Ask HN: Stark Trek - How far are we? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Stark Trek - How far are we?

37 pointskyro55 comments

Seeing Star Trek last night (a great movie, btw), I couldn't help but genuinely feel depressed that I wasn't born 500 years from now.

For you physicists, and those knowledgeable about this sort of space development, how far do you estimate we are from becoming a universe like that of Star Trek? Sure, it's just a movie, and apologies if this may come across as a silly post, but I've always been pretty amazed at the thought of a space world.

I'm not a physicist by any means, or a person who has any significant grasp on physics theory, but hopefully this post will spark some interesting and educational (for me) discussion about physics, the future of space development, and how far we are from making significant steps towards space societies.

EDIT - Just to clarify, I'm speaking more to the technological side of achieving such societies, and less about the social dynamics, etc.

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The biggest inhibitor I think would be the lack of economical justifications for it. We don't need the space (or rather, what we would like is the space to be close. Take a plane trip across the U.S. and you'll find a whole lot of empty), and our natural resources will last us for the foreseeable future.

What benefits are there? What we would need is a space 'gold rush' if we wanted to realistically expect any sort of real progress in that direction. Maybe we'll discover that there's oil (for example) on Mars. Maybe we'll see a lot more space speculators.

That's it for financial issues. Of course finances will drive the technology. The most prominent pieces of technology we're missing are faster than light (or warp) engines, and artificial gravity. Warp would let us travel very far very efficiently, and artificial gravity would allow humans to spend extended periods of time in space. A couple other things we're missing are materials to build such starships (not sure if we have anything that would hold such large ships together in space), replicator and transporter technology, phasers, shields/forcefields, and last but not least, proton torpedoes. If anyone knows of technology listed above that exists today, please let me know.

warp engines: not needed for colonization. Materials: plentiful, no shortage. Replicators: missing, no obvious food alternative around. Transporter Tech: unneeded. Phasers: unneeded. Shields: unneeded. Photon (or proton) torpedoes: unneeded.

All we really need is a way to be confident that if we send some people out, they will be good for 1000 years. That means food and environment, not forcefields and transporters. Look into the experiments where they tried to isolate humans from the earth environment by sealing them in a airtight greenhouse. (hint: the ants started dieing within a month)

Well, if I understand correctly, 99% of the cost of space travel is getting out of Earth's gravity well.

Once you're up there, moving around is pretty easy.

So, space elevators that could bring down surface-to-orbit costs would probably drive a huge boom in space exploration.

No idea how soon we'll have those though.

That depends on what you mean by space. LEO to Geosynchronous orbit is still a lot more than 1% of energy to orbit.

Anyway, orbit is only 17,000 MPH which is way to slow to go travel to the next star. Traveling at at 17,000 mph would take about 40,000 years to travel one light year. The good news is you slowly accelerate in space over a long time, so smaller high efficiency engines would work just fine. The bad news is the closet star is over 4 light years from earth.

So getting something the size of the space shuttle to the next star in 1,000 years would take 2x (168^2) as much energy as it takes to get to LEO. ~56,500 * 2.2 * 10^12J = ~10^17 jules for comparison that's ~28 thousand megawatt hours.

We're still trying to get back to the moon, haven't built a nuclear power plant in decades (US) and our bodies fall apart in zero G.

I doubt we'll be touring other planets in even the next 100 years.

And yet we went from the first powered flight to landing on the moon in 66 years.

Its 106 yrs (nearly) now since the wright brothers first took to the air and barely 40 since Apollo 11 touched down. So I'd suggest that 100 years is an age to fix those problems in :)

The issue is, I think, that we lost interest in the moon and stars. The space race was driven by politics and so we got there by sheer force. Then it all slackened off again. But I think the next generation will have grown up with enough modern Sci-Fi to think "I wonder if...." and hunger for the sky :)

If star trek taught us anything it's that we're a plucky race that can do almost anything (provided we overcome our violent history).

But I'm judging the next 100 years on the past 20. We did squat compared to what we're potentially capable of. NASA lost about 50% of it's unmanned Mars missions. What a joke.

But we did the internet. Personally I think it's an accident of human history that space exploration came before the information age. It would have gone the other way if not for the Cold War.

The internet is mainly a set of protocols and business rules humans created. Space exploration has to tackle rules the universe created. Much different story.

If a set of rules is created (or emerges for you Hayekians) whereby there is significant incentive for the creation of increments contributing to overall advancement, we will advance in space exploration.

The cold war was such system. The next one will (hopefully) be more peaceful & market driven. Space flights for tourism provide a few of these increment. Asteroid-mining might be another. Military probably has a few more to play.

None of these have been paying much dividends in the last 30-40 years.

The of protocols and business rules humans create may be capitalism (or some sort of cousin). The rules the universe created need to be tackled no matter what we do.

