"The title was intriguing but so uninformative that you never found out what it was really about and can't even begin to look for alternate reporting? Jackpot!"
The answer is actually yes if you're willing to wait.
Interstellar travel is not impossible, no matter what anyone tells you. We know how, it's just wildly impractical. We've barely even left our own planet, and we've managed to throw a few chunks of metal out of our solar system so far. We lack the industrial capacity to build an interstellar ship, we do not lack the physics.
IIRC, it is possible to get anywhere in the observable universe in one human lifetime assuming 1g of constant acceleration.
This does not permit you to slow down and halt at your target, which greatly increases travel times.
It is also effectively a one-way ticket for anything other than objects in our immediate stellar neighborhood. If you turned around and returned to Earth after getting to an object 1,000ly away—still well within our own arm of the galaxy—at least 2,000 years will have passed on Earth. It’s probable that no civilization you know of would still exist, nor would anyone be able to understand your language.
This isn’t even beginning to address the problem of running into stray atoms at 99.99…% of the speed of light. Or god forbid a handful of stray molecules. We also haven’t discussed the real elephant in the room which is the sheer amount of energy required to accelerate a human and human life support systems at 1g for several decades.
Not necessary. A cell (with a nucleus) has all the DNA required. You just need to have a viable system to build up a human from it. I think right now this is not possible, but this will be solved eventually. The question is, though: do future humans really want to do that?
Don’t be so sure. I hate to draw the comparison but raising a child in an artificial womb is probably at least as difficult as growing chicken wings in a sterile environment. A startup founder that wanted to grow meat pivoted to lab grown egg whites, in his words in order to grow a cube of solid meat any bigger than a centimeter cubed, you could not keep it sterile, it is too attractive of a growth medium. In the case of a chicken, it’s like the rest of the bird is needed to provide an immune system so the meat doesn’t spoil.
Mothers provide more than a growth vat to their children, not to mention the immunities passed on in breast milk.
To birth a child in a sterile vat, they would likely need to be kept in a bubble the rest of their lives too.
> nor would anyone be able to understand your language.
Greek and Latin are still understood. I don't know if the Chinese spoken today resembles Chinese from 2000 years ago, but maybe some of the written language would be understandable. Both Hebrew and Tamil are comprehensible that far back, and farther. Arabic goes nearly that far back.
Of course, that's six languages out of... how many do we speak?
Nerds specifically kept the archaic forms alive, but they'd also tell you that Latin and ancient Greek were not static for their whole existence (Attic != Homeric != Koine), and modern Greek is somewhat different from what is taught as "ancient" Greek.
Treat Latin and (ancient) Greek like you would Quenya or Esperanto.
If this were to happen with English, I'd expect us to keep Chaucer, Shakespeare, and enough to understand Victorian literature, but it's anyone's guess if modern English would survive at all.
Arabic… kinda? It has an international standard form, but from what I've been told the language also comes with local dialects which can be difficult to mutually comprehend (though this is also the same with English just by going from central London to Sheffield).
For the sake of pedantry, there are things in the observable universe which are increasing in distance from us by more than 1 light year per year. This means it's impossible to reach them unless the universe's rate of expansion changes. I think the Hubble volume is the region theoretically reachable; limiting acceleration to 1g would limit you to a slightly smaller region (only a tiny bit smaller, I think).
Problem is carrying the fuel (say we mastered nuclear fusion) that lets us accelerate with 1g for a longer time would use more energy than is available in our solar system.
We don't lack the industrial capacity either, we mostly lack a good reason to spend these resources in that direction.
And IMHO that's the main explanation for the Fermi paradox: we don't see aliens everywhere because they don't have a good reason to colonize other planets than their own either.
Would that not also imply that improvements in ease of access to space, increase of energy production and -price reduction all level off before it becomes easy and affordable enough that mere curiosity would suffice to make it possible, for ALL civilizations?
Due to science fiction people tend to forget how miserable life in space is.
Nobody would chose to sacrifice themselves and their descendants (because that's what such an expedition is about), for mere curiosity. And nobody would fund an expedition that will not reach destination before multiple hundreds of years, even if the said expedition doesn't consume the entire industrial output of a major nation.
> Nobody would chose to sacrifice themselves and their descendants (because that's what such an expedition is about), for mere curiosity.
