal and mineral assets to sustain colonies. The thing is, our interstellar community would not be a community. As we reached further and further into space, our society would adapt and evolve separately, depending on the conditions in which that segment lives. Assuming we developed technologies that allowed us to hibernate or otherwise make it to other star systems, I think we would develop similar but still distinct values systems between the stars and there would be vast amounts of legends grow up around tales of what was. Say we got to the Centauri system though, we could still beam messages to Earth. It would take years to get them and years to respond, but we could keep some sort of communication open. The Centaurians would have to form their own government(s) to more efficiently handle affairs on their end, but the human expansion would eventually happen. You'll just never get to visit colonies outside of the solar system that you are in. 

 

Knowledge would become more specialized. Why would you need vast amounts of information about Terran ecology if you are living on some way station a light year out? Other than as a hobby, you wouldn't. You would need to know how to grow food, recycle water and other waste, and maintain your station for future generations. Things like the Sun would seem incredible on an emotional level, even if the intellectual knowledge of them was present. Days would be split into a number of light on/off cycles. 

 

As for being smart enough, who knows? Some of our greatest leaps weren't all that great at all. They were the culmination of generations of experiments and theories that finally reached the epiphany stage. We think of them as remarkable because they changed the way our society evolved (electricity and powered flight for example). Even if we don't master FTL, maybe we will master extending lifetimes by a century or two. Maybe someday, we will be able to travel at sub-light speeds to new solar systems in the span of a single human lifetime. Maybe cognitive AI is out of our reach, but we learn to do so much with Engineering AI (to borrow your term) or Virtual Intelligence that we don't 'need' a truly cognitive AI. We are pretty clever as species, especially given time to accumulate vast amounts of knowledge for future generations to draw from.

 

Or, we may nuke ourselves into extinction next week. :D

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I think it's been at least three hundred years, maybe more, since we could have a real "Renaissance Man" who had a real, expert grasp of most if not all of the sciences of his day. There's simply too much accumulated knowledge for any one person to master it all. Mastery these days is becoming increasingly fragmented. On the other hand, communication has never been easier, and access to the knowledge of other specialties (and increasingly sophisticated ways of mining it for the data that are important to you) are also improving daily. So we're already at the point where "what knowledge matters" depends greatly on your circumstances: what your environment is, and what your goals are.

 

"If we cannot reach the stars" is already sort of true. Even if we discovered a cheap, reliable FTL drive tomorrow...the vast majority of human beings are never going to leave the solar system. There's nowhere for them to go at the moment, and most of them (of us) don't want to leave anyhow. It's like the discovery of the new world--a relative handful of people colonized the Americas, but the vast, vast majority of Europeans never left Europe. Even once America was thoroughly settled, when millions of immigrants came here every year--far more people did not. They lived out their lives without ever leaving. Immigration to the Americas never made a dent in the population of Europe (or anywhere else).

 

It'll be the same if/when we colonize the solar system or other star systems. While eventually they might have populations of billions, they'll be mostly native-born. 

 

As for AI--I'm of the opinion that we'll have "effective" AI long before we can even agree whether it's "real" AI or not. Expert systems that can communicate with humans in English at least as well as humans communicate with one another (including occasional mistakes in what they "heard" or thought the other speaker meant) will be able to do pretty much anything "real" AI can do (except perhaps true creativity--and maybe they'll be capable of that too). Long after children grow up with Jarvis as their minder while mom and dad aren't home, we'll probably still be arguing over whether Jarvis is *really* self-aware, but it won't matter much except to philosophers.

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Wait for the test results on the EM drive. If it works, the stars will be attainable w/o FTL. It'll be slow but inevitable.

We still would need to figure out how it works, before we can scale it up. And know if it would even work in deep space.

We would need a space station outside earths magentic and gravitational field to even test the thing properly. As all the thrust might just be an interaction with either of those two (wich would be useless once you leave those two).

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Pfft. Project Orion will get us to the stars just fine. Like every sane human being, I have my reservations about using it as a single-stage-to-orbit platform on a regular basis, but with orbital industry, you could easilly build it in orbit. No need for waving your hands at nebulous future tech.

 

The rub here is the "orbital industry." That sounds hard. And expensive! So we're not doing it. 

 

Well, here's the catch. Everything sounds hard and expensive when you don't put the resources into it. Even the stuff we used to do! That's why we're here, after all, sniffing the last bit of powder from the baggie of a dead  industry. Does that sound like defeatism? It is! It's also a completely chosen defeatism. Spend the resources, and the problem will solve itself. (And, yes, that means that getting to the stars will incidentally be a boost to Hero Games.)

 

We'll get to the stars. If we choose to do so. Also, the Renaissance Man thing needs to die in a fire. There are plenty of Renaissance Men around. Go to your local prison and talk to the guys there. At least half of them know everything, and a good share of them will tell you so as convincingly as your average "Renaissance Man" of three hundred years ago. And with as much reason. 

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Nope, that's what the rain forest is going to look like in another 50 years.

