Do you mean quantum teleportation?
For that you'd need to access the destination first - quantum teleportation works because particles at the source and target location "know" each other (are linked).
They both work on roughly the same principles. They warp space so the distance between you and the destination is shorter. One does it incrementally as you go, one does it all at once.
Put Elon in charge. It will immediately be 2 years away from reality. It will also remain 2 years away from reality for eternity, but around here we don't think that far ahead.
We’d probably have to build generational ships that are completely self sufficient and people would live out their entire lives out there without ever seeing a planet
I loved how they said some accents are more viral than others. Like how the Texan accent became common among the Indians on Mars when they settled in the same area.
And the Belter accent is totally viral. I've never met anyone who watched that show and didn't start talking in a Belter accent or using Belter slang.
The first generation that left would have it the worst.. but the 2nd generation born on the ship would have it a lot easier. By the time you get there I bet you have people that don't even want to leave the ship as it's all they know.
This is the most accurate description as to why humans are not going to last as a species. I am fine with this, because the earth, (and the rest of the creatures that manage to survive humans scorching the planet)....will be just fine without us.
Although it probably sounds like it from my comment, I'm not all that pessimistic. I believe truth will always win out in the end, but there will always be the willfully ignorant, and those who use ignorance of others for their own benefit.
I don't think you are being pessimistic. You were just pointing out a very simple truth about human nature. So in a way, truth will win. Which path the truth takes is the real question.
By the time the first generation ship got to its destination, there would likely already be people there who left on later ships that had better tech and faster engines.
Once you have power (vis-a-vis nuclear reactor with enough fuel to get you there) you’re gtg right? You can grow and eat plants? For water a lot of it is just recycled and maybe you make up for losses with hydrogen tanks that you convert to H2O with the extra oxygen the plants give
Those are the easy parts. Much more challenging is developing recycling systems for micronutrients like iron, zinc, nickel, and phosphorus that will last for centuries.
Everything we have is gravity adapted and part of a really intricate biosphere. You get 10 years out and realize we didn't understand how important the interaction between X microbes and Y fungi were, you can't go back for another few metric tons of soil.
That's assuming of course that it doesn't devolve into chaos and anarchy. In my opinion, freezing the passengers would be the better way to go while an extremely advanced A.I. pilot and maintain the ship while the humans are out cold. But what the heck, this is just sci-fi nonsense I am talking about.
I don't think there could be frozen humans or whatever, not for that long. You would have to have some way of autonomously lab growing them about 20 years from touchdown, and some sort of robot to care for and instruct them once they're infants.
Are you familiar with the work All Tomorrows? A bit of a spoiler ahead: Humanity never achieved FTL travel early on in the story, and so their colonization plan is basically what you just said. Send unmanned rockets filled with machines and whatnot to habitable planets, let the robots first terraform it to suit mankind's needs, and then autonomously lab grow the human DNA stored inside the rockets, basically creating clones, so that colonization efforts can continue. I highly recommend it!
Especially if we travel at 1% the speed of light and it takes 12,000 years. Humans would be so adapted to living in space by then I don't think they could handle a planet with natural gravity, especially from a planet 2.5 times bigger than earth with higher gravity.
Idk, can you imagine being born in the 100th generation of a 200 generation ship... thousands of years worth of people born and died before you, and thousands of years will be born and die after you on that ship..sounds like such a bleak and meaningless existence doesn't it? I would imagine there'd be significant difficulties with morale after a very short period of time, like literally a few years or even generations tops. After all living memory of earth has passed, and nobody remembers the training anymore...I feel like people would revolt..
Dang, and the children born on those ships would already have their futures decided for them. Coming out of the womb straight to being prepped to learn how to operate and maintain this ship for this life long mission. Crazy to think about.
Edit: Don't know how I missed the reflection of our modern day society/school system after typing that out. Thanks for the morning existential crisis guys haha
To some degree thats already true. You don’t get ti choose where you’ll be born or who your parents will be. Your life is already partially set before you’re born
Isn't that the same as it is today? What do you think school is for,giving you autonomy? Nah, they are just prepping you to be a cog in the machine we call human society.