This is not a joke, it is kind of by design. Of course when you pursue "smaller, faster cheaper" you are going to sacrifice fault tolerance and certainty of design. The tax payers are still likely ahead launching 2x as many of these missions than half as many of the older technique. Now, the effect that failed missions have on the morale and career development of the next wave of PhD candidates and grad students is one that interests me greatly.

I say this in the most serious possible way. I hope in the next twenty or thirty years Russia or China builds a base on the moon and puts weapons on it. I'm not sure how useful weapons on the moon would be tactically, but at least a refueling/rearm station. You're right, getting to the moon was political. Sadly, the only way I can see to make it political again is the weaponization of space. Having another world power do this would jump start our space program in a drastic way.

EDIT: I apologize for the American bias in my post. When I say "our" I am referring to NASA. I think collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and/or the Russian Federal Space Agency would be good to some extent. Of course, this type of collaboration would probably prevent space exploration from becoming a political issue. And for reasons previously described, eliminating the politics from space exploration is probably a bad idea.

I overheard a coworker of mine asserting "there is no strategic value to the moon". And I think he's right. There's no practical reason to put weapons on the moon, they work a lot better on the earth and with the cost of putting them on the moon you could just build more weapons.

But at the other hand, strategic value may not mean just put weapons on moon. What if it is easier/cheaper to mine rare earth elements in Moon than earth then for Russian and China to dig rocks there and throw refined metal back to earth like meteors will be their strategic advantage.

and since working conditions will be extremely hazardous, maybe we would send convicts and otherwise "unwanted" citizens to the mines.

we would of course need to send some form of authority, like a warden, just to keep the convicts (loonies!) under control.

it would also be necessary to set them up with an advanced computer system to handle all colony operations, from telephone switching to ballistics calculations for the throws.

all and all, i don't see how this could go wrong.

what I thought is to have a big army of robots. But if you like to send convicts...

We can plan this all out in a novel called The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Where do you work?? I would love working in a place where I overhear things like that.

Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Pullman WA. It's got its pluses and minuses like anywhere else.

We already have all of the technology we need for a spacefaring society, and probably have had it for some decades. Our economy is stuck in a local maximum, where there is no short-term economic benefit to going there.

Read Zubrin's _Entering Space_ for details.

http://www.amazon.com/Entering-Space-Creating-Spacefaring-Ci...

For example, the original Orion project had a means of traveling to Saturn in a year. (Using nuclear bombs to power a spacecraft.)

The various studies on space colonization are also interesting. T.A. Heppenheimer summarizes some of them (in particular, the famous Stanford Summer Study) in his book "Colonies in Space."

Interstellar travel is another thing entirely, though.

The future is weird. Asking how many discoveries away from reaching Star Trek is like asking how many Ivy League degrees you need before you turn into Obama.

The whole space opera thing is fairly unlikely. It's more likely that the world we'll be able to simulate in our own solar system will be much more interesting than any world we'd be able to visit outside of it.

The future depends on what you extrapolate; Star Trek goes from trains to planes to space; right now, lots of interesting fiction goes from PCs to ubiquitous computing to uploads. Whatever's next is unlikely to resemble any of that in any way.

"It's more likely that the world we'll be able to simulate in our own solar system will be much more interesting than any world we'd be able to visit outside of it."

Good point, I had never thought of it like that.

We need to solve the problem of producing energy. I think that human progress, even in the short term, depends entirely upon "breaking" the first law of thermodynamics. Clearly, no one will successfully create energy out of nothing, but I hope that physics will one day invent a way to cheaply and cleanly tap into energy sources which produce a huge yield. We have nuclear reactors today, but they are enormously large, expensive, and difficult to maintain. The day that you can buy a car --- or a wristwatch --- powered by atomic energy, you can say that the future arrived.

This energy source does not have to be atomic, except we don't know of a fuel more densely packed with energy than atoms. E = mc^2 and all that. In most science fiction, this problem has been solved using mumbo-jumbo technology, such as matter-antimatter reactors. Whatever; maybe someone will one day think of a way to make that work. Solving the energy problem means that the vast amount of effort currently directed at, e.g., oil production, stable trade with parts of the world which produce and sell hydrocarbon fuels, and climate maintenance can free up to really push things forward.

Just think of the rockets we could build if they didn't need to use awful rocket propellants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_propellant) or nuclear explosions for fuel. And I'll try to make sure the controlling software for those rockets uses Lisp. :)

> I couldn't help but genuinely feel depressed that I wasn't born 500 years from now.

The thing is - we have no way of knowing what life in the future will be like. There might not be anything we recognize as human life there in the first place.

