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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

The engineering issues are really tough, though surmountable. Currently, we just can't engineer the parts that will last that long in hard vacuum. Mostly because we can't test in that environment easily. Also, what do you do when all the light bulbs have burned out or gone haywire, what does that fault-tree look like for the billion and one parts on the craft? For a short journey of ~7 years, it's not a very big deal, it's just engineering issues. When you get into generation ship discussions then it becomes a human rights nightmare to trap newborns in a ship for their entire life and the lives of their descendants.

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With a round trip parts delivery time OF a generation, and a communications delay of almost a decade (two for duplex), I don't see any reason not to classify such a mission as a short-range 'generation ship' / complete colony effort.

Getting our 'eggs' out of a single cosmic basket is really important, however I think we need to at least take the baby-crawl to establishing an outpost in the asteroid belt. That would be far closer, have far more reasonable communications/parts delays, and if we can actually send up some robots to build things ahead of us, might actually be a good manufacturing base.

I feel that advancements in quantum mechanics will solve the communication problem.

No, it almost certainly won't. Our current understanding of quantum information theory simply doesn't allow transmitting classical information faster than light. There's no room in what we don't understand that could plausibly contain FTL communication. This is a pretty fundamental result of quantum information theory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

> it becomes a human rights nightmare to trap newborns in a ship for their entire life and the lives of their descendants.

Which is exactly why we should get some people off this ship, and colonizing others!

Oh, you meant the generation ship, not the Earth; nevermind.

Yeah I'm to be honest just trying to awaken people to the priority being that we need to establish a self-sufficient colony somewhere other than Earth.

Honestly, as long as humans stay stuck to earth, losing all humanity on earth won't hurt anyone. As long as the extinction is instant. If we have colonies, those colonies need to suffer through the knowledge that we lost earth.

Establishing colonies is only imperative if the continuation of the human race is. I'd argue that humans have value only due to other humans. There is nothing inherently valuable about human life from a non-human perspective.

That is not to say I don't support space colonization, just that I don't think its a moral imperative.

"There is nothing inherently valuable about human life from a non-human perspective."

How would you know?

It's a perfectly reasonable assumption until there's some evidence there is. Given the vastness and scale of the universe, it seems quite likely that our disappearance would never be noticed.

Going unnoticed is not the same as inherently not valuable. Imagine aliens finding us extinct, wringing their little tentacles in dispair at the lost probing opportunities. :)

Well, HN is not the most optimal place to do that. There are not many of us on here and we all already know these things. 1600 Pennsylvania Pl. is a better bang for your buck.

I think you probably mean 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (not Pl.), Washington, D.C.

Though I don't share your assessment that that is a productive place to direct citizen input on this (or any other) issue.

Thanks!

Elon Musk is working on that.

http://www.spacex.com/mars

And you're certain enough that he's going to be able to do it in time and that he's doing it properly enough that you don't have to do anything about it. And you'll continue to go about doing the exact same things. Got it.

In no way attempting to deflect from my own regrettable inaction, I'm curious to know what you're doing about it?

Based on his previous achievements I feel like he is likely to move the field forward by big steps. And if not him the people after him. I'm not sure if pushing myself into field I don't understand much would help the progress. Scientists do science, not activists.

Are you a space activist of some sort?

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