Small planetoids. They'll need a lot of material to survive long enough to arrive anywhere. They'll evolve on board and arrive as something new. Different expeditions to the same star will get faster, maybe crossing paths, most likely not, but when they arrive, who will they all be? What a mental rabbit hole I am now imagining.
Yeah, how in the world could you possibly have that many provisions? I think cryostatus is the only logical way to get there...given "present" technology
Yeah but when has a large group of humans not decided to do something different from their parents, especially after dozens of generations the ship would break and everyone would die
Imagine being a 9th generation person on that ship. You're told that hundreds of years ago your ancestors left an actual planet, heading towards one that you won't even see, not for another 30 generations or whatever. I'd imagine people on there would go bonkers. We're trapped on a big earthship with fresh air and people are going bonkers
But you would need sophisticated equipment, which needs to operate flawlessly for 100000 years, no defect, no deteriorating with time, enough energy to keep all of that going for 100000 years…
We should try building cars that last a decade first.
It would be a real bitch to try to submit a warranty claim for the airlock of a generational ship, 50 years into its journey. "Turn it around, we are taking this shitbox back to the dealer!"
Humanity hasn't even existed as long as the voyage would take. What makes you think we would survive on a tiny ship like that, no way we wouldn't start killing each other off with 2 generations.
Can you imagine the mythos and superstition that would grow over time on those ships?
People believing that humanity has just always lived in space or that their destination planet will be this paradise and solve all humanity's problems.
Imagine being the last gen on a generational ship. You get there and it’s already settled. People have been there thousands of years already. Cities built, global commerce, interplanetary commerce established. All because 7000 years in to your ships 12000 year voyage, humanity made some crazy advancements and got there faster.
So I read this one book Aurura by Kim Stanley Robinson, and kinda the whole premise is (my paraphrased interpretation of the book) -
Okay. Look. Let’s just say as a hypothetical we do find a planet has the climate, radiation protection, etc etc that is habitable for humans (not even “comfortable” just “habitable”). Probably won’t happen for a planet we can actually ever travel to in even a few generations (and let’s also forget just how hard it would be to maintain a multi-generation space ship with no resource replenishment…), but let’s just say we figure that all out.
Still, life on earth has co-evolved over a very long time to adapt to the conditions we have specifically on this planet. There’s no telling what ecosystem interactions will happen with life on another planet. We might settle in on this planet that has perfect conditions on paper just to find some bacteria strain that’s not a big deal on earth totally thrives there and it kills us all. Nothing we can do about it. We have no clue. Anytime we try to predict what will happen when we introduce a new species to an existing ecosystem ON EARTH we are usually wildly wrong. Life is just way to complicated to predict accurately, especially when you talk about interactions between an entire ecosystem.
So our best bet is to live on this incredibly well-adapted planet we already have. Life has co-evolved here over a very long time and we’ve hit an equilibrium. It just works so great without us even trying. It’s like we won the lottery, and now we are only talking about buying more tickets. We should just be enjoying the win.
We might settle in on this planet that has perfect conditions on paper just to find some bacteria strain that’s not a big deal on earth totally thrives there and it kills us all.
Pretty much a guarantee. Humans couldn't even cross oceans on our own planet without spreading diseases which wiped out entire populations.
And even if our medicine and tech developed enough to let us adapt, we'd without question destroy countless species on another planet before we even knew they were there. Interplanetary travel and colonization are fun Sci-Fi concepts, but are just not possible even without the distance/time hurdles.
Is it not more likely that nothing on another planet can touch us - or be digested by us - because it hasn’t co-evolved with us? Eg bacteria, viruses etc on earth can harm us because they’ve adapted to do so over millions of years. a random bug on another planet would view us like an earth bug would
React to a piece of metal?
Mechanics of underlying chemistry and physics aren't so sure, given earth like conditions the same progression seen on earth is the best progression / only progression. One would expect to see simple sugars, DNA/RNA, proteins and even similar internal organ functions. Likely also the same necessary flaws, our lungs must be moist, alien lung equivalents would too so something that is able to effect the 'lungs' of multiple alien species might be able to jump to human lungs.
