Now that we've segued into Superman, here's the question we've all pondered at one point or another:

[conuly]

Is it ever going to be possible to find a way around that whole "speed of light" thing? One that doesn't involve generational ships or the also sci-fi concept of cryogenics, that is? NASA's page isn't that hopeful, and I assume they know what they're talking about.

Does that mean we really ARE all stuck here? (Well, unless we DO go the generational ship route, but that causes its own problems, I should think.)

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

For sure, lots of kids end up in awful situations, but while they're on Earth, there's the option of getting out of them - change schools, change jobs, get a divorce, move away. I realize a lot of people on Earth don't have very many or very good options - they'll live and die in the starving villages where they were born, working hard for the Boss to keep their kids fed, and never know anything else - but they do have some chance of successfully escaping into a different situation. And they've got the sky over them - not just stars, but sun and moon, clouds and wind.

A sufficiently large spaceship shouldn't be *too* claustrophobic to somebody raised in it, just like a sufficiently quiet classroom shouldn't be too loud to someone who's used to it. What if it IS too claustrophobic? First comes the denial: "Oh no, it can't be; it's sufficiently large", next come the drugs and/or punishment, but what comes after? What if the size of the place has nothing to do with the problem, because however big it is, you can never in your life go outside of it, and you won't live to get where it's going?

Of course the dullnormal children would probably mostly adapt well enough to a life of rules and corridors and (inevitably) strict social hierarchy. The others, the bright, the fiery, the original, would be 'weeded out' one way or another; even if they rebelled and had a successful mutiny, it wouldn't make anything better for themselves or anyone else. However, there seems little point in sending colonists to some other star-system if, by the time they get there, they've self-selected for passive obedience to .authority and an inability to cope with change.

Alas, robots wouldn't help much, because first we've got to send them out and wait several generations for them to get there before they start transmitting. information about the place, and then the information can't travel back any faster than lightspeed, so there's always going to be this lag of years between sending and receiving.

I think we'd do better with some kind of cryo-sleep, so that the people who signed up for the mission are the ones who get to do it, and send out scout-ships to any star-system with interesting planets. In Ursula LeGuin's story Vaster Than Empires And More Slow (http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook934.htm), it's some kind of folded space rather than cryo-sleep, but the principle is the same. And just like in that story, I think most of those who volunteered to go would be misfits.

[conuly]

Much of the world lives in a world of rules and lined streets and strict social hierarchy. I'm not seeing that the wind and the rain and the sky are *that* crucial to human happiness... though I admit neither of us can really test our views in the real world.

I think we'd do better with some kind of cryo-sleep, so that the people who signed up for the mission are the ones who get to do it, and send out scout-ships to any star-system with interesting planets.

I concur, but at the moment that seems about as likely as FTL. Wanna take bets on which one is shown to be possible in our lifetimes? (If ever, but I can't collect 150 years from now. Well, not unless cryogenics really DOES become possible.) Probably neither, definitely not both.