Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

In space, today, we're in pre-aviation days: we're still using hot air balloons for transportation. We make them lighter than air (i.e. shoot them up in space) and let the wind (i.e gravity) to carry them places.

Imagine the most educated human 120 years ago is being told about planes heavier than air, air transportation over oceans, jet-powered planes, autopilots and fly-by-wire, not to mention people on the moon. He would say it's impossible, due to energy constraints. Today a daily JFK-NRT flight uses more energy than all the horses which lived two centuries ago would be able to produce in their lifetimes, combined (my math may be off by one order of magnitude: it's late here). Today we're this person. Educated enough to have valid arguments against it, but utterly incorrect.

Edit: What on earth would cause you to downvote this?

Edit2: Thanks. I would still appreciate a comment if I'm 'doing it wrong.'

If we could stand building for the future and experiencing by proxy, a few more options become available:

e.g. We could transport a set of human "blanks" or a "blank" creating machine to a distant star at 10% of c. It would take a few hundred years. When it arrives and deploys, we upload our consciousness at the speed of light with no acceleration and deceleration into a "blank" human.

Copies of ourselves could be regularly transported to and from a distant star over a few decades.

A few technological breakthroughs would be required to make this a reality:

* True Artificial Intelligence. A machine that is capable of self-awareness and analysis.

* A complete understanding of the human brain and how to replicate the organism and it's contents.

* A complete understanding of the human body, the life support mechanism for the brain - and how to duplicate it.

* How to turn nuclear fission or fusion into propulsion at a high level of efficiency.

* How to build factories that can stay dormant for a thousand years, wake up and operate as well as the day they were built. This probably will be solved as a result of AI and the ability to create self-repairing and self-improving machines.

Many of these problems are in the CS and Biotech fields. That's what we do. Now get to work!

Edit: The cool thing about this is that, assuming these technologies come to fruition, the entire project could likely be financed privately by a group of wealthy backers. You wouldn't need the massive bureaucracy of NASA or their dependency on Congress. You'd simply develop, test, then manufacture the (likely quite small) probes, then send them up and out on commercial rockets.

Believing that what we currently know is applicable to humans in the future, that our current limits are immutable.

We know all the laws of physics, right? We know if the universe is finite or infinite(because we had traveled there and seen the limits), we know what creates gravity and exactly how electromagnetic attraction really works... the same way the people Socrates asked 2500 years ago knew it all, and Socrates himself did not knew anything(in his own words).

The same way people already knew everything about the small things before microscope invention(in their own words it was unnecessary because "why we want to see what we already know smaller?").

That someone develops better ways to control active fission(atom by atom) and fusion reactions, that someone discovers something new about the universe,that someone discovers how to create antigravity because understands what gravity really is, that someone discover the way to crack the code on aging on our DNA, that someone discovers why the light limit on vacuum is what it is and some way of going faster, all of this impossible, because we know it all.

If either Bussard's polywell fusion or focus fusion turn out to work, that'll be achievable within a couple decades. As Moore's Law continues and we get better at simulating plasma, it's not that unlikely that some form of fusion will work out.

There are a lot of possibilities for non-rocket launch, including various space-elevator-like schemes, laser launch, and mass drivers. Even without fusion, thorium fission could provide plenty of power.

It'd be pretty expensive and slow to travel to another star with fusion...but eventually, with large solar panels in close orbit around the sun, we'll have an awful lot of energy to play with, and just maybe we'll figure out efficient laser or microwave power transmission sometime in the next thousand years.

On the other hand, maybe we'll just colonize the Oort Cloud and gradually migrate to other stars over the next million years or so without really trying.

(And, not that I'm holding my breath for this one, but if Woodward's right about the Mach effect we'll get to other stars pretty quickly.)

As for the reasons...the resources of the solar system are millions of times what's available on Earth. Once launch is cheap it'll be a no-brainer to start mining the asteroids.

"As Bruce Sterling has put it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live."

It seems unlikely at best that we'll ever attempt interstellar travel in our current organic bodies. The idea of taking along an atmosphere, food, water, and enough space to move around just seems ridiculous when you could stuff a human consciousness into a volume that, at worst, is the size of a melon, and at best considerably smaller. You'd also be able to add error correcting and redundancy to make the ship robust from radiation damage.

I suspect that any future spaceship will consist of perhaps 100 tons of computer and memory, designed with considerable redundancy and error correction. Perhaps 200,000 tons of shielding/fuel will be required, sufficient to protect the core computers and memory from interstellar particles, but also from the radiation from the ship's drive. Finally, you'd have a 1 million ton black hole sitting at the tail end of the ship, sufficiently large not to explode, but sufficiently small to have hardly any gravity. This would be fed by taking matter from the shielding to keep the black hole stable.

For further redundancy the ships might travel in small fleets, each acting as a backup store for each of the others. If one ship gets taken out by a stray piece of matter, at least you'd have a few more containing the same colonists.

The smart/educated few are not enough to offset the masses and for the masses it's simply not 'comfortable' to work on space travel; why would you, you already have a pool? Maybe poorer countries where people are not comfortable could be of use? Nah; you see around the world; when GDP gets over a certain level, out come the gadgets, mobile phones, ringtones, bentleys and other useless crap.

