Posted on 08/25/2010 9:06:20 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Humans have always been fascinated by the idea of space travel. Some even believe that colonizing new planets is man’s best hope for the future. The popular idea is that we’ll eventually need some fresh, unexploited new worlds to inhabit -a real-world Pandora.
In an earlier Galaxy post we wrote that Stephen Hawking, world-celebrated expert on the cosmological theories of gravity and black holes who held Issac Newton's Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University until his recent retirement, believes that traveling into space is the only way humans will be able to survive in the long-term, while warning about the potential threat of actual alien contact with Earth.
"Life on Earth," Hawking has said, "is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers ... I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space."
Another of his famous quotes reiterates his position that we need to get off the planet relatively soon. "I don't think the human race will survive the next 1,000 years unless we spread into space."
The problems with Hawking’s solution is that while it may save a “seed” of human life- a few lucky specimens- it won’t save Earth’s inhabitants. The majority of Earthlings would surely be left behind on a planet increasingly unfit for life.
In a futuristic mode similar to Hawking, both Steven Dick, chief NASA historian and Carnegie-Mellon robotics pundit, Hans Moravec, believe that human biological evolution is but a passing phase: the future of mankind will be as vastly evolved sentient machines capable of self-replicating and exploring the farthest reaches of the Universe programmed with instructions on how to recreate earth life and humans to target stars.
Dick believes that if there is a flaw in the logic of the Fermi Paradox, and extraterrestrials are a natural outcome of cosmic evolution, then cultural evolution may have resulted in a post-biological universe in which machines are the predominant intelligence.
Renowned science-fiction writer, Charlie Stross, argued last week in his High Frontier Redux blog that space colonization is not in our future, not because it's impossible, but because to do so effectively you need either outrageous amounts of cheap energy, highly efficient robot probes, or "a magic wand."
"I'm going to take it as read that the idea of space colonization isn't unfamiliar," Stross opens his post, "domed cities on Mars, orbiting cylindrical space habitats a la J. D. Bernal or Gerard K. O'Neill, that sort of thing. Generation ships that take hundreds of years to ferry colonists out to other star systems where — as we are now discovering — there are profusions of planets to explore."
"The obstacles facing us are immense distance and time -the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive."
Stross adds that "Planets that are already habitable insofar as they orbit inside the habitable zone of their star, possess free oxygen in their atmosphere, and have a mass, surface gravity and escape velocity that are not too forbidding, are likely to be somewhat rarer. (And if there is free oxygen in the atmosphere on a planet, that implies something else — the presence of pre-existing photosynthetic life, a carbon cycle, and a bunch of other stuff that could well unleash a big can of whoop-ass on an unprimed human immune system."
Stross sums up by saying that while "I won't rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic that, interstellar travel for human beings even in the comfort of our own Solar System is near-as-dammit a non-starter."
Stross's blog received over 450 comments as of this writing. The most prescient follows:
"First, Stross's analysis fails to take into account future civilization types; I get the sense that he takes a normative view of today's technological and economic realities and projects them into the future. This is surprising, not only because he's an outstanding science fiction visionary, but also because he's a transhumanist who has a very good grasp on what awaits humanity in the future. Specifically, he should be taking into account the possibility of post-Singularity, Drexlerian, Kardashev Type II civilizations. Essentially, we're talking about post-scarcity civilizations with access to molecular assembling nanotechnology, radically advanced materials, artificial superintelligence, and access to most of the energy available in the solar system.
"Stross also too easily dismisses how machine intelligences, uploaded entities and AGI will impact on how space could be colonized. He speculates about biological humans being sent from solar system to solar system, and complains of the psychological and social hardships that could be inflicted on an individual or crew. He even speculates about the presence of extraterrestrial pathogens that undoubtedly awaits our daring explorers. This is a highly unlikely scenario. Biological humans will have no role to play in space. Instead, this work will be done by robots and quite possibly cyborgs (which is how the term 'cyborg' came to exist in the first place)."
Send all the Liberals away, Earth will be saved.
/mark
IMO Hawkings is whacked out. Yes, if you absolutely deny God, then the fate of humanity rests solely with... humanity. If that were the case, then we would have all perished long ago.
