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

[mc776]

Our space opera are phlebotinized magick all the way down I'm afraid.

(and as far as even the generational ships go, don't forget remass.)

[conuly]

I'm still going to keep hoping we're all just very, very wrong. It's a little irrational, but what of it?

[mc776]

Heck, having a universal reference frame and an easier to understand universe would be enough of an advantage for me, but then again that would make light a very, very strange thing to work with...

[dragonwolf]

Given that mass increases exponentially the closer you get to the speed of light, unless we can come up with an energy source that increases faster than that, faster-than-light travel is very likely impossible. At least, Einsteinien FTL travel.

Enter Warp Drive, wormholes, and yes, even the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. The technologies required for these methods of travel are still waaaaayyy off, but current analyses say that, given our current understanding, they are possible (even if remotely).

[azarias.livejournal.com]

Upload mind to computer, ship computer out to wherever taking as long as you need, instantiate mind at destination.

Not that that's necessarily any more possible, or desirable.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Are we completely giving up on the "black hole as space-time tunnel" concept? Or are you asking about plausible things?

[conuly]

I'm looking for plausibility. Though that'd be cool if black holes COULD work that way.

[conuly]

Yeah, but you can't really do much as a disembodied mind, can you?

[azarias.livejournal.com]

Sure you can, if you build yourself a sufficiently awesome robot body first.

[eldarath.livejournal.com]

FTL travel is...pretty unreachable with the current level of understanding regarding our physical universe...I mean, we can't even decide if a tachyon is beyond that theoretical limit.

I'm afraid we're just going to end up in hover chairs. (ex. wall-e)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

There's a song about that, too: FTL: A Historical Perspective (http://pigsandfishes.com/filks/mikefilk/ftlhistorical.html)

Alas, no, we're not going to find a way around the speed-of-light thing. Worse than that; we' might not even be able to go to Mars, because the health problems caused by microgravity (http://www.racetomars.ca/mars/article_effects.jsp) are so bad.

Not like we were exactly prepared to go anyway, or that there's anything out there we particularly need. If we're going to throw money at a problem, let's work on reducing a population of 7 billion to about 1 billion, without war, famine, pestilence, genocide or coercive law, while preserving as much as possible of our genetic diversity, improving the quality of life for everyone, starting from the bottom, and protecting/restoring the natural environment. THEN we can talk about what's out in interstellar space that might be worth sending a few good robots to check out.

[conuly]

I don't know, I'm still holding out for some sort of breakthrough on one of those issues. Not in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anybody who knows me, but it seems so... final otherwise. I can be a *little* irrational, it's not hurting me.

[conuly]

Well, yes, but what I'm hoping is that the odds of our understanding being incredibly wrong are better than we think. It's happened before, after all. Of course, we knew a lot less then. (Way to state the obvious, Connie!)

[sayga.livejournal.com]

I would totally volunteer to go on a generational ship if it was like Star Trek. :P Course, if it was like Star Trek, we wouldn't NEED it to be a generational ship.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking of mud hut dwellers in our own world that show up on Google Earth but we never visit. They're unlikely to invent jet airplanes any time soon on their own.

But we might get visited by some advanced aliens who have invented FTL, and they might give us rides or show us how. If we demonstrate enough civilization for them to want to visit us.

Maybe we could draw a giant Pythagorean Theorem as a crop circle.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm fond of the idea of tessering (basically, bending space) instead of trying to go faster than light...

[prezzey.livejournal.com]

I think the most plausible form of FTL propulsion is the improbability drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Infinite_Improbability_Drive) from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I'm only half joking...

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

The good old 'Spin the Space Station concept might take care of the microgravity problem. In Robert Heinlein's book Orphans of the Sky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky), the generational starship rotates to provide pseudo-gravity to the living decks.

Unfortunately, that starship was doomed to a grim fate: to travel ever on and on through space, its inhabitants sinking farther into barbarism as they slowly die of starvation and mutation, unless/until it suffers a hull breach sufficient to kill them all first. But the pseudo-gravity worked fine.

I think generational starships are a terrible idea; not to be considered unless conditions on Earth are so dire that there's no alternative - like, our Sun is about to go nova, or an asteroid big enough to destroy the planet is going to hit. All very well to volunteer oneself to die in space - as the first generation assuredly will - but to volunteer one's children and grandchildren to do the same, on the bare hope that one's great-great-grandchildren will survive to land on some unknown, hopefully not immediately letha,l alien world in an alien star-system, severed forever from their native world.... it's not right; not unless their native world is going to be gone anyway.