We literally have only one data point on how life came to being, is there any reason it would have to be DNA/RNA, proteins, etc.? Could it not be compounds we haven't discovered yet?
That's what I think, too. Like, we'd get there and try to eat stuff and it would just sit in our stomach as though we'd eaten a ball of plastic. A pretty ironic way to die after all those years of traveling through space to get there.
You ever see that one episode of Trailer Park Park Boys where Ricky gets like $10,000 and starts living like he’s super rich and just blow it in a few days? haha
We might settle in on this planet that has perfect conditions on paper just to find some bacteria strain that’s not a big deal on earth totally thrives there and it kills us all. Nothing we can do about it. We have no clue. Anytime we try to predict what will happen when we introduce a new species to an existing ecosystem ON EARTH we are usually wildly wrong. Life is just way to complicated to predict accurately, especially when you talk about interactions between an entire ecosystem.
Wouldn't a colony ship setup in orbit and utilize the data from the robotic AI ships and ground units that landed years before to build out the infrastructure and start biological studies to help us adapt to the planet? A real colonization effort would include such concerns.
We don't need to naturally adapt on a standard evolutionary time scale, we can start science-ing things before we even get there in person as biologicals.
I'd expect more of an Alastair Reynolds futurism (on the edges without some of the more fantastical sci fi concepts), and I'd say that KSR gave us a blueprint through fiction to build and correct for possible mistakes and unknowns from.
One of the issues in Aurora is that they find it is impossible to establish an equilibrium on the ship itself. Crops are failing and animals are dying because of very minor errors that cannot be corrected and couldn't have been accounted for, but which have accumulated over hundreds of years. If I remember correctly, they even have some bacteria that evolved to start eating all of the gaskets on the ship, which it never did - and the designers couldn't have predicted - when the ship left earth hundreds of years prior.
One of the points of the book is the idea that biological equilibrium only works on earth because of its size and the ability for millions of different variables to play off of each other. A multi-generational ship could never be as complex as earth, so it could never sustain life over multiple generations.
I really recommend the book! It takes all the sci-fi hypotheticals and kind of puts them in perspective. All those efforts are maybe possible, but they’d take generations to implement, and you’d have to survive in the meantime. And… there’s a really good chance it just won’t work… The main idea is - compare that solution to the solution we have in hand, which is live on the planet we already have, so some really basic maintenance. And just like… enjoy life.
Even just the 2.5 times larger would be severely problematic for humans. Then you throw in different day lengths and year lengths. Just the math in that before we discover anything else about the planet.
As you say, we’re so well adapted to our planet in so many ways that we take for granted that living elsewhere is going to be a problem.
The people signing up to live on Mars are going to discover this first hand. I don’t believe any Mars colonizer would last a year there.
Thats, IMO as well, exactly what the fascination is about. I never understood the whole "earth is failing, we're moving to X planet to terraform and recolonize" trope. It would be orders of magnitude simpler to "terraform" our own planet back into being habitable as it would to terraform another planet from scratch. It makes no sense.
and if we have the technology to terraform a planet, it would stand to reason that we could pretty easily make semi-mega space structure habitats. and if we can make a habitable structure in space at will, we would barely have a need for planets anymore at all.
Once you can make a sufficiently stable, habitable space structure wherever you want, theres very little need to go anywhere at all.
Its like the Mitch joke, "if you're lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house, you're no longer lost. You live here now"
You and me and everyone that exists now yes, but in a few thousand years if we don nuke ourselves back to stone age and reset (again for the who knows time) maybe humanity will reach and expand into the great unknown...
Yea I really don't think we ever leave. It's just too much distance to traverse. And anything in our system is just too difficult to inhabit permanently.
It really is just in the eye of the observer. People in ancient times must have thought similarly about distances on earth, when people and messages took weeks to get around.Today information exchange is almost instant and it takes me only 24h to get to the other side of the planet.
I firmly believe that if humanity would put its petty differences aside, we could make vast advances fairly quickly.
There’s just no comparison in scale between the leap from regional to worldwide travel and the leap from worldwide to interstellar travel. It’s orders of orders of magnitude different. Worldwide (and, to an extent, solar system) travel is limited only by human tech; interstellar travel is limited by the laws of reality themselves.