Unfortunately, what Steven may not know, is that God gave man dominion over the earth and its creatures, but not over space. We may visit the moon and beyond but we’re not equipped by God to have fruitful lives in that environment.
Perhaps Hawkings would be more comfortable at zero gravity.
JMHO...
Read his book and some articles - he is smart but not overly so - a good polemicist and very glib writer - he certainly knows how to build a ‘castle’ on top of a mountain of ‘sandy’ assumptions.
Anyone who believes this is horribly naive or deceived. Mankind would just spread its nonsense more widely.
The only true hope for the future is Jesus Christ.
Why would we all have perished long ago, if the fate of humanity rested solely with...humanity? How do you know this?
While you can throw out the whole idea of global warming, or a genetically engineered virus wiping out humanity we’re quite vulnerable. A nice meteor strike, a big enough solar flare, or who knows what else could easily wipe out humanity. Or at best destroy civilization to the point where we’re hammering rubble together and worshiping sun gods.
We need to get off this miserable ball of mud and expand. Not large scale colonization for centuries or millenia yet but at least we can start mining asteroids and scraping helium 3 off the moon for fusion.
Why is the whole idea of space colonization so insane to most of you? This lump of rock can’t sustain humanity forever.
Colonizing another world sounds nice, although extremely difficult if even humanly possible, but a civilization cannot be made up of just a few people. Soon enough resources run out, and you need lots of people to create and process new resources.
There is no planet in our solar system that will currently support human life, and it would take a gargantuan effort if even possible to change the climate of another planet or moon to make human life suitable.
If the closest habitable planet in another solar system is 10 light years away it would take a space vehicle 10 years to reach it if we can travel that fast which is doubtful at best. If it was accomplished, it would take even longer to create a civilization assuming there wasn't one already and it didn't particularly like us being there.
Hawkings sees life a bit differently than most of us, being restrained in a wheel chair and depending on technology and other humans in order for him to survive. He also has a lot of time on his hands to think and ponder about things most of us don't have the time to even consider. So he is removed from the daily stuff we have to deal with, and this is the part that he doesn't apply to his thinking. What is practical for the average human.
I'm not much for Global Warming so I don't count that as our downfall, more likely a nuclear holocaust or some viral/bacteria thing will kill us off, but most likely not all of us. I'm betting that a few of us will survive to start again, and I think that has a higher probability of success than a few astronauts trying to create a new world somewhere else.
what is a post-singularity civilisation??
But I've never heard of a post-singularity civilization before. I always thought once your civilization hits the singularity point, there's no telling what will come after. Kind of like entering a black hole, which, of course, is where the term as applied to civilizations comes from.
‘If the closest habitable planet in another solar system is 10 light years away it would take a space vehicle 10 years to reach it if we can travel that fast which is doubtful at best. If it was accomplished, it would take even longer to create a civilization assuming there wasn’t one already and it didn’t particularly like us being there.’
Not only this, but you have the iron shackles of relativity to consider. If you travelled at 0.9 c, it would take you 11 years to get there ship time and 28 years earth time just to travel there.
So you are basically limited to 0.5c, which would take 22 years to travel there ship time, and 24 years earth time. Paradoxically, travelling faster actually takes you longer to travel.
I understand. In addition, communicating with earth (assuming anyone is left) will be a problem the further away the craft gets, and the older earthlings get while you (space traveller) don’t age nearly as fast.
Just ask Superman.
I think you've got your time dilation backwards.
At 0.9c, it seems rather self-evident that a ten-light-year trip would take roughly 11 years as viewed by the non-traveling observer.
To the traveler, the trip would seem to be just short of five years.
My apologies, I’ve gotten it reversed. My bad.
The point about 0.5c still stands.
As we have some scientists posting, here is a question I have:
Would it not be very dangerous for a ship to travel across space at such a high velocity because eventually the ship might hit a piece of space rock, and my thinking that the “velocity squared” portion of the kinetic energy equation would make the impact with such a space rock seem like a major explosion.
I would think that extremely fast travel through space is not realistic. If some future civilization accomplishes it, maybe the technology will be something entirely different (like creating a warp in space and zapping over there kind of like Battlestar Galactica).
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