General / Off-Topic The terrifying thought that interstellar travel just isn't possible.

[Patrick_68000]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2

I was speaking of men, not of a probe (I know, Voyager 2 ...). I was talking about a constructive journey with a destination, and not suicidal for a man

 

[Javert]

The problem isn't just the technology to propel yourself to another star system. We can do that now in theory. The real problems are the logistical details.


1) fighting bacteria and viruses that get strong in space even as our immune system gets weaker in zero g
2) surviving deadly radiation outside the protective bubbles of the magnetosphere of the earth and heliosphere of sun
3) what if something breaks? What are the odds that you could travel for years though interstellar space and have nothing malfunction?
4) what if an engineer or scientist used english instead of metric units (yes this kind of error has cost billions of dollars already), and you end up in the middle of nowhere with not enough fuel to do anything
5) finding a place that is hospitable to human life! (the estimate for ELW in elite are optimistically high, and we have FSD technology)
6) if we find an ELW, then it may very well have existing bacterial life that is hostile or deadly to human tissue, for which we would have no natural defense
7) space debris: we could travel several light years and get obliterated by a high speed pebble in the last 1000km of the journey
8) the incredibly perilous journey of falling through an alien planet's atmosphere faster than the speed of sound
9) not crashing on the planet's surface
10) The unknown: this is probably the most deadly of all the items on the list

I'm always a bit worried about lists which end up wiith exactly 10 items on them. It feels like you either left something out, or some of them are made up.

Or, if there are only exactly 10 reasons to stop this the universe must be so well organized....

 

[Surly_Badger]

Just because you have travelled so fast you see events that have happened in the past that does not mean you have travelled back to that time.

OK, it's tricky. The problem is that if you're dealing with multiple time-frames and you expect them to interact, you wind up with what amounts to time-travel in certain time-frames.
Think about it this way: if you had someone leave an orbital on a non-FTL ship going 99% of the speed of light, and you let them travel a couple years (let's say 3) they would experience a subjective time of about ~40 days because of time dilation. Then if you chase them in your Asp Explorer and catch them almost instantly and bring them back in your passenger seat, you have a time paradox because in the frame of reference of the non-FTL ship only 2 days have passed at the orbital, and 45 days have passed on the ship. In the frame of reference of the orbital 3 years have passed and you've hauled them back in time. Whups! Its paradoxical and doesn't make sense.

Here's a better explanation than I can give.

Time-travel forward is not a big problem. You can just sit on your couch and travel forward in time one second per second.

You could not use it for stock market profits

Sure, you could. For one thing, you could see into the past, undetectably. Which would mean that, potentially, you could learn what happened, when, and have a much better chance of predicting the effect. You could see what numbers IBM's Chief Financial Officer reported on a quarterly earnings report, race ahead of that information at FTL, and trade based on it. Note that this technique exactly was used by bonds traders in 1790* and is the basis of what is called "high frequency trading" today. Except that if you did it with FTL you wouldn't even have a ghost of a chance of making a mistake in your trades!! The only way to prevent that sort of chicanery would be to ensure that any gambling (including the stock market) was restricted to within a fixed frame of reference; i.e.: you could only bet on a poker game if you were at the table.

 

[EdzUp]

Radio transmissions only travel at the speed of light. Our own bleeps have only traveled about 60-70 LYs. Which is quite meaningless. So I'm not buying: if there's other life out there, we'd have heard them. And that's assuming we'd recognize the signal if we received it.

If we can't get to other stars, our days are numbered. It's a pretty big number though.

Thats also assuming they understand our signals too, for all we know they might think our signals are primitive background interference so dont bother with it. Also seeing as we are entering an age of quantum computers and tech maybe faster methods of communication we hadnt thought of will be developed. Take into consideration that most things we have only noticed are things that we as a species have experienced first hand, even if we got a signal from another planet we still wouldnt believe it till we get over there and meet them in person.

 

[Sanderson]

Honestly though, if man can keep from destroying each other, themselves or making the Earth uninhabitable, we may someday travel to other stars. Given enough time and peace there's nothing man can't do. IMO. It's the whole peace and time thing that get's us though.

What about the universe expanding though? Isn't it doing so faster than the speed of light? If so, we may need to go a bit faster than just silly old lightspeed.

 

[Zplintz]

OK, it's tricky. The problem is that if you're dealing with multiple time-frames and you expect them to interact, you wind up with what amounts to time-travel in certain time-frames.
Think about it this way: if you had someone leave an orbital on a non-FTL ship going 99% of the speed of light, and you let them travel a couple years (let's say 3) they would experience a subjective time of about ~40 days because of time dilation. Then if you chase them in your Asp Explorer and catch them almost instantly and bring them back in your passenger seat, you have a time paradox because in the frame of reference of the non-FTL ship only 2 days have passed at the orbital, and 45 days have passed on the ship. In the frame of reference of the orbital 3 years have passed and you've hauled them back in time. Whups! Its paradoxical and doesn't make sense.

Here's a better explanation than I can give.

Time-travel forward is not a big problem. You can just sit on your couch and travel forward in time one second per second.



Sure, you could. For one thing, you could see into the past, undetectably. Which would mean that, potentially, you could learn what happened, when, and have a much better chance of predicting the effect. You could see what numbers IBM's Chief Financial Officer reported on a quarterly earnings report, race ahead of that information at FTL, and trade based on it. Note that this technique exactly was used by bonds traders in 1790* and is the basis of what is called "high frequency trading" today. Except that if you did it with FTL you wouldn't even have a ghost of a chance of making a mistake in your trades!! The only way to prevent that sort of chicanery would be to ensure that any gambling (including the stock market) was restricted to within a fixed frame of reference; i.e.: you could only bet on a poker game if you were at the table.