A very small (fractional) % of humans is busy with the problem of energy and space travel. If it would be a few actual %s of humanity we might stand a chance, unfortunately, the rest of the collective brainpower is spent arguing if the latest X Factor was won fairly.

I don't think we'll ever meet aliens either; after a certain time in the evolution, every race of 'intelligent' beings will invent paid ringtones, after that all chances of interstellar travel are gone.

Additionally you could explore the possibilities of fleets of nano sized probes, which over the course of thousands of years, confirm the habitality of an exoplanet, and build a crude nursery for sperm (which could be sent at a later date). This method makes the energy/momentum problems slightly less impossible.

The first is some breakthrough in physics that makes interstellar travel feasible. Not likely, but a staple of sci-fi.

The second is a series of improvements in nanotechnology making interplanetary colonies feasible (though less necessary).

And the looming confounding factor is that a "singularity" event might make all of this moot.

One interesting thing about sending some future human AI into space is that it could in theory 'power down' higher functions for hundreds or thousands of years as it travels to its destination. Upon reawakening, it would be in a new star system, with the cumulation of human knowledge in memory and enough tech to reproduce and start anew.

This is a problem because with 6.5 billion people we're using up resources. Fast.

Anyway, I see two potential solutions to this problem: one not-so-far-fetched and one incredibly far-fetched.

The not-so-far-fetched version is... hitch-hiking. Our understanding of the Universe is that it is full of mass wandering between stars. IIRC recently a planet-sized body was detected traveling between the stars.

Simple probability dictates that it is only a matter of time before a sufficiently large body travels through the Solar System with sufficient velocity (including direction) to reach somewhere else in sufficient time (but not too fast that we can't perform an orbital intercept) that we can essentially build a colony on it.

The far-fetched version is to use back holes as power sources [1] as this is, as far as I've read anyway, the only remotely viable method of providing propulsion without reaction mass to speak of and reaction mass is the death of any form of interstellar propulsion.

The answer to the Fermi Paradox [2] may simply be that it's too hard to leave our comfortable gravity wells and most (all?) civilizations simply run out of stuff before they get there.

I've also given the thought to "footprints". If you think about, say, a primitive tribesman. What do they need to survive in a sustainable fashion? They need a sufficient sized population (measured in the hundreds or low thousands) to avoid inbreeding and sufficient land area to provide a food source. This is probably measured in the tens or hundreds of square miles.

Imagine all they need as the footprint of a sustainable colony as that then dictates the minimum size of any spaceship.

Now imagine a more advanced society. 1000 modern humans would need an ENORMOUS footprint. Just think about computer chips. On any long voyage they'd break down so you need to be able to make new ones. That means a sufficient lab, technology, materials (or, in reality, the means to get more materials), all that knowledge and so on. Plus the size of the population goes up given required specializations.

This of course assumes that people would do all of these things instead of, say, an AI of some kind (which would actually solve a lot of problems).

That footprint is currently way too large to build any kind of interstellar vessel (IMHO). One of the trends I see in coming centuries is that footprint will reach a point of reducing in size. By 2100 I expect we'll be able to keep the sum of all human knowledge (or a close enough approximation) on an essentially mobile device. Advanced manufacturing techniques and materials may solve many of the footprint problems and so on.

As the footprint goes down, the viability of any isolated colony being able to survive increases.

The hitchhiking idea would also be ideal for the survival of humanity overall. With sufficient isolation, there will be cultural and genetic drift. If we're able to influence each other, that's a recipe for conflict. But a large mass passing through the Solar System is very likely a one-way ticket. There's no way to follow and no way to return (barring astronomically small odds of a repeat or inverse body).

[1]: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803v1

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

So you're saying there's a chance!

What? No it doesn't. We can do massively better than this, right now. As in, today's technology. No problem.

Why haven't we? It's frickin' expensive.

But the long-range probes we've launched have been pretty damn near coasting their entire trip, with a few course corrections. They were pushed, and now they float until they gain sentience and come back to say "hi". If they had a huge-ass rocket attached to them, such as would likely be on anything interested in going any distance at any kind of speed (ie, human-carrying ships), they'd get where they're going a lot faster.

Next up, to get to proxmia centauri in 42 years with some hand-waving to make things simpler and 100% efficient energy usage:

>To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon ...

Where did 400 megatons come from, if it's equivalent to 21.6? And if 400 is "the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force", I say that's a miniscule amount of energy, especially once it's divided by 20. Crank it up another 10-fold beyond 400, and we're still talking modern-day terrestrial-level achievable energy without breaking a sweat.

>So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a million seconds — roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-voom.

Not bad, really. We're pretty inefficient right now. Make it cost a few times that - we'll be producing that in a week before we can even get a lame v0.1 ship built and in trials.

---

All in all, an interesting read. But it feels more like a half-accurate rant. We're waving magic wands to get 100% efficiency and 2000kg, but we're not waving magic wands to get away from conventional rockets and today's energy production levels?