I'm continuously amazed by the here and now. I've been all around the world. I have friends all over this planet. I communicate with people all over the world via the net every single day. And my friends? Ha! They could be anywhere and all I have to do is pick up my cell phone and call them. ('Uh, can I call you back, I'm in Singapore for some work thing and it's 4 am here..').

I love speculative sci-fi, but not to the extent that I want to not be born in this age. Put things into perspective if not living in the super-happy-fun sci-fi future gets you depressed.

Agreed. I'm happy to live in this future where we can at least play around with this caliber of imagination.

I'm not cut out for farming or the floppy wigs of the past.

Space exploration as portrayed in "Accelerando" by Charles Stross, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(novel), seems far more practical than portrayed in Star Trek. In Accelerando interstellar spaceships are the size of beer cans and full of electronics.

I also found Star Trek to be disappointing in its depiction of technological change. It is, at base, little different than all the other sci-fi depictions of housewives in space and Colossal-sized vacuum tube intelligences.

It's a common bias to overestimate technological and societal change in the short term, and underestimate them in the long term. Think of those McCarthy-era AI guys promising GAI in a decade: I bet you $100 that their vision for the next 4 decades was surprisingly conservative and unimaginative. The same men who imagined GAI in their lifetimes were most likely the same men who could not imagine the full societal implications of civil rights legislation.

I should expect the world in 500 years to be as unimaginable, complex, and alien as the world now is to someone from the 16th century. I hate to make an argument from fictional evidence, but there is no reason at all to prefer a Rodenberry future as opposed to an Egan future. The former is refuted by witnessing how pervasive and tempting it is to anchor future change on the present.

If Charlemagne and Shakespeare could understand the future, it's a bad indication for how realistic you are being.

you never know, the thing with physics, is that a single discovery can turn everything upside down and lead to millions of inventions

aye, waits for the LHC to come back online

My lucky lotto numbers are 1,11,17,21,44,69

That doesn't look that lucky, I've never seen a lotto drawing that had 1 in it

Interesting question. In the developed world, the last three decades seem to have only entrenched class power and moved us further from a post-monetary society; however there are many encouraging developments in the periphery that could bear much fruit over the next quarter century. History, as always, will be written from the future.

You need to take Star Trek and the reality it posits within the context of its time. Star Trek was initially pitched as "Wagon Train to the stars"; think back to the westerns of the 50s/60s and you will see a lot of similarities in narrative structure as well as the idea of roving "law enforcement" wandering around a lawless frontier dispensing "justice." The basic problem is that if technology progresses along a line similar to what the TV shows and movies suggest then there is no way that society will remain in a late-20th century stasis to match the shows/movies.

There is some good "hard" sci-fi out there that you should read if you want some interesting suggestions regarding "what will life look like in X years" and I will let others jump in with some of their favorites (e.g. Vinge, Bear, Stross, etc)

What are the market forces driving deeper space exploration? There aren't any I can think of except recreation and science experiments.

What's hot right now in aeronautics seems to be better communication and navigation satellites. Maybe these will push the boundaries of space technology?

Asteroids. No corporation driven by quarterly returns will spring for that, but there is an enormous amount of raw material there. If we had a very cheap source of propulsive energy, it might be profitable to transport it back.

I think physics is not the only answer to this. The following technologies and organization maybe more useful in certain case.

1. The capability to have all my DNA sequences stored.

2. The capability to create an organism that has exact DNA sequence as me.

3. The capability to have all my memory inside my brain read out.

4. The capability to restored all my memory to the organism created in step 2.

5. The capability to remove aging effect on my brain and body.

6. An organization that is willing to keep the technology and data above passed down by time without errors and is willing to teach the resurrected me what the new world is and help me to fit in without questions and still grant me freedom or treat me as a 2nd class citizen.

If there exists such technologies and organizations, we are all endowed with eternal life and are capable of seeing all new possible technologies in Star Trek to show up...

A solution to (trans)personal space exploration might be synaptic level brain imaging with blue brain -simulation and becoming V-ger yourself. But what comes to capability of seeing all the possible new Star Trek technologies, the only good solution is eternal life as movie audience. ;)

There is a very interesting book Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku (http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Impossible-Scientific-Explorat...). It is exactly about those questions.

I've always been pretty amazed at the thought of a space world.

Great! 'cos you're living on one :)

Very far. We can't travel faster than light and at the moment not even close to it. We have vague ideas that warp drives might be possible, but generating, containing and manipulating enough energy to work in some of the suggestions is also currently unthinkable. We're at the stage of needing multiple unpredictable breakthroughs to get anywhere close, and that leaves travel to the nearest extra-solar anything taking many years.

Also, the Star Trek technology is very inconsistent, I don't think we are going that way. I haven't seen the new film (yet) but from the TV series, there are numerous questions. How come nobody else ever has Geordie-style visors as an option? Or any kind of optical or neural enhancement or display? Or any kind of body armour?