Funny thing with those predictions:

Did you know that the Ozone hole is actually shrinking again?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-hole-healing-fingerprints/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/30/ozone-layer-hole-appears-to-be-healing-scientists-say

http://abcnews.go.com/International/antarcticas-ozone-hole-shrinking-study-shows/story?id=40277104

It is the proof we can stop ruining the planet if we just try. Might take a few decades to see the effects, but they are there.

 

I am tired about all the fear and hate mongering. Can we stop with that fad already? It grew old half a century ago.

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I am tired about all the fear and hate mongering. Can we stop with that fad already? It grew old half a century ago.

 

Without the fear (actually certainty) that if we didn't do something about it, it'd get worse, we wouldn't have done anything about it. And it would have got worse rather than better.

 

Same applies to the current climate catastrophe staring us in the face.

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Without the fear (actually certainty) that if we didn't do something about it, it'd get worse, we wouldn't have done anything about it. And it would have got worse rather than better.

 

Same applies to the current climate catastrophe staring us in the face.

We are so overtaxed with "things we need to fear", we have no way of approaching any of the issues.

Realising what we did accomplish will get more done then having a new "thing to fear of the week".

 

I our soceity not supposed to be aging? Are we not supposed to get smarter with age? Then why is the entertainment and news industry appearing dumber and deeper into fear/hate mongering every yera?

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The energy requirements for "practical" interstellar travel are staggering. Moving a thousand ton craft at 0.1 c and then slowing it down again to get to its destination requires 9 x 10^20 joules, or 900 exajoules. That's about 2 and a half years' worth of global energy production/consumption, at current levels. And if we want to actually start a "space colony" when we get there, it might be more realistic to talk about moving a million ton craft(or a thousand smaller craft adding up to a million tons). That would require an amount of energy equivalent to our global reserves of fossil fuels PLUS our global reserves of uranium. It would be about a fifth of the total sunlight hitting the planet every year.

 

So to put it bluntly, manned travel, especially colonization type efforts on a planet in another star system, requires an enormous investment of technology, manpower and energy resources. We'd practically have to be a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale just to have the energy budget necessary to make it something other than an exorbitant expense. So if there's a reason we won't travel to the stars, I'd say that's one of the top 5 reasons it's unlikely to happen. We don't have the "gas" for our giant rockets.

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The energy requirements for "practical" interstellar travel are staggering. Moving a thousand ton craft at 0.1 c and then slowing it down again to get to its destination requires 9 x 10^20 joules, or 900 exajoules. That's about 2 and a half years' worth of global energy production/consumption, at current levels. And if we want to actually start a "space colony" when we get there, it might be more realistic to talk about moving a million ton craft(or a thousand smaller craft adding up to a million tons). That would require an amount of energy equivalent to our global reserves of fossil fuels PLUS our global reserves of uranium. It would be about a fifth of the total sunlight hitting the planet every year.

 

So to put it bluntly, manned travel, especially colonization type efforts on a planet in another star system, requires an enormous investment of technology, manpower and energy resources. We'd practically have to be a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale just to have the energy budget necessary to make it something other than an exorbitant expense. So if there's a reason we won't travel to the stars, I'd say that's one of the top 5 reasons it's unlikely to happen. We don't have the "gas" for our giant rockets.

A gas giant candle colony ship could work. Considering that all Gas Giants are basically undersized Stars.

But as you said, it is definitely in the Kradesh 1 area:

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-08-03

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The energy requirements for "practical" interstellar travel are staggering. Moving a thousand ton craft at 0.1 c and then slowing it down again to get to its destination requires 9 x 10^20 joules, or 900 exajoules. That's about 2 and a half years' worth of global energy production/consumption, at current levels. And if we want to actually start a "space colony" when we get there, it might be more realistic to talk about moving a million ton craft(or a thousand smaller craft adding up to a million tons). That would require an amount of energy equivalent to our global reserves of fossil fuels PLUS our global reserves of uranium. It would be about a fifth of the total sunlight hitting the planet every year.

 

So to put it bluntly, manned travel, especially colonization type efforts on a planet in another star system, requires an enormous investment of technology, manpower and energy resources. We'd practically have to be a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale just to have the energy budget necessary to make it something other than an exorbitant expense. So if there's a reason we won't travel to the stars, I'd say that's one of the top 5 reasons it's unlikely to happen. We don't have the "gas" for our giant rockets.

 

Note, however, that we produce and consume energy in inefficient ways. Nuclear fusion is the way to go, and while nuclear fusion is, in general, not practical as yet, it's the one application where existing methods of producing fusion (blowing up deuteurium with an atom bomb) is actually practical. Dyson's interstellar Project Orion is still a bit gobsmacking --300,000 1 megaton bombs to propel 50,000t of structure and payload to Alpha Centauri in 133 years, but it's not impossible The scaled up worldship using Tsar Bomb-sized propellant units? Now that's impractical. 

