Posted on 08/11/2017 10:15:15 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Yes, many people want to travel to other stars....Yet making preparations and doing judicious planning is the aim of this book. Wisely though, this book isn’t technical. It has no mention of specific impulse calculations or ion shields. Rather, this book takes a very liberal view of space travel and ponders deep questions such as whether the cosmos is an ecosystem.
Does our species have an appropriate culture for space travel? What exactly is a human? These concerns get raised in some very thought provoking sections. And given that the editor is an architect and one who apparently considers the emotional qualities of a structure as much as functional qualities, then this book’s presentation tends to be a little more on the philosophical side of things.
In particular, it looks at the benefits of living entities. For instance it notes that humans live in symbiotic relationships with a host of internal and external organisms. Most have already gone into space either within people who have traveled in space or possibly upon probes sent to other planets. So we aren’t the only species that’s traveled beyond Earth. But which beings are sufficient and necessary to keep humans alive for the generations needed to travel to another star? That question and many answers come up often.
As well, the essays get into bigger questions such as: What is life? Could the vessel be an organic construct? How might today’s humans evolve to tomorrow’s star travelers? Should humans travel in space and promote/continue panspermia? Yes, these questions and many more are raised in the essays collected within this book. And true to form for any book considering star travel, there aren’t any strict answers. There are however lots of ideas and concepts to better prepare humans.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Azimov had a short story regarding inter-steller travel.
(Patience, please as I am trying to recall details of a short-story read over 40-yrs ago).
Scenario:
Decades and decades ago, earth was facing certain death and ships of humans are launched towards a star system suitable for human life. But these ships are limited to “regular” sub-light speed.
What complicates is the fact that the large slow ships were limited in speed and subsequently generations of humans were born and died on those ships as they traveled between the stars.
But. . .just after the huge slow ships launched hyper-speed was solved and travel between the stars was regular and fast and no longer took generations, just a few months.
Question was, how to contact those old large ships and tell them they did not need huge ships capable of inter-steller travel.
Vast distances between the stars made finding the huge and old ships was darned near impossible. In fact, they had not established communication with the old huge ships.
How do you initiate contact and update them on advances that would have made their sacrifice (saying goodbye to family and friends) unnecessary.
Kinda sounds like what the Demoncrats did to the inner cities..
There’s an app for that ;-)
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