chat

So big. Literally the biggest thing.

Space travel is not guaranteed in the history of humanity. The capitalists had little interest in conquering the space. In fact, space programs would have been extensively delayed or even neglected had it not for the Russians and the Soviet space program.

Human space travel had its roots in the philosophy of Russian cosmism of the 19th century (e.g. N. Fyodorov), who believed that at the rate of technological advancements they had experienced at the turn of the century, human livelihoods would soon be improved to such an extent that Earth’s resources would be depleted and the planet itself would become over-populated.

Fyodorov’s disciple K. Tsiolkovsky envisioned that a solution to the problem would be for humanity to leave Earth and colonize the stars, and started to research the feasibility of space rockets that would allow humanity to travel through the stars.

Rather surprisingly, the roots of human space travel had little to do with colonization, imperialism or resource extraction.

An ardent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, Tsiolkovsky believed that the inevitability of socialism would soon make such advancements become reality, and if that were to be the case, humanity would really need to explore the outer spaces for new homes to live.

His work on rocketry would influence the pioneers of the 20th century space programs: Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth, the American and German pioneers in rocketry, respectively, as well as an entire generation of Soviet rocket scientists (S. Korolev and V. Glushko, for example). The Soviet space program would make Tsiokovsky’s dream become a reality.

Suffice to say, if it weren’t for the Sputnik moment in 1957, NASA would likely never be formed and space rocketry gained such momentum and received such generous funding by the government. Despite the fact that they had obtained the entire German V-2 rocket team, the development of space rocketry/intercontinental ballistic missiles wasn’t that much prioritized until the Soviets raced ahead of them.

I'm sure we'll send some kind of vehicle to other stars eventually, but it's a super super super super super difficult engineering task to a degree I don't think a lot of people properly appreciate. Whatever your vehicle is, like if we assume realistic travel speeds, it's going to spend decades, probably centuries or even millenia, out in the deep black with no power at all, getting hit with interstellar radiation, suffering all the ill effects of long term exposure to hard vacuum. And then, when it gets close enough to another star for it's solar cells to start working again, it has to wake up and unfold and come back to life starting from near-zero temperatures, and boot up, and enough hardware and storage has to survive for it to be functional and intelligent.

The vehicle, whatever form it takes, would need to survive the most extreme environments (other than, like, every environment on earth) for a very very very long time, and still be able to wake up and perform very complex, energy intensive functions when it arrived.

I think, if we can fix some of the shit going on right now, we will probably try. I want to meet the neighbors, even if "meet" means sending letters back and forth across hundreds of light years. *

In the future their won’t be any flags.

You are correct, but the expansion of the universe is relative to intergalactic space, not interstellar. Our galaxy isn't flying apart, so it will be explorable with currently theorized faster than light speed drive systems. There's more than enough to explore in our galaxy as it is, so it will have to do when and if we ever develop an FTL drive. But traveling to another galaxy is an entirely different feet because of the expansion of the universe. You may wonder why, when it is just a distance that needs to be covered, all you should need is enough fuel and supplies... But you would also need to accelerate to many magnitudes of the speed of light in order to "catch" the galaxy you want to travel to. This is because galaxies are accelerating exponentially away from each other. An easy way to visualize it is to remember that the universe is expanding out from a central point - so take a balloon and draw two dots on it, then begin to inflate; after one breath they spread apart, after the second breath they've spread appart at a faster rate, and after the next the rate of spread continues to increase and so on. The points are spreading away from the center at the same rate, but the distance from each other is ever increasing. Therefore, their will be a day where we can no longer see any other galaxies again, because the speed of the spread will far exceed the speed of light and continue to increase for all eternity (we presume).

Except for the Andromeda galaxy, that one's headed right for us and the two are going to collide in a few billion years... Which will probably pose a major threat to all life and indeed earth itself... Maybe we should start planning to try to get to another galaxy. 🤔

Why? Wrap some copper around a magnet, bam, hydropower. What's hard about that? I don't think the math for nuclear chemistry requires burning a lot of coal, first.

I think there is a convincing argument to be made that one day we will create an army of self-replicating battle bots that will be able to do just that.

We could destroy the planet with grey goo by releasing tiny little nanomachines to clean up an oil spill, and even the universe if we released drones to harvest asteroids and use the raw materials to replicate themselves. In the event it all goes OK though, they could be directed to assemble something like a Dyson Sphere, and an AI could oversee the project to maintain order as a million things would inevitably fail on such a large scale. Not sure why we would want to do it at all, but an AI-robot workforce feels a lot more realistic than organising millions of humans.

But yeah though you try to do something like this you are for sure going to bump into the laws of physics at some point.

And, like you said, maybe they have a very different mentality or philosophy of life, and going out isn't a priority or isn't of interest.

this is often used to explain why starfleet is full of humans.

Right, and then we need the tech for communication since I'd imagine that's how it'd go, first tech traded is to better understand each other in some way.

I was thinking something anatomically limiting the species so they can't handle the g forces of liftoff for whatever reason, or they're super short lived, so even a really short trip within their system would take generations .

Dyson swarms, having a bunch of power collectors that are really really big, but not "We converted all of Jupiter's mass in to super-concrete" big, make a lot more sense. Like, small dyson swarms. really small dyson swarms.

Build a dyson sphere around the planet except it projects light instead of emitting it. Powered with laser.

I think I remember that. Like anti-gravity and FTL were trivially easy with early industrial revolution technology, Humanity just happened to never discover that, so an alien empire was flying around in wooden sailing ships and tried to invade us and were like "Wait what the fuck is a jet fighter oh no!"

How so?