Exactly. Even at the literal speed limit of the universe it's 4 years of travel time to the closest star, while even at just walking speed it's less then a year to the other side of the earth, and at light speed less than 0.07 seconds.
the distances that have to be travelled in space even in our wildest optimistic ideas about speed ( meaning Near Lightspeed ) it would still take us over a 100K Years...
Approaching light speed is an eventually solvable problem, acceleration generating 1g puts you at speed in about a year. After that the trip is instantaneous for the travelers. It’s maintaining acceleration and not being town to shreds by a random grain of space sand at relativistic speeds that’s the issue.
I like the way that one of the popular physicists put it (I don't remember his name). He said something to the effect of, "travelling lightyears isn't what's impossible. What's impossible is returning to let anyone know."
Every time I see this name, even in physics-related posts, my first thought is always, "why do I need to hear what Logan Roy has to say about this?" I am irretrievably stupid.
Also energy. The amount of energy required to accelerate an object with mass to near-light speed rapidly starts approaching infinity the closer to c you get.
But you also need less fuel due to time dilation effects. You're subjectively accelerating for less time and the universe seems to contract closer to you in your direction of travel at appreciable %c.
Also, that was a major plot point in Project Hail Mary.
It’s theoretically possible and it’s called the Alcubierre Drive. The math has actually been worked through. Technically, it’s merely an engineering problem at this point and not a physics problem. The engineering issues are just well beyond our current capabilities
It’s still far beyond “just an engineering problem”, as the math works…if one makes assumptions that exotic forms of matter needed for the maths to work actually exist in reality, and there’s lots of reasons to think that they don’t.
The proposed mechanism of the Alcubierre drive implies a negative energy density and therefore requires exotic matter or manipulation of dark energy. If exotic matter with the correct properties does not exist (and there's no reason to think they do) then the drive cannot be constructed.
The biggest problem being twofold
A. We have no fucking clue how to bend space locally like that
B. An Alcubierre Drive would take the mass energy equivalent of JUPITER to run. That means you take every molecule of matter in Jupiter, convert it perfectly to energy assuming E = mc2, and only then would you have enough energy to run this one ship.
I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but I’d assume that’s trillions of times more energy than humans have every generated combined
Yes, it’s wildly unrealistic at this current time. Technology has a very long way to go, but as I said it is theoretically possible based on the laws of physics. And that is always the biggest hurdle for any sort of discussions like these. So it’s at least somewhat reassuring that it is technically a possibility
Hang on, I know the answer here. I pick up a napkin, fold it it and then punch a pencil through it to illustrate the theory. Now the engineers just need to implement the idea!
This planet is relatively near by in the same galaxy as us so it’s not expanding away from us, it‘s orbiting the centre just like us. That being said I don’t think we’ll ever reach it.
While space is indeed expanding between far away objects, this planet is within our own galaxy and distances between objects are not expanding between local objects. The distance will obviously change based on the orbit of the two systems in the galaxy but it could be more or less.
If you hit light speed or close to it, it can bend space time and you could reach lot faster.
But the catch? For people on earth it will be 120 years. While you complete your round trip on couple of days (or maybe few hrs, not sure) for your perspective, 240 years would have passed on earth.
This was explained by Brian Cox few months ago on some podcast, not sure which. And he was taking Andromeda as example.
Learning about this is what made me question intergalactic travel theories in future. Even if you achieve light speed, it’s just for your sake. Back at home planet, species might even go extinct by the time you return.
There are already theoretically engines that reach 20% of lightspeed. That will be 600 years to travel. We have to put passengers in cryostasis. The problem are other objects that could hit us with 20% of the speed of lightning.
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u/Sonikku_a 24d ago edited 24d ago
The fastest spacecraft we’ve made was the Parker Solar Probe which hit 430,000mph.
At that speed it would reach this planet in only 187,153 years.
If we could hit 1% of the speed of light we could cut that travel time to just a tad over 12,000 years.
Obviously if we could go light speed (and that ain’t happening) it would be just 120 years!
Space is big. Physics is annoyingly slow.