I don't think that's a valid explanation, for two reasons. First, you're always going to have to get resources and deal with waste. That requires some active intelligence--SOMEONE has to pay enough attention to the real world to get the food, the fuel, the raw materials, and to get rid of the waste materials, broken bits, etc. And second, in a large enough population I'd be very, very surprised if you didn't have a few people like me that think space travel is necessary. Okay, I'm not going to be able to do much about it--I'm don't exactly have the resources to do much one way or the other with space flight. But if we were all living in computers, it'd be a lot easier to convince people to colonize a new planet (I'd be able to find the RIGHT planet, and stir up political turmoil or something).Democracy Simulator said:
-
Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more
Why We Haven't Met Aliens Yet
- Thread starter BadBoy
- Start date
-
- Tags
- aliens max tegmark
Can I suggest that people read:
Mary Roach, Packing for Mars
It rather explores the human problems of space flight. OK, no doubt there are ways of solving the problems - but they ain't easy.
The one I liked was putting your astronauts into suspended animation (or hibernation). What happens if the systems break down and they wake up. You are still going to have to feed them - so you still have to carry insane quantities of food.
I thoroughly recommend it.
Mary Roach, Packing for Mars
It rather explores the human problems of space flight. OK, no doubt there are ways of solving the problems - but they ain't easy.
The one I liked was putting your astronauts into suspended animation (or hibernation). What happens if the systems break down and they wake up. You are still going to have to feed them - so you still have to carry insane quantities of food.
I thoroughly recommend it.
Marduk
Banned
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2009
- Messages
- 10,183
the Anuna (not Annunaki) were the cthonic deities, they weren't from anywhere up above at all, they were from down below. Sitchin is the originator of the "gods from above" translation of their name and its completely wrong, it actually means "those of royal blood". Sitchin is now dead, like his baloney always was
the Egyptians
the Romans, its actually called, "the temple of Jupiter", Baalbek is the location
I find the most likely interstellar travel scenario to involve robotic drone ships.
Give us a few thousand years of technological growth and we might be to a point where we could send out Voyager 5(or wtvr) thats a large computer controlled drone ship that is riddled with measuring instruments ...etc and is completely self reliant, it's mission is to go to another solar system and take measurements and send back information. Over more and more time our range could extend. But I see no point in risking human life in such endeavors.
Give us a few thousand years of technological growth and we might be to a point where we could send out Voyager 5(or wtvr) thats a large computer controlled drone ship that is riddled with measuring instruments ...etc and is completely self reliant, it's mission is to go to another solar system and take measurements and send back information. Over more and more time our range could extend. But I see no point in risking human life in such endeavors.
RecoveringYuppy
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2006
- Messages
- 14,185
What are the odds that another planet will adopt the same plant/animal dichotomy we have here?
RecoveringYuppy
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2006
- Messages
- 14,185
There doesn't have to be a connection between the two. But a frequent objection to interstellar travel is that it will cost too much energy. That isn't necessarily true for a long lived civilization. It doesn't have to cost much at all. If you're here for a long time anyway you're going to be presented with opportunities to simply hitch a ride on objects that are already headed out anyway. This applies both to interplanetary and interstellar travel.
There are objects in orbit about the sun now that are on extreme orbits. Build your ship from material on them and you get your orbital velocity for free. You've got the cost of getting the startup material to the object in the first place, and even that doesn't have to be done in one step if you're a civilization that's been around for a couple thousand years.
Same thing applies on an interstellar level. Typical differential velocity between stars in our neighborhood is about 1 LY per thousand years. Just be around long enough and something will drop by. And it doesn't even take long as you might imagine. In only 9,000 years Rigil Kent is going to be displaced as our nearest neighbor, for example.
I generally agree, though I expect such drone ships to be designed to use in situ resources. It cuts the costs down by an incredible amount, particularly for interstellar voyages, where each extra gram of mass might equate to billions of dollars of fuel.
And once you can do that...
BadBoy
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2009
- Messages
- 1,512
Or, perhaps we look at some bacteria that actually came from space on a rock, why do they always have to be bigger and better and more advanced. Or like Larry Nivan's space seeds (or whatever they were called).
However, on the whole I think the article is strange in that submersion in virtual reality and media could well be a purely human concept. You wouldn't catch Cpt. Spock getting his rocks of in a virtual reality gig.