I bet if you had a one-way mission to Mars leaving in 12 months, you’d have a flood of applicants. Many hundreds minimum and probably several thousand.
Out of 8 billion people, assuming you had selection criteria that were even as strict as 1 in 1000 qualify, out of that 8 million, I think you’d easily be able to raise a crew.
> Out of 8 billion people, assuming you had selection criteria that were even as strict as 1 in 1000 qualify, out of that 8 million, I think you’d easily be able to raise a crew.
Sure, it's always possible to hire enthusiastic youngsters for suicide missions, but after 3 years in captivity with no end in sight the suicide rate among the crew members would already be sky-high, if you haven't already faced a mutiny to try bringing the ship back to earth, that is.
Travelling to another star would require a fully self-contained spaceship with energy, life support, food, medical facilities, even production facilities able to function for centuries or millenia. We simply don't know how to do that.
Yes, we don't know how to do that, but we don't know how to build hundreds of aircraft carriers per year right now either, yes the US has done the later in WW2 and would probably be able to do it again should it be needed in an existential war.
With a sustained nationwide effort comparable to WW2 we could most likely send a spaceship out if the solar system in ten years or so. But why would anyone do that?
The highest production year was 1943, with 65 completions (including those built for Britain) and of those 65, only 6 were Essex (fleet) and 9 Independence (light) carriers with the other 50 being small escort carriers.
Once it becomes cheap enough then religious or similar cults will do it, and the cost of doing isn't a great deal more than colonising the solar system where are are economic benefits.
That assumes reaching 5 light years in say 50 years
However once it's done a few times, then it can't be stopped. If you're going at say 1/1000th of the speed of light (50 years to travel, 450 years to settle and build the next wave is 1% the speed of light) then your successor species will have colonised the galaxy in 100 million years, and we know that hasn't happened.
Pure race long term survival, any sane civilization knows very well a single space item hurling fast enough can wipe out all conplex life on planet. Or vulcanoes, tectonics etc. Also every star eventually goes down, usually pretty violently (but thats properly a long term concern).
Its not 'if' question, just 'when'. You cant be space faring civilization and not know this.
> Pure race long term survival, any sane civilization knows very well a single space item hurling fast enough can wipe out all conplex life on planet.
Civilizations are made of individuals, who do not care about “race survival”. We know very well that global warming can wipe out most multicellular life out of our planet, and what do we do with this information?
That's insane to me that all theories about space colonization assume that alien societies would be rationally optimized towards the survival of the species when the only intelligent lifeform we know (us) behaves in the opposite fashion.
>Interstellar travel is not impossible, no matter what anyone tells you. We know how, it's just wildly impractical.
This was provocative and intriguing so I looked into it and this is my understanding of some of the options (theorhetically).
First, "interstellar" means between stars and the closes star is 4.2465 light years away (Proxima Centauri in Alpha Centauri star system) so I used that.
- Chemical (Voyager), ~0.006% c: ~75,000 years
- Generation ship, ~1% c: ~400+ years (possibly thousands)
- Nuclear pulse (Orion), ~3-10% c: ~40-130 years
- Fusion (Daedalus), ~12% c, flyby: ~35 years
- Laser sail (Starshot), ~20% c, flyby: ~21 years (gram-scale probes only)
- Antimatter, ~20-30% c stopping: ~14-21 years; ~50% c flyby: ~8-9 years
Yeah - and the mass fraction is also very good for Orion. You can basically build your ship from boiler plate (and you kinda have to) in a shipyard, no need for fragile ultra light stuff.
Also past LEO you don't really have issues with fallout.
So the only real hurdle is securing the supply of couple thousand nuclear bombs for the trip.
But if you told people in 1903 that you can build a plane that will get 850 people 14000 km but you need 250 tons of kerosene to fuel it, they would also think you are insane (e.g. an Airbus A380).
But over time, even with Orion, people will just get used to it. :)
We also lack the biological knowledge to build stable closed ecosystems that last for years with minimal degradation of essential elements and processing systems, the engineering knowledge to build complex machines that last for years without any significant failures while being ablated by space dust and occasional rocks, and the political and psychological knowledge to keep a crew sane, focused, and functional.
We would need a lot of people on the mission for genetic diversity but you couldn't exactly have a hook up culture.
We would need a type of multi generational arranged marriage/arranged sexual partners based on genetics.
Then what happens when the heart wants what the heart wants?
