sounds plausible, wouldn't it awesome if it actually worked and in 200 years we could be colonising other star systems. and maybe meet some Vulcans on the way,
I am not sure I could justify the cost of researching and building this. The problems to overcome dwarf the concept and realization of CERN or the ITER.
We have people dying of malnutrition every day yet the rich west wants to leave them behind and reach for the stars.
Who would reach there? The white elitist scientifically minded people of the first world countries. If science is not paired with ethics, it is useless to me.
And what would go there? Humans. What are humans? A species that acts immorally towards itself, the flora and fauna of their mother world, through the paradigms of capitalism, open market theories and individualism. Would we bring that to a new habitable world? Or would we change a world's unique flora and possible fauna to match our needs?
I don't want the human race to reach any star while we are still so infantile. And there is a serious worry here. It might just turn out to be the case that there are civilizations out there that are checking our progress. Surely the UFO phenomenon points in that direction, validated by the high secrecy of governments about this issue. These civilizations might not be pleased with the way humans treat themselves and their habitat. And they might intervene.
I propose that we stop spending hundreds of billions of currency in such fancy notions and spend it on improving the conditions of life for all people that exists now, before we think of colonization and terraforming of other worlds, or even trying to build the means to get away from Earth.
The problem with science is that it is material, reductionist and nihilistic. It no longer has a heart and all progress is defined not by evolving moral understanding of ourselves as a species but by your value in the economic life in the sense that we are consumers first and most, who buy gadgets of many kinds on open markets in a capitalist system, where scientific research and understanding is valorized by universities and private and corporate research labs into technology in the form of consumer goods.
Since Descartes separated nature into two epistemological parts, the primary and secondary qualities, things have been going downhill.
Despite our self-admiration and breast beating on the 'progress' we have made technologically, at the cost of climate change and the dying off of many species in nature by using fossil fuels, we still have at each other mercilessly.
Moral progress must go hand in hand with any other, if not, the word is unbalanced because we deny 50% of what reality is, which is, the secondary qualities that make life worthwhile.
Therefore I would see science merge with spirituality, like it used to be over 2000 years ago, when people such as the great thinkers of those days dabbled not just in mathematics and such things, but also wrote poetry or plays.
To me that model is not outdated but very much needed.
And as you all will understand, the whole concept of Elite Dangerous seems nothing else than to transport our current paradigms into the future. And most people embrace this mercantile society as something worthy to strife for. Even slaves are no longer a moral issue in that future, which seems to me to be a bleak hopeless and gloomy future.
But there is hope in it as well, because I know that such a future can never exists. For if science does not merge again with spirituality, if ethics do not again begin to guide the hand of progress, then the human race will end up stranded in a swamp it cannot get out of.
Simply because our culture as it is now cannot endure. We are disharmonious with ourselves and the world through the adoption of reductionist science, that leads to climate change and possible extreme conditions on Earth. Climatologists warn us that even if we go green immediately, the Earth will still have a momentum of warming.
I cannot see our culture go on like this for 100 years, let alone thousands. We are reaching the hard boundaries of a finite world. Therefore, to believe that our current culture will somehow muddle along for hundreds of years, then reaching a technological point of being able to build warp drives and colonize other worlds after finding them of course is ridiculous.
It would be utterly apprehensible if we would colonize the stars and re-create 20th and 21st century capitalism on every world. Would we not be parasites, in the same way we create a science fiction film called Independence Day where a species attacks us as a plague of locusts.
It worries me that people project our current way of life into the future based on reductionist materialist science and celebrate it through playing a game.
The only reason I like such space sims is because I know from out of all that I am and believe in, that it will never happen. And this frees me up to enjoy it, but make no mistake, it will never happen because currently, as a species, we might not exist with any ability to create science in 100 years.
At this stage of the human evolution we remain an immoral species, driven by greed and pre-occupied almost solely to material wealth. Our species is overly obsessed with matter. We are beings that take matter and through industrial progress based on scientific (mis) understanding create new arrangement forms of matter we call consumer goods.
If we keep doing this, there cannot be any future like ED predicts.
So that is how I look at science and technology. These things are not neutral to society despite this claim by most scientists. Science currently lies in bed with business. Just look how Information and Communication Theory had lead to the NSA's massive spying capabilities. Science is en enabler of immoral conduct because it is not paired with spirituality.
Science is the business of throwing a club in the hen house, startling all the hens, causing chaos and disruption and then asking the hen society to work out for themselves how to deal with the new situation.