Razako
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- Mar 17, 2006
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I'm not too worried about an asteroid impact wiping out our society. Within 50+ years we should easily have the tech to deflect civilization ending asteroids. I think the real 'timer' is related to the sun itself. As it fuses hydrogen into helium the core gets denser. This causes the core temperature to rise and the rate of fusion to increase. Scientists estimate that the sun will be 10% more luminous in 1 billion years.My thoughts on interstellar travel focus on one aspect: WE MUST DO IT IF WE ARE NOT GOING TO GO EXTINCT.
The earth, the sun, well, they will not last forever. Yes, we might have a few billion years before the sun converts to a red giant, etc...but we do not know how long before an asteroid analogous to what wiped out the dinosaurs, or larger, whacks us into oblivion in the interim.
That means that we KNOW, we, as a species, will disappear w/o a trace, unless we use the time we DO have, to figure out how to colonize other worlds.
So, yes, the logistics ARE daunting.
The TIME required to traverse the distances involved are mind boggling....and we ARE looking at the potential for the colonization of other worlds to be analogous to mankind's colonization of THIS world.
IE: Our ancestors came from Africa in waves, and, each wave had varied success, over millions of years....eventually inhabiting almost all parts of our planet.
So, just as some English settlers brought their families to the "New World", the earth's settlers will bring THEIR families to other "New Worlds".
The colonists will in turn send their descendants out to yet more new worlds...spreading out through the stars in waves of exploration and colonization...as our ancestor's descendants spread across this planet.
Some, as expected, will stay...and never leave the world they colonized...and, others, will leave on new adventures.
I don't think we will travel faster than light...and I don't think the energies required to warp space will be practical for propulsion...but, then again, perhaps new scientific breakthroughs will find dark matter fission or whatever stuff we can't imagine yet, to work.
With space expanding, and light itself..."tacking into it", the way a ship can sail faster than the wind propelling it, might work for example, etc...but, with what we know TODAY, light speed is the speed limit.
That means even telling those behind what you find gets difficult.
If it takes 100 years at light speed to GET somewhere and send back a message at lightspeed...no one back home gets the message until ~ 200 years after you left.
"You" in the above scenario means you, and your kids, and their kids, and their kids, et al, etc...and the people back home where you left from are also long gone, by the time your post card arrives at lightspeed.
After all that, its just logistics: Working out how to survive long space journeys, and the establishment of colonies, both physically and psychologically.
The "kids" who end up on these new planets would need to know how to colonize it and then leave it to colonize the next one eventually.
This means an ENORMOUS educational and research requirement for these colonists. Enough "Professors" and not too many "Gilligans"...or they are doomed.
Just as early settlers on earth had to be experts at woodcraft, textiles, hunting, and politics, etc, to survive, so too will these new colonists.
The difference is that the American colonists for example saw woods with some different trees and berries and wildlife, they did not see different gravity or atmosphere or lifeforms fundamentally different than English counterparts.
Skills that don't yet have names may be critical to survival on new worlds...and the ability to adapt to these differences will be critical. That means the ability to conduct research and fabrication and adjust behavior, etc, as needed.
It might TAKE millions of years to figure out HOW to do what is needed....we have SO MUCH yet to learn about fundamental physics for example, but, the longest journeys start with but a single step.
We best get steppin.
This Is What the End of All Time Looks Like | Smart News | Smithsonian
600 million years: Thanks to the sun’s increasing luminosity messing with the carbon cycle, all plants that utilize C3 photosynthesis (~99 percent of present-day species) will die. (Talk about putting climate change into perspective . . .)
If our civilization (assuming it's still around) isn't capable of interstellar travel 600 million years from now, I honestly think we don't deserve to go on. Within that amount of time we should have colonized much of the solar system and set up manufacturing bases in the asteroid belt. We'd be able to construct massive interstellar arc ships from the materials in the asteroids. These might take hundreds of years to reach the nearest stars, but they'd basically be built like cities with their own internal ecosystems and such.