We could get out into our own solar system, though, if we deal with the gravity thing. We could have a Moon Base, and a Mars Base; from Mars it'd be a lot easier to send our little robots to the gas-giant moons Maybe we really could mine the asteroid belt. Setting all that up wouldn't require any paradigm shifts or technological innovations - all it would require is, say, half the money and resources our species currently devotes to waging war. Woot, right on; Make Space Not War!

And then we could use the other half for taking care of the Earth, because even if we had the power of Q and could instantly go anywhere in the Universe at will, we'd never find any place like this anywhere else.

[conuly]

Meh. Any time you have kids you're condemning them to live until they die. Sometimes they end up in awful conditions you could never have predicted and wouldn't want to anyway. A sufficiently large spaceship shouldn't be *too* claustrophobic to somebody raised in it... though let's hope they don't spend very many generations on it. Maybe robots first to determine if the destination is habitable.

[conuly]

Were it Star Trek, there'd be holodecks.

[sayga.livejournal.com]

I think the replicators would be my #1 choice. Well, that or warp drive. Holodecks would be awesome (I would love to do some holonovels!), but having replicators would really be awesome in so many applications. I imagine that the invention of the replicator is what made currency outdated. Nothing is worth anything if you can replicate valuables, or any tool, food, or item you want or need. Transporters are really great too, but I think I would be really paranoid about using them as much as people do on Star Trek. I'm surprised transporter accidents are as rare as they claim them to be. Haha, speaking as if all this is completely real and just waiting for me in the future!

[conuly]

Nothing is worth anything if you can replicate valuables, or any tool, food, or item you want or need.

You can't replicate repairmen, or medical knowledge, or garbage pickup, or a host of other things. If the replicator repairpeople go on strike, you'll know what's valuable and what isn't.

[sayga.livejournal.com]

You are totally right of course, but in this case, by "nothing" I really did mean "no THING." I wasn't terribly clear, but I like in Star Trek that stuff doesn't matter with the exception of a few rarities, and the people themselves, their contribution and their efforts are what are valued. It's such a nice fantasy world to wish I was a part of. :)

[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.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

You can build replicator repair robots, and autodocs (http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=264), and automatic trash trucks. That's what robots are for - to do the work that people don't want to do.

Of course, then you've got to be sure to treat the robot-makers right. Otherwise, being geeks, instead of going on strike themselves, they're liable to program the robots to rise up, and robot uprisings tend to be a lot worse than workers' strikes. It's impossible to negotiate with an army of robots that's already killed off the only people who knew how they worked, which is what usually happens.

Ick, replicated food - thanks no, I'll be in the garden. Preferably a real garden, with real, composted soil, but if it has to be hydroponics, that will suffice. As for replicating tools, clothing, etc, people would still have to pay for the raw material (because obviously the replicator has to have mass to start with; it can't just create atoms out of nothing) and for the energy of replication, and the overhead on the machine's maintenance, and the insurance in case the maintenance robot suddenly goes 'on strike'.

Starfleet is the military, though; they provide all this luxury tech to their flagship officers as part of the package. I bet the USS Cargo Grunt only has a replicator if replicators are the cheapest way to feed a crew - which they might be, but if so, the Enterprise ought to have fresh organic food, at least in the officers' mess, for the sake of comparison. We've already observed that society in the Star Trek world may have gotten rid of war, racism and poverty, but they haven't gotten rid of class markers and status indicators.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I like that better too, but so far, only angels, Norns and spice-addicted Spacing Guild mutants know how it's done, and none of them will tell anybody else how. It's possible that they don't really know how either; that they just do it, the way Arthur Dent flies, without thinking about it - which is very cool, but not terribly helpful to the would-be apprentice.

[conuly]

That's what robots are for - to do the work that people don't want to do.

I thought that's why we had illegal immigrants...?

Ick, replicated food - thanks no, I'll be in the garden.

Notably, all Star Trek ships that I can recall grew or bought their own food. As I recall, replicators were far from perfect when it came to edibles. Still, better than starving.

[darkpoole.livejournal.com]

The old "Bussard ramjet collecting hydrogen to provide continuous acceleration" concept. Once you're very, very close to lightspeed, time compression can make a decades-long journey pass in months. Give it a year to reach relativistic speed, some number of months traveling nearly at light speed to cross multiple light years, and a year or so to decelerate at the end.

Of course, you can't go home again (generations will have passed on earth while you traveled), but it gets you there in a reasonable time (by your own subjective reference) with no need for hibernation.