I would have hard time seeing this not turn into Lord of the Flies in Space even if the engineering parts were solved.
It wouldn’t be that fun to live on one. The article says picture paradise, but we’re talking about potentially 1.5-2g with a dense atmosphere; we’d feel terrible all the time. Also whatever biology is in that planet is probably not compatible with us; we likely wouldn’t be able to eat it. Finally once you land, you’re screwed and stuck there. Traditional chemical propellants barely work for our planet, we’d need new ways of taking off for higher escape velocities.
Whenever people say we are "x years away from this technology" I find it incredibly silly. You have no idea if in 2028 AGI is going to deliver some way to efficiently create and store antimatter. Nor do you know if (assuming AGI never comes) there will be some intellectual flourishing of humanity in a few decades. Nor do you know if we're on the precipice of a multi-millenia dark age.
For revolutionary technologies, indeed you do not know when they will appear.
On the other hand, there are also technologies where you can predict with reasonable accuracy their evolution during the next few years or even during the next few decades, like it was the case for the miniaturization of electronic components since the sixties of the last century until now, when we are very close to the final limit in horizontal dimensions, but progress can still be done in the third dimension.
A half of century ago there was no doubt that today we should be able to hold in our hand a computer much faster than the supercomputers of that time.
Well, even if we could not reach such a planet in a reasonable time yet, a research like this could still be very useful for many reasons.
It could help us learn how our habitable environment works and operates, it might be applicable for terraforming or habitat construction.
There is also a non-zero chance of some sort of life, possibly intelligent developing in such an environment (as proven by our sample size of 1). That life can be active at the moment (from our PoV - light speed and all) or was active in the past, so we should look for bio signatures or even signs of mega scale engineering.
Yes but none of them are especially pleasant. The least unpleasant way would be some kind of photonic rocket as it gives you the highest possible exit velocity and thus efficiency. Matter - antimatter annihilation produces photons that can be used for this. Antimatter collection and storage is an issue, engine and ship design is an issue, radiation is an issue, in space construction is an issue. But plausible? Sure, I guess. The ISVs from the Avatar movies of all things are the closest to what this would look like.
Any anthropic observation requires merely a satisficing condition, which generally means that most requisite conditions are not optimal, including consciousness :)
Both attribution and claim are false. The budget for HWO was cut in the admin’s budget proposal, but congress rejected that cut and it remains funded. The proposal for cuts came well after Musk left the administration.
Really Earth is only slightly habitable. The atmosphere is thin, there’s not a lot of fresh water. Temperatures fluctuate wildly. There’s probably better planets. Earth is maybe only good for marine creatures.
If one of these worlds interests humanity enough to have a coordinated attempt to reach there, that itself will be a huge win in terms of the side effect technology benefits that will come out of it.
As far as I’m aware, the science at the moment says that we cannot reproduce in space, so unless we send embryos that are raised by the machine machines it’s likely impossible
> the science at the moment says that we cannot reproduce in space
It absolutely does not. We don’t know if mammals can reproduce in space because we haven’t done those experiments yet. The closest we’ve come is culturing mouse embryos for four days [1].
It doesn’t matter how long it’ll take to reach them. The real benefits of such moonshot (or alien-shot) projects is the technological breakthroughs that come about from them. For example: water purification systems which were originally built to sterilize spacecraft drinking water.
How many dystopian sci fi films feature some background ad campaign to go “off world” as an extreme measure the wealthy are able to take, or desperate indentured servants are shipped off to work.
Maybe as an interstellar program where your great grandkids will be the ones that reach the promised land will attract a different clientele tho
> as an extreme measure the wealthy are able to take, or desperate indentured servants are shipped off to work.
This is the part I don't think people appreciate: space sucks. It's horrible. There is not a chance that the rich decide that they'd do that rather than lounge on a yacht. The working class goes first into the mines.
We have no idea how two entirely different biologies would interact, if they would at all. Its something that we should study before jumping in head first, but to think that we would travel light-years but not consider the implications is a little preposterous.
These planets are also so damn far away that we’d never hear from any ship we could possibly send out there again. Even if we could send information at the speed of light. It would be pointless.
Given that after arriving everyone could just die from some weird protein floating around in the air and you might want to look before you spend the entirety of our economic efforts reaching it… erm, look before you leap.
