I wonder if ancients felt this way about the sea, or sky, or mountains that seemed impassable to them, knowing or believing it was only a matter of time. Or did they wonder at areas just plain never-to-be-seen.
The emotion it conjures up is rather nice, kind of bitter sweet and expansive at the same time. It seems to stimulate the imagination to contemplate it even if you never actually go anywhere.
“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Let's assume we have advanced but still physically plausible technology. The universe is huge. The Solar system is huge. Getting anywhere takes forever! Months, to years (can be shorted with very large energy expense, but you only go faster with the square root of energy!).
Shielding from radiation requires large barriers. So you need to spend most time in a relatively small quarters guarded by large mass barriers (magnetic fields might help a little too). Everything about living in space will probably be a mix of boring, hard/confined and extremely costly.
This kind of yearning makes me remember something that Richard Feynman said. It's something like (paraphrasing) "We know almost everything about the universe, the nature of forces, even how life works; the forces that bind everything together are known to astounding, extraordinary precision -- pretty much all phenomena relevant at all to every day life. Yet when I meet someone who isn't a physicist, they will ask almost immediately "So what don't we know about physics? What unsolved problems are there?". There's so much we do know and they're not interested in that! And it's so fascinating!". (I think that deserves a name, like "Feynman syndrome", or something :P
Like the physics we already do know (and the mathematics as well) is astounding, fascinating, I think so is where we can go, and where we can observe. Like, the Earth (and its lifeforms!) is absolutely astounding. If you go a block around your house, with a keen eye, there are probably interesting enough things to spend a lifetime studying. A single species of insect, a species of tree, microscopic polen in the air, microorganisms, human-made systems, it's just too much to tell. And you've barely left your home. Then there are all sorts of ecosystems and places on Earth, I bet most don't have to travel far to go to a place of natural beauty they've never been to. For reference, Jupiter seems to be about 600,000,000 km away from us. It's interesting and beautiful for sure, but also... a giant blob of gas. If we were a little more thankful for what we do have, that's also unlocking a great treasure.
Also, we don't value enough our imagination (and even computer games!) too I think. In a movie or computer game[2], you can make so it so the travel to Jupiter takes seconds (or minutes to hours, just to make it more exciting ;) ), and you get quite astounding views too in the comfort of your home. Telescopes and scientific missions do the same. Through fiction and fantasy, we can travel to places that don't even exist and have all sorts of exciting histories :)
If you think about it, life right here on Earth is amazingly beautiful really -- but we have to look with the right eye (mindset and wisdom) to see it at all...
That said, bring in the space movies :)
[1] Nothing at all wrong with a little romanticism I think, that's good. But we shouldn't lose sights of reality...
[2] I really wish computer games were more culturally valued, and not seen as a way to kill time, or an addictive past time. They're really our tool to travel to brand new worlds at our fingertips (of course, with great power comes great responsibility...), we should recognize that as our generation's great medium !
This is something that drives me nuts about wannabe photographers. They all immediately travel off to "exotic" locations to take pictures of "exotic" people and things.
Your house and neighborhood is plenty exotic enough for a lifetime's work, if you have the eye.
Your first three paragraphs are the answer to the so-called Fermi Paradox.
If your species has adapted to spending tens of thousands of years in tiny craft isolated by vast distances from anything else, leaving that environment would be extremely risky and difficult.
IMO the only solutions to the paradox are either that intelligent life is really, really rare or civilizations wipe themselves out in some kind of filtering event.
So the people might live in a disconnected digital paradise, but their automated servants might cross the void at relativistic speeds to harvest any and all matter and energy not bolted down, to upgrade the paradise of their masters.
Or even find out that some weird natural phenomenons might be actually results of such engineering endeavors.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43650/auguries-of-inn...>
Extra points for advocating for playing/exploring video games!
Similar depictions occur in fiction, most of which are fairly shallowly-disguised Western, Journey, or Empire sagas relocated in space, though without any actual foundations on physics. Hard science fiction can sometimes make a few nods to reality, and often exists as a sort of "what if", exploring the potential consequences of some scientific or technological capability being realised, but again has very little basis in any known physics.
And I write this as someone who was caught hook, line, and sinker by the von Braun vision of spaceships to the planets, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others. As I've gotten older it's the psychological and social explorations which are more interesting: Le Guin, Stephenson (who tends to remain in near-Earth orbits), Bradbury, Butler, KSR, and the like.
Not that the fantasy isn't still attractive at times, and with the capabilities for visualising potential space-scapes and starscapes, the visual imagery really is stunning, as in 1RPM here.
(I'd watched before reading the description, and pretty much all the points Wernquist highlighted were ones I'd noted in the video itself.)