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'Cuz the bigger booms were a bit counterproductive. The basic fusion-fission-fusion-fission bomb gets a lot more megatons out of a given chunk of U-235 than the bombs the big powers chose to design. With Project Orion, you're not really reaching full efficiency until you get to the 1MT interstellar design, and it looks as though 1MT bombs are easily scalable up by a factor of ten or so by wrapping them with depleted uranium to get the final fission stage, complete with bonus fallout. 

 

We can build starships. The details are engineering, not basic science. An unimaginable and insanely expensive amount of engineering, of course, but that's the way people tended to think about a manned moon shot in 1960. 

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Well, bomb designers calculated out the maximum efficiency for h-bombs at about 6 megaton yield per ton. Translated to the Orion proposal, that's 6 bombs per ton, or 50,000 tons of bombs to move the 50 kiloton payload to another star. The durability requirements for the craft make a toughbook look like a fragile flower. Maybe in the age of graphene that's less of a challenge. Still seems like an undertaking that might take a century to build and cost in the trillions.

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The NPP drive and manned mission have a wierd, counterintuitive behavior:

You can not use all the Kinetic Energy produced by the bombs. Even with the shock absorbers you crew would be squished by the sheer amount of Kinetic energy.

But you can only build nuclear weapons so small (about 14 kg of Fissionable material). While you can fully control how much of that is transformed into Kinetic Drive force (you actually have to add stuff that hits the plate) you still end up wasting a lot of energy.

 

You want to build the ship bigger and heavier so you can use more of that Kinetic energy.

With smaler manned ships the "Fuel/Weight efficiency" goes down rather then up.

The Drive would get more effecitve with true Fusion bombs* not because of the higher energy - but because you can scale the bombs down a lot better. Propably, that is (as we have not build any).

 

*Our current "Fusion" bombs use a Fission bomb as detonator. So you just made the fission bomb problem worse.

 

We can build starships. The details are engineering, not basic science. An unimaginable and insanely expensive amount of engineering, of course, but that's the way people tended to think about a manned moon shot in 1960. 

Interestingly the NPP flight to the moon would have propably only costed 1/10th of what we finally did. And the technology becomes better with higher total mass, as oposed to our rocket approach.

 

For multiple understandable reasons they just decided against NPP.

And then they actually banned it with that treaty (no nuclear explosions/weapons in space).

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We are so overtaxed with "things we need to fear", we have no way of approaching any of the issues.

Realising what we did accomplish will get more done then having a new "thing to fear of the week".

 

 

I our soceity not supposed to be aging? Are we not supposed to get smarter with age? Then why is the entertainment and news industry appearing dumber and deeper into fear/hate mongering every yera?

I find that first part optimistic. Populations don't work that way. Fear gets people to clamour to those with power (who need to keep the votes) to "Fix or do sumfink", and that's one of the very few levers we proles (including the scientists) have on the political classes. Having the pollies bask in their past successes is not a good way to get them to do something new.

 

Fortunately, the compelling science behind anthropogenic warming and the monstrous consequences of inaction are helping the self-interested start to do the right thing. Hopefully it'll not be entirely too little, too late (it's already somewhat both of those), and we'll be able to mitigate the changes to levels which we can adapt to.

 

As to the society aging leading to smarter people: why do they get youngsters to fight wars? Because young people are braver and less aware of their own mortality. Brave enough to get things done. How many revolutions have been started by septuagenarians?

 

And the entertainment industry isn't any more hatemongering than it ever was. It's dumbing down so that the post-industrial wasteland will be populated by pliant proletariat, fat on bread and content with circuses.

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It's possible that, as Moore's Law starts to break down, that our pace of technological advancement may slow as well, and we may hit a relative plateau for a few decades or even a few centuries. I'd expect that innovations would become more cultural, economic and sociological in nature. We might work fewer hours and change the way we live our lives. If lifespans become extended, then we may have first and second and third retirements, where we take time off to do stuff of interest to us, then return to doing work we like to do.

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I find that first part optimistic. Populations don't work that way. Fear gets people to clamour to those with power (who need to keep the votes) to "Fix or do sumfink", and that's one of the very few levers we proles (including the scientists) have on the political classes. Having the pollies bask in their past successes is not a good way to get them to do something new.

From my point of view that is only a distraction.

Born of people incapable to accept thier own shortcommings and looking for Distrations and Scapegoats.

A common mistake while growing up, but not a unsourmountable one.

 

I managed to overcome that pattern of reality-denial and distraction despite having something that qualifies as mental illness. If I did it, everyone can do it.

I really need to write my theory over on the non-gamign discussion.

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It's possible that, as Moore's Law starts to break down, that our pace of technological advancement may slow as well, and we may hit a relative plateau for a few decades or even a few centuries. I'd expect that innovations would become more cultural, economic and sociological in nature. We might work fewer hours and change the way we live our lives. If lifespans become extended, then we may have first and second and third retirements, where we take time off to do stuff of interest to us, then return to doing work we like to do.

 

Or, on the other hand, we might find that a point of diminishing returns in the one technology we've pursuing with any enthusiasm is a signal to put our money somewhere else. 

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