You don't get a time paradox because although there is a difference in perceived time passed, which maybe confusing, time has not gone backwards for either party either perdonally or rekative to each other , only forwards.

Neither party has any information about the other, about their futures, that they can communicate or use, nor can they change what happened in their pasts.

 

[epoch71]

Life isn't isolated in space anyway.

Bacteria have been found in meteorites.

If you're referring to the supposed discovery by Richard Hoover (NASA) then that has not been proven, and has been largely dismissed by the scientific community.

 

[Agarthan]

Getting really tired of people constantly saying "humanity is a disease" and "we are all as good as dead". Have some goddamn pride how far we have come in so short a time. Yes, at the moment we are backpedalling on space exploration - mainly because the country with the actual balls to do it has now lost those balls and decided its too dangerous and/or turned space into a commodity only private companies can exploit.

Currently its the very definition of the "best of times and worst of times". In my lifetime I've seen people walk on the moon (I was 3 months old at the time) and then lose the technology to do it and then losing the tech to even get back in space. We cant rely on 40 year old Russian tech for long.

If we had the smegging will to do it we could easily get to the nearest star. All the tech is right here, right now. We could easily build a large ship using either nuclear propulsion or ion engine tech to get to Proxima. One big enough that the people aboard could grow their own supplies and big enough that psychological issues are lessened. One big enough that it could be radiation shielded (the biggest issue with long term space travel). It could generate 1G by rotating easily enough.

There are few if any technical barriers to this. The barriers are financial and political sadly.

Stop dissing Humans. We rock (mostly).

Thank you. If you think humanity is a disease, by all means out there, kill yourselves, make room for some more appreciative consciousness to spawn in on this planet, you are a waste of space.

 

[sutex]

If I told you under the veils of the national security state the tech is 50 years ahead of where you think it is right now, you wouldn't believe it so it doesn't matter.

Yes sheepRdangerous not to those who know, only to themselves

There was a interesting Sci-fi show years back that had the lead scientist from a think tank ,turned up at a medical conference too talk of his work/findings. This was all leading edge science to all those in the public medical conference, but to the scientist from the think tank , the science they where disclosing was decades old, the updated science was kept secret.

Why do this , its done to keep the sheep on track in a misdirection , that will take years of work , before other researchers realized, the science disclosed, at the conference, was a dead end. Which was the point of the lead scientist going to the conference in the first place lol

controlling the tech , though the flow of information via misdirection .......anyhow it was just a Sci-fi show .... art imitating life ?

Any interstellar travel will require medial knowledge far more than is in the public domain now, who do you think would be going ?.. members from the local pub lol

 

[callahan44]

If you're referring to the supposed discovery by Richard Hoover (NASA) then that has not been proven, and has been largely dismissed by the scientific community.

Complex organic molecules have been detected in space, just nothing with the complexity of DNA, even though that has been shown to be theoretically possible.
The search is ongoing.

While I like the idea of aliens on Omicron Persei 8 watching our early TV broadcasts, they might be disappointed we no longer broadcast, since we use digital & satellite these days.

 

[Sanderson]

.........they might be disappointed we no longer broadcast, since we use digital & satellite these days.

Or, they will be in 40-60 years

That's assuming the "other" intelligent life form evolved enough (or little?) in the right time frame (before we vanish) with the right technology and will to even care to look for us. IMO most people think that we have been around forever and always have been broadcasting to the galaxy how stupid we are (TV). Humans occupy a (relatively) microscopic slice of time in the history of the Universe, there's billions of chances we just missed the only other intelligent life in the galaxy by a few millennia or eons.

 

[Agarthan]

Yes sheepRdangerous not to those who know, only to themselves

There was a interesting Sci-fi show years back that had the lead scientist from a think tank ,turned up at a medical conference too talk of his work/findings. This was all leading edge science to all those in the public medical conference, but to the scientist from the think tank , the science they where disclosing was decades old, the updated science was kept secret.

Why do this , its done to keep the sheep on track in a misdirection , that will take years of work , before other researchers realized, the science disclosed, at the conference, was a dead end. Which was the point of the lead scientist going to the conference in the first place lol

controlling the tech , though the flow of information via misdirection .......anyhow it was just a Sci-fi show .... art imitating life ?

Any interstellar travel will require medial knowledge far more than is in the public domain now, who do you think would be going ?.. members from the local pub lol

I even got a comment rep from one of the most prominent members of the E: D community for this too, though they didn't post in this thread, they must have felt my post was enough of their own sentiment.

On your show, well the Pentagon and CIA has planted stories in fictional and non-fictional media presentations for decades.

 

[Adept]

I had a disturbing thought, we have become used to technology moving forwards in human history. Sometimes it moves forwards in bursts, sometimes it crawls, and sometimes we see a seemingly steady rate of progress.

But in terms of interstellar travel, what if this just isn't possible. What would that mean for the human race if we couldn't ever get to other stars. The human race is quite young, given the number of extinction events on earth. But I can't help think that there must be intelligent life in other solar systems that must have been around far longer and if interstellar travel is possible would have branched out across our galaxy, and that we would have picked up some evidence by now either by direct communication or by picking up on radio transmissions etc. Is the human race so closely tied to that of our own sun.

Yes. I do think that the likeliest explanation to the Fermi Paradox is that practical interstellar travel just isn't doable.