Aepervius
Non credunt, semper verificare
Emphasis mine. Do we EVEN have that much potential ? Our oil wealth will trickle out sooner than a few thousand years in the future, and we haven't made any real progress toward fusion in such a meaningfull way. Even easy accessible coal is running out (BP predicted about 150 years coal reserve worldwide with currently known exploitable resource, peak coal predicted for 2030).
Without big energy source, our technical advancement potential will peter out, slow down, and maybe stop and regress. In a thousand year I see the human civ back to what it was in the 16th century and never going away again from that point. That is at least from the available info much more likely than continued advance in technology.
I find that highly unlikely. If there's one thing that humans are, it's bloody creative. Especially when the chips are down. We have gone from a computer the size of a building to one that fits in the palm of my hand (and with thousands of times more computing power) in like 50 years or so. Imagine where we will be in 50 more!
As far as energy is concerned, we will figure it out. We always do. Even if it means we have to face facts and build more nuclear power plants to get us through the dark times. We will conquer the energy beast. Figuring stuff out is our bread and butter. (in fact CERN may turn out to be the gateway to our energy future as we learn more and more about how particles work, and what different types there are)
As far as energy is concerned, we will figure it out. We always do. Even if it means we have to face facts and build more nuclear power plants to get us through the dark times. We will conquer the energy beast. Figuring stuff out is our bread and butter. (in fact CERN may turn out to be the gateway to our energy future as we learn more and more about how particles work, and what different types there are)
MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2002
- Messages
- 24,967
Long thread, but I agree with the above. One thing that tends to stump even scientists is the sheer scale of even a galaxy. The galaxy spreads over not just an area we can hardly imagine, but also over a tremendous amount of time. Even if our galaxy has hosted a million civilisations with an evolutionary history like ours, if we assume that this has spread over a period of 10 billion years, and we assume that a civilisation is 'visible' by radio waves for a century, there is only one chance in ten that another is 'visible' anywhere in the galaxy just now.
As for colonizing the galaxy, again, this is highly unlikely. It has taken us thousands of years to populate a single planet, our experience indicates that highly evolved civilisations have a low growth rate, so even given unlimited resources and FTL capability, a civilisation would not be likely to ever colonize more than a dozen planets. As soon as they had made themselves independent of their mother star, and secured themselves ample 'lebensraum' what would motivate them to continue? Sure, they might explore further, but, again built on our own experience, there seems to be a pioneer phase and a settler phase of cultures.
Hans
Aepervius
Non credunt, semper verificare
All our modern industry consume inordinate amount of energy. Where will you take it from ? It isn't a question of ingenuity it is a question of available resource to produce energy. Your reliance on "we will figure it out" is quite touching, and IMHO , misplaced. there are indeed hard problem that we did not solve despite being creative and willing to have those solved.
Studying physic has taught me to be a pessimist.
Aepervius
Non credunt, semper verificare
This is very interesting , last time I looked at extracting U from sea water it wasn't worth it due to low concentration, but that was a long time ago.
MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2002
- Messages
- 24,967
Well, our history shows that we do tend to figure it out. Some of the solutions hurt a lot, but, we're still here.
Industry, in many places, has realized substantial energy savings, merely motivated by rising energy costs. Once the motivation increases, it will get even better. Recycling has boomed during the last decades, to a level where certain kinds of waste is an object for thieves!
Hans
I studied physics too and there is nothing in the physical world that keeps us from extracting energy from the sun or other areas (hydrogen, geo thermal energy...etc)
What the hold up has been is that we haven't developed technology that does this at an efficient enough level to make it practical. THAT'S where the figuring it out part comes from.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "[not] worth it". It's currently not worth extracting uranium from sea water because we have much cheaper sources of uranium available.
But that doesn't tell us anything about what will happen as those sources start to run out. The cost of extracting uranium from sea water is low enough that the affect it would have on energy prices is basically non-existent. So while there's no reason to do it now, as we run out of conventional sources, it will become entirely economical to do so, and this transition will have no meaningful affect on the price of nuclear energy.
Pretty good, I'd say. The modes of life for terrestrial organisms seem to be necessitated by physical concerns. For example, a plant that could walk away from sesille predators wouldn't get eaten. The sesile animal would starve.RecoveringYuppy said:
In fact, Earth life supports the idea that photosynthetic organisms on land will be stationary. In the oceans, they're not--animals are stationary, and currents sweep photosynthetic critters into the animals' feeding apparatuses. In order to come onto land, they had to be sesile. That switch implies that there's some physical concern involved.
Of course, this doesn't mean there won't be organisms that are both autotrophs and heterotrophes. Soemthing that eats other things, but has a backup photosynthesis system.