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Old 04-17-2012, 06:53 PM   #71
David Johnston2
 
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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Originally Posted by vierasmarius View Post
Because humans never seem to be satisfied just sending their probes to look at something. =P
I'd say the last 30 years of space exploration say different.


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More seriously though, if humanity is to survive in the long-term it will need to expand off of Earth, and eventually out of the solar system.
If all you want to do is hedge humanity's survival bets, there's no need to send actual people. Sending germ cells with some robots is a more practical solution. Besides, I was asking in the gamable sense.
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Old 04-17-2012, 07:02 PM   #72
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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To see and experience the universe of course!
That would require someone who owned a significant proportion of the sun's yearly output of power and a strong desire to commit suicide in an interesting way.


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Out of curiosity. To homestead, to stake a mobile piece of space and time just for you, away from an oppressive society with its obligations, responsibilities, the "ties-that-bind", to be genuinely free and independent of all that nonsense.
A person who commanded those kind of resources would not be the kind of asocial person who would have that strong a desire to live alone until the day they day.

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The best part is that when you come back home, it won't really be home anymore.
In order to come "home" you would have to massively industrialize your destination from scratch over thousands of years creating the exact kind of civilisation that you were escaping.
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Old 04-17-2012, 07:17 PM   #73
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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I'd say the last 30 years of space exploration say different.
Mostly the result of having our hopes and expectations too high, underestimating the difficulties involved (thinking it'd be somehow as "easy" as early trans-Atlantic oceanic voyages), taking loads of things for granted, wasting tons of money to make certain "milestones" in some ******* contest "space race" happen rather than using that money to engineer reusable and cost-effective infrastructures, and now the hyper-politicization of space... all of these things and more have meant that in many ways there haven't even genuinely been 30 years of space exploration. Not in any dedicated, scalable, extensible, forward-looking, serious sense. It's maybe a case where we're not only culturally unready but also technologically so.

And if futurists' predictions of the increasing state of abundance arising from maturing information and nano technologies are correct, then abundance will launch us into space.

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If all you want to do is hedge humanity's survival bets, there's no need to send actual people. Sending germ cells with some robots is a more practical solution. Besides, I was asking in the gamable sense.
And this is where it gets boring. Humanity's survival... who cares? I sure don't. I sure as hell do care about the lives and well-being of existing humans, some more than others, but why would anyone care about the perpetuation of the species, just for its own sake? That ideology of space travel won't ever capture many imaginations because in the end no one currently alive will ever get to benefit or see any of it. Some aliens will, albeit aliens that have our DNA and could cross-breed with us. But how similar will humans raised from germ lines on alien worlds by robots be to us? This approach makes humanity more of a cosmic virus than a collection of individuals. Individuals matter; species are just a handy biological abstraction, a category based on similar genes, often blurrier and less meaningful (especially in light of genetic engineering possibilities) than most like to think.
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Old 04-17-2012, 07:24 PM   #74
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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And if futurists' predictions of the increasing state of abundance arising from maturing information and nano technologies are correct,.
They aren't. Neither of those technologies conjure up energy. They are fundamentally irrelevant to abundance.
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Old 04-17-2012, 07:26 PM   #75
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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...
And this is where it gets boring. Humanity's survival... who cares? I sure don't. I sure as hell do care about the lives and well-being of existing humans, some more than others, but why would anyone care about the perpetuation of the species, just for its own sake? ...
That's really odd. As I only care about propagating the species into space, BECAUSE nobody I know would benefit. In a thousand years, I doubt anything of my present cultural background would exist. The only thing in common, maybe, is that they will be my species.
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Old 04-17-2012, 07:33 PM   #76
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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They aren't. Neither of those technologies conjure up energy. They are fundamentally irrelevant to abundance.
Well nano-motors would improve power use and possibly efficiency.
The real boom to energy abundance would be functional D-D fusion if and when they ever get it off the ground.
Oh, I'm not that pessimistic. I'm sure humanity will get it going some day. But I'm not holding my breath for my lifetime.
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Old 04-17-2012, 07:38 PM   #77
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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...
A person who commanded those kind of resources would not be the kind of asocial person who would have that strong a desire to live alone until the day they day.
....
Lotteries and inheritances make some very odd people rich... and they rarely hold on to it for long.

