Posted on 01/13/2016 9:28:58 PM PST by LibWhacker
Baby steps, first a Moon Pie then a Mars bar then a Milky Way.
Discovery of some sort of warp in space-time "wormholes" or the like to jump the distances. Otherwise the relativistic time issues are going to create a bunch of totally disconnected nodes of humanity never to contact each other again. Once someone has left, that is it. No further contact, ever. in a useful manner. Radio conversations with multiyear pauses between replies do not work so well I should think. And that would be for close neighbors.
>What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?
A lot of Mars Bars. ;-)
IMHO, the whole enterprise is “beyond imagining”. The reality of these distances conquers any notion we may rationally maintain of traversing them. I may cite the Fermi paradox ... where is everybody?
“Forget arks. We’re going to have to do it with speedy starships, so that people can get there in a couple of years (ship’s time), or not at all. And before we do that, robotic scout vehicles are going to have to check the planet out first to determine its habitability. Condemning generations of unborn innocent people to spend their lives in some nightmare, totalitarian prison ark is inhumane, unethical in the extreme.”
An asteroid the size of Ceres has been calculated to provide as many hectares/acres of arable land inside the asteroid as all of the arable land on the Earth. Such a craft would be a mobile world rather than a restrictive prison. A cavern space wit a ceiling about 700 meters in height is sufficient to give the impression of a blue sky, while centrifugal force provides a substitute for Earth’s gravity necessary for good health.
Ummm, I think we have already colonized the Milky Way. It is called Earth.
Never happen, we will not go back to the moon, or ever try for Mars. After Jesus comes and kicks some evil bootay yes. Man by himself, we are too busy fighting each other and always will be.
It's only a matter of time until some rebel physicist breaks the universal speed limit of 186,000 mps, then all bets are off. The whole universe will open up for the humans of this little mud ball we call planet earth.
Lol!
There was a time when humans couldn't imagine distances we routinely travel today. The same will hold for the future, which is endless. We've literally got forever to figure this stuff out - and we will.
Well, we have to go back to the moon first. It’s been almost 50 years since we’ve been there. Currently, the U.S. can even refly John Glenn’s mission without paying for a Russian seat. :-(
Immortality.
Thanks to Obutthole, who had the gall to cite the U.S. space program in his rant last night.
After the first few colonies, we can automate the process.
Send a colony ship with self-replicating robots to do all the work of building habitats, stockpiling fuel and materials, making air and water, raising food, and then terraforming the new world.
Once everything is ready, take some embryos out of the freezer and raise the kids (a great clone army). Call home and report in, or lay low and try to hide from the government (no reason to think they will be any better then).
Then start building and launching an endless stream of further colony ships.
Repeat exponentially.
Let us not be unkind to creatures beyond our realm, and restrict human perfected suffering and misery to our own planet.
Excuse me, but I'm hard put to name what these unimaginable distances are that we routinely travel today, since we haven't left the earth since Apollo.
“where is everybody?”
The vast majority of extraterrestrial Life can be expected to be single cell like forms, which you cannot expect to be attempting to communicate. Where the more complex multicellular lifeforms exist and developed into sentient beings, there is still the problem with overlap in time and space. Humans have been aware of the radio spectrum for only an instant in time. There are innumerable reasons why the Universe is teeming with Life and we would not yet detect it.
I think the answer is suggested in the Bible. The answer is not to try and go faster than the speed of light, but to stay still and bring the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak.
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