I'm entirely on their side that our tech today can't get us to the stars. Totally. I agree, the energy needed is quite literally astronomical, and we're not even close to it. But we keep finding weird things with our science - I'm not writing it off entirely. And I don't see why people seem to imply that we must leave from Earth - why not mine the asteroid belt to provide the fuel at our leisure, and build a truly massive ship? We're not going to aim for the stars on our first go, we'll be living in space for a long time before then.

In one short century we published more books and amassed more knowledge than all centuries past. Together. And we built the tools to search it and process it into meaning.

Traveling to another star is a formidable problem and doing it Newton style is not impractical. But if the past century teaches us something, we are a species prone to invent magic wands.

Besides that, we all know how futile is to try to predict the future. We can only see and express it in our own terms. The future is as alien to us as Twitter would be to my grandmother (who would be turning a century if she were alive).

James Arthur Baldwin

That being said, I don't disagree with most of the post.

Some other things man will never do: http://www.rense.com/general81/dw.htm

There seem to be two common misconceptions about the colonization of space:

1. People will colonize other planets. The notion that future generations will desire to burrow into other planets is as strange as expecting people to build a new city by digging caves in a cliff wall. Just as we now build apartment blocks and ranch houses, we will someday build custom habitats that aren't continually ravaged by earthquakes, tornados and spring floods.

2. Reaching the next solar system will be momentous. People will populate neighbouring solar systems just as our ancestors moved from Africa to other parts of the world... gradually from one generation to the next, each one drifting a little further into the Oort. One day a habitat that has its own artificial star within will move from the most recent piece of raw material to the next, not realizing that the one orbits our distant sun while the other orbits another star entirely.

Barring catastrophe at home, this future is likely. It's just the same story that's been happening since Lucy's family left the Great Rift Valley.

Granted, space colonization would be much more expensive than any very long-term or symbolic project we do now, but it's not out of the question that future societies would be more inclined to do stuff like that than 21st century anglophones. If so, none of Stross's barriers are necessarily deal-breakers.

For example, I don't think Hitler would have spared any expense to seed another world with Aryans, regardless of whether it made any economic sense (since when do humans only do things that make sense?), and the 420 year time frame wouldn't seem like much to a man who thought he founded a 1000 year Reich.

"We won't make it to america unless we build ships as large as a stadium and can put a thousand slaves with oars in them. But then, where are we going to put all the food to feed them? Well, we let them die and throw them in the ocean, only the stronger will deserve to be called the first american settlers"

We don't know yet what the future may teach us.

Personally I am an optimist on these things - in 1711 you could not have imagined regular Aircraft - something we take for granted today much less Spacecrafts. Electricity, Computers, Cell-phones, Internet, etc would have been inconceivable. Today we have been to the moon ~40 years ago. Villagers in India use cellphones and electricity and a fifth of humanity is interconnected via the net.

So I have to believe that by 2311 we will have cracked the problems around Interstellar travel and be living around a different Sun than our Sol.

Anything else is just underestimating the Human Spirit.

So it is possible for a life form, human or extraterrestrial, to build such a civilization seed which contains enough energy reserve and machinery to sustain life activity restoration and live form rebirth. Throw such civilization seed vessel like a bullet toward a distant solar system so that the energy of the target can be used to trigger start of development and we have our space travel capacity.

This is not how we'd naturally imagine interstellar travel, but the important point is that this proves that it is possible without relying on exotic or hazardous hypothesis. We should also keep in mind that there is still the possibility to tap into the dark matter as source of energy. While this is still very uncertain, it should be known and well accepted By now that interstellar travel and space colonization is possible.

I would like to add to this that if human life is a result of a natural process, there is a very high likelyhood that we are not alone in the univers and that other entities are likely to have started colonization already a long time ago. As we can see from earth civilization history a key factor to perserve its liberty and life autodetermination is the mastering of science and technology, intelligence and defense capacity. While there is still a need to protect ourselves from oher humans, in which we spend and waste a lot of ressource, the clock is ticking, and other civilizations may be developping much faster and efficiently than humans. It is no hard to see what it all implies.

"Kiwi developer Glenn Martin, who has been working on his flying machine for 30 years, intends to make it available on the market in 2012 at a cost of about US$100,000. Last month, the jetpack made its first high-altitude test flight, taking a dummy pilot to 1,500 meters under remote control while Mr Martin watched from a helicopter."

For more, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8566096/Martin-Jetpack...

Humans will make it to the asteroids, to the rest of the Milky Way, and fill the Universe.

In a few decades from now, the energy necessary for such a long distance space flight could come from half a ton of anti-hydrogen.

Brief article summary: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Breakthrough_...

But one could sum up the essay as such:

"A man from the XXIst century said it it's impossible to leave the solar system"

Perhaps we should wait for what the man of the XXIInd century might have to say?

We'll need a couple of magic wands, but we've already built a lot of them.

Remember that in the early XXth century going into space was still science fiction.

Nor should the future bankruptcy of your country concern you as long as it happens after you're dead. Even if your descendents have to pay the piper for it.

Like it always has, something will come along that will change everything.

alternatively upload me and I'll put myself in a more suitable interstellar body.