Give me internet, my cats, and my life mate, and I don't care if I never physically see another living creature again.
But my life mate does get antsy if she doesn't interact with other humans every month or two.... the social butterfly. :)

Of course I know we're odd, but we're nice odd.
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Old 04-17-2012, 07:39 PM   #78
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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They aren't. Neither of those technologies conjure up energy. They are fundamentally irrelevant to abundance.
We don't have a purely energy-limited economy, and are not likely to in the near future. We also have rather substantial untapped energy sources on the planet which could become economical to exploit if other areas were more productive.
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Well nano-motors would improve power use and possibly efficiency.
The real boom to energy abundance would be functional D-D fusion if and when they ever get it off the ground.
Oh, I'm not that pessimistic. I'm sure humanity will get it going some day. But I'm not holding my breath for my lifetime.
Space based solar: because you don't really need to make your own fusion.
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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
Lotteries and inheritances make some very odd people rich... and they rarely hold on to it for long.

Give me internet, my cats, and my life mate, and I don't care if I never physically see another living creature again.
But my life mate does get antsy if she doesn't interact with other humans every month or two.... the social butterfly. :)

Of course I know we're odd, but we're nice odd.
Of course, your internet would get pretty slow if you left the solar system.
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Old 04-17-2012, 07:43 PM   #79
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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That would require someone who owned a significant proportion of the sun's yearly output of power and a strong desire to commit suicide in an interesting way.
For a stasis kind of trip, it wouldn't require that much power. For a time dilation "shortened" trip, it would indeed require quite a great deal of power, yes, but who knows what future technology will allow. Antimatter drives, while difficult, aren't strictly speaking deserving of a "^" after the TL. Spacecraft powered by solar lasers aren't either. All are difficult but not impossible even with today's understanding of physics.

I don't see the suicide part. Because of aging? No reason we can't conquer that. Smart people are working on that. No reason we can't even shed our biology in time, perhaps even becoming the consciousnesses of these ships. And in general risk taking behaviour isn't analogous or even similar to suicide, lest we call firefighters suicidal. Heck, we don't even usually call it suicidal when people kill themselves slowly, via alcohol, tobacco, or just plain not optimizing one's life habits to result in the maximum possible lifespan.

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A person who commanded those kind of resources would not be the kind of asocial person who would have that strong a desire to live alone until the day they day.
This makes assumptions about the limits on the levels of abundance that may exist per person in some distant future. Resources and power aren't strictly required to come from a large social stucture.

And even if those assumptions are and sadly will always be true, the financiers may still pay out for those sufficiently interested and asocial to make such trips joyfully. Astronauts are of necessity the types that can deal with scarcity in close quarters, separated by society, with only a few crew members for regular contact, and good at solving problems for themselves. Why would governments, businesses, and individuals finance these missions for other people? For lots of reasons. Humans have been undertaking large-scale, high-cost, and long-duration projects for which they'd never see a return of investment since the building of the pyramids and other such monuments. Sometimes it was just to say they did it, or contributed to it, or to be remembered for having done it, or for the social credit. What did we really get out of the manned mission to the Moon, in the end, or expect to get out of it? Not much. Yet we did it, at a time when technologically it was a huge stretch and probably a bad idea. Mostly to show a rival nation that we "beat them to it".

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In order to come "home" you would have to massively industrialize your destination from scratch over thousands of years creating the exact kind of civilisation that you were escaping.
If you take the technology with you to automate those tasks for you when you get there, and sufficiently advanced spacefaring technology, that wouldn't be necessary. Even if it was, civilization wouldn't be required, just machines, ideally self-replicating robots, and lots of them.

I see all these objections as surmountable, even if it may take a century or centuries to develop the technologies to enable them. Tell a Columbus-era sailor about getting across the Atlantic via the air in mere hours and they'd laugh you right into a mental hospital.
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Old 04-17-2012, 07:47 PM   #80
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Default Re: Space Opera vs Hard Sci-Fi, personal vs realistic

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To risk sounding condescending, may I state how cute it is of you to think our species has a shot in hell of surviving the over 1 billion years it would take for the earth to start becoming uninhabitable?
Yeah, that does sound pretty condescending. I never said that I thought we'd survive anywhere near that long; there are a lot of ways for our species to go extinct long before the Earth itself can no longer support life. Spreading out mitigates those risks to a degree.

And yes, it may make sense to send out robotic sperm'n'egg banks instead. I was just saying that if humans do ever engage in interstellar travel, those will be the most likely reasons for it - curiosity and procreation.
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