Transporters specifically were "invented" due to budget constraints on the original series. The original plan was for the crew to use a shuttlecraft whenever they visited a planet, but that proved too costly-- In the absence of CGI, that would have to be done with practical effects, i.e. a model shuttle filmed landing on model terrain. The transporter shots, on the other hand, were really just a fancy cross-fade.
After all, who’d design a fuel tank that explodes when it loses power and “antimatter containment” fails.
Though you might also consider that landing from the ISS, in low-Earth orbit, takes at least hours presently. This Dragon X capsule landing initiated at 11:05 GMT on 3 September 2023, and was scheduled to splash down at 04:17 GMT on the 4th, over 17 hours later.
<https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-6-astronauts-depart-iss-we...>
Descent phase for the Soyuz is at least three hours.
Launch-to-dock takes 6 hours to 3 days: <https://starlust.org/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-the-iss...>
With transporters, script writers can bounce characters between locations in seconds.
Regarding the FX challenges: It's common to re-use stock or standard footage for such segments, which already occurs with many spaceflight sequences in Star Trek and related series. With the ability to swap in different backgrounds (using mattes or rear projection in the pre-CGI era) this gains more flexibility. Establishing shots are the equivalent for contemporary or historical terrestrially-based plots, programmes, series, etc.
Viewing television productions with an eye to scene, set, and location cost helps one realise why so many scenes are shot in low-rent locations: car parks, warehouses, docks, drainage canals, desert, etc. (Also typically proximate to major film studio locations as with Hollywood or elsewhere.)
That's part of the sadness. But it is possible to spread throughout the solar system, and so it's a matter of scale after that.
At one time, nobody could leave the shoreline or they'd be lost forever. We have invented our way out of most of it.
Now, I enjoy thinking about how _different_ it would be from any journey we've taken. Something more like frozen embryos and robotic caregivers than a ship full of brave men. I mean, what would they eat? But it is not at all impossible, just unfathomable to us.
Not really. In this solar system, the off-Earth real estate is pretty bad. Worse than almost anywhere on Earth. Most of Canada and Alaska are vacant, after all, and those areas have air and water. Now that it looks like human population is peaking, there's not much pressure to inhabit low-value real estate.
Space travel belongs to machines. Small ones. Read Ashlee Vance's new book, "When the Heavens Went on Sale". All the action now is in small satellites and small to medium sized rockets. If and when Space-X gets its Starship working, it may turn out to be a white elephant, like the Space Shuttle. There just aren't that many big payloads worth launching. About once a year, somebody buys a Falcon Heavy launch, and once or twice a year. China launches a Long March 5.
So I think the demand is there & finally the costs are low enough to enable many missions that we just can't afford before (like all those lunar landers showing up recently) and I don't think this trend will slow down any time soon, thankfully.
Think of a Falcon 9 second stage but instead of payload, it had more tank, more fuel, a docking ring and a set of RCS thrusters. It gets to orbit, finds its ”passenger”, docks to it and pushes it into whatever trajectory it wants to go.
Add a truss with multiple docking rings to your payload and you can add multiple tugs to give a larger payload a bigger kick.
Even packing a few kick stages on top of F9s or F9 heavies would enable some interesting missions - as both trajectory can be higher energy and payload doesn’t need to be trimmed to the minimum viable mass.
As for shielding - there are ways around that. To shield from your own reactor you can use shadow shields & fit you ship quite comfortably into the protected cone it provides. If you are afraid of solar radiation, you can use that as well, just orient your ship accordingly when a solar flare is detected that could har you.
For fixed stations you either are on some body & have more or less unlimited amounts of "dirt" for shielding or for an orbital installation you should be able to accumulate enough material over time & it should not really matter as such stations would likely rarely change their orbit, if ever.
And lastly, you might be able to improve humans over time to better handle the space environment via new medical practices, new drugs or even various physical enhancements.
Modern people live in many places where their predecessors would not survive (or at least not with any reasonable quality of life) and this seems like another such challenge & stepping stone for humans.
The amount of shielding needed is squared every time you increase the amount of living space by the third power. All that means is that whenever people manage to live on space, they will live on something huge, not a station like the one on the movie. The most stupid way to do it is by creating small quarters on small stations.
Also, that's when near a star. If you are moving very fast away from one, your need for shielding will increase linearly every time you increase the living space by the third power. Making smaller ships even less viable, but large ones with plenty of space.
Spend 8 hours slowly digging an access tunnel on Mars, 8 hours in the fully immersive fantasy world of Unicornia as a level 85 troll-mage, 8 hours sleeping. Rinse, repeat.
Without the mental escape, there would be sadism and brutality.