Why is there no nanotechnology anywhere except when the Borg turn up? Why isn't there an anti-Borg good cyborg species? They destroy entire star ships so frequently and inconsequentially that they must have tremendous manufacturing capability, but wouldn't that have more ramifications somehow? How come Picard has a replacement heart and Geordi a brain-connected replacement vision, and everyone can be rebuilt by the teleporter, but they all have wrinkles and age and die? Why don't they throw half the Enterprise away and replace it with a much smaller holodeck with simulated rooms? Why does nobody ever ask the computer anything interesting? Why can't Data improve himself or replicate himself? Or merge with the ship's computer? Why has nobody built a machine to pick up what Deanna Troi's empathic sense does and done away with the whole "Computer, where is x?" "x's badge fell off so I can't find them" thing?

Why is nobody sitting at home on Earth and using the magical instantaneous subspace communication to explore with unmanned spacecraft?

So, yeah - space: big, cold, empty. planet bankruptingly expensive.

"Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence." -- Leonard "Bones" McCoy, 2009

I think the main problem with the Star Trek scenario is "faster than light travel". Of course, traveling faster than light really isn't possible however most of the alternate mechanisms proposed, e.g. worm holes, etc. don't seem that feasible either.

I think more realistic is that man gets a toehold on space by being able to harness resources from other planets / asteroids. If people can become self-sufficient in space, perhaps generation after generation, we can creep out further into space.

But it takes a big initial commitment and it's unlikely we'll ever resolve all the problems on earth so I'm not sure how much of a priority it will be.

You're not trying to travel faster than light, you're tying to bend space.

To understand, take a piece of paper and imagine you're on one end of it trying to get across. Instead of traveling the length of the paper just fold it in half and jump to the other side.

I hated this example of folding space. This example just shows us how confused we are about "folding".

When you folding a paper. Your reference frame is outside that piece of paper. You also possess energy supply outside the paper to exert the deformation of the material on the paper. But you did not posses the energy to fold the "space" around that paper.

In fact, even you fold it, you and that piece of paper are still in the same 4-d space time. Unless you are the lucky intelligent beings that are living on that piece of paper such as a colony of bacteria. Now it is the time to jump to the other side the paper!

So I guess the first step to construct a warp drive is to figure out questions:

1. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper evoke help from extra dimensional source and energy from it?"

2. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper control this mechanism?"

3. "Can the above mechanism to be achieved without ruining basic physics laws such as law of matter energy conservation, laws of thermodynamics in marcophysics scale".

As long as we figure the possibility for those questions in physics, then we will know can we travel like Star Trek.

Don't get me wrong. I love Star Trek. And my undergraduate major was physics. But I know very few general relativity theory and problems. What I just said is just consider what is necessary if we want to fold the space time.

I'm happy you edited your reply to try and clarify your point but you're still over complicating an attempt at a simple explanation.

My original point was that going faster than light in a straight line isn't the goal. The goal is to bend/fold/warp space around you and get to another physical point is space before light does.

Edit: I'm saying bending space, which happens all around us, is more likely a scenario than traveling faster than light. Is this statement wrong?

Yes, but eugenejen's point is that you're vastly oversimplifying a complicated concept. It's easy to use paper as a metaphor for our universe, but unless you've got any practical ideas for how we, as members of it, can use technology to accomplish this bending, it's not really very useful.

In fact, we are never able to bend the space and time to perceivale level so far. To bend the space and time we need to create a large gravitational field.

We bend the material, but we did not bend the space.

The problem with this approach is that it looks like anytime you bend space like that, you create a vacuum-energy resonance that destroys the space-time structure you just created. I'm not a physicist and I've never seen anyone state this as a universal rule, but it has come up in the recent analysis of the warp drive (won't try to spell that A-guy's name), in Hawking's analysis of what would happen if we tried to drap a wormhole around such that we can use it to travel FTL, and a couple of other things I've seen too.

I always find it amusing when people look at these hypothetical designs and say "Hey, it must be possible!" Because what I see is a universe that absolutely hates FTL and will destroy anything that looks like it might achieve it with extreme prejudice, yanking the space-time rug out from underneath your atomic feet.

I'd say about 20-30 years away: http://markii.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/kurzweils-singularity...

Our society isn't nearly as hierarchical, militaristic, conformist and fascist as that depicted in Star Trek but I could see us there in a few hundred years.

we barely know enough about what's on this planet and how it works let alone go anywhere else. 500 years might not be enough.

> I couldn't help but genuinely feel depressed that I wasn't born 500 years from now.

What does it mean to say you wish you were born 500 years from now?

Explain: what would have to happen for that to be so?

Maybe we were all born 500 years later, only it was 2009 instead of 1509.

Be happy you weren't born 500 ago instead!

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