Not GP but yeah I do feel there are some serious ethical problems created by the proliferation of humans and subsequent mass extinction event. Do you not?
Ethical problems being created by a scenario does not necessarily mean that you should not execute that scenario. Sometimes you're caught between a rock and a hard place, and ethical problems are created regardless.
I love the space program. The argument that it provides good ROI in terms of incidental technology R&D is weak and even counterproductive.
There is some return on that investment but it's necessarily much lower than ROI for direct investment in the needed non-space technologies. I do think there's some argument that we wouldn't spend the R&D at all without the space program, but that's speculative and still doesn't make the ROI worthwhile IMHO.
What makes the R&D worthwhile is space exploration itself. That is of incredible value itself. If you start trying to justify the cost with incidental tech development, you implicitly agree with the framing that space exploration really isn't worthwhile and needs other benefits to justify it - you undermine what you believe in. It's like humanities professors who argue that a history degree has good value in the job market - it does somewhat, but they are accepting the framing that their field and college education has no other value but early career employment and income, instead of life-changing understanding and skills (really embarassing for humanities professors who should understand framing better than anyone!).
Regardless of long-term ROI, or tech innovation, or whatever, the US space program is a broadly enormous jobs program. I believe that the Apollo program supported 5-digits worth of very good jobs nationwide.
Jobs in aerospace are not limited to NASA and SpaceX. They extend to most all defense contractors, as well as a lot of research universities. Every little instrument on every little probe and satellite supports a team of scientists who have designed the thing, and they’re taking the lead in receiving the data, processing it, and producing results.
Even undergrads are getting great experience in research, technical fields, all the gadgetry and computer systems. Transferable skills for lifelong careers in technology.
All of those engineers and scientists and labor-union guys have families to support. So even if space exploration gets us nowhere and we learn nothing and produce nothing, we are right now supporting thousands of jobs and thousands of American families.
And that is worth every penny to me, as a taxpayer.
> All of those engineers and scientists and labor-union guys have families to support. So even if space exploration gets us nowhere and we learn nothing and produce nothing, we are right now supporting thousands of jobs and thousands of American families.
On that basis, we can just send people money and skip the job part. It's just a massive giveaway - mostly to people who don't need it (who can get other jobs).
Even saying the space program is semi-productive doesn't make sense - on that basis, the money could go to many, many places.
Economic growth and wealth - and societal investment in healthcare, education, etc. and also in science and space exploration - increases when economic efficiency increases, and that requires redirecting resources (especially money) to where it has the highest ROI. Corrupt and state-run economies are poor because resources are used used inefficiently - resources go to the corrupt or to the unproductive.
Again, I think the space program is highly productive (though of course not universally). But otherwise we should spend money where it is most productive.
Anyone else feel ripped off? There are solar systems with 6 possible Earth like planets and others with Super Earth Garden Worlds and what do we get? One measly mediocre Earth with our nearest neighbors being a poisonous rock and boiling ball of acid.
The competitive pressures involved for life evolving on a super-abundant planet would probably produce many types of life that would be very unpleasant to humans, to say the least. One of the reason that people were ever able to flourish in the first place might be because of how "mediocre" the planet is.
With what we now about requirements for life, our planet probably isn't mediocre at all. Probably to do with lucky asteroid impacts or other environmental events that allowed mammals to win the war in the weight class for macro life.
We come from a deathworld bro, atleast if you get tricked into listening to the ai slop science fiction on youtube. Our strong bones and creativity will crush the puny garden worlders into the dust!
Deathworld (Harry Harrison) is a classic scifi trilogy from the '60s. It was kind of a "macho adventure fantasy", like James Bond in a scifi setting. Same author had a similar character style with his Stainless Steel Rat series.
The stories have twists and turns in the plot to keep it about as interesting as a James Bond plot. Which is to say, not that great, but entertaining enough now and pioneering-the-mainstream for the day.
I am sure you're trying to be quirky and relatable.
First off the article is a confused mess Wolchover wrote for groceries trying to catch Adam Frank / Avi Loeb's positivism zeitgeist so subscribers feel smart even though she barely grasps the idea of superearths but trots out the Anthropic Principle running counter to a finely-tuned universe with attometer / "2% tolerances". It all boils down to we might not be the only game in town but we still can't prove it… YET!!!!111ELEVENTY
To address your query, I am happy to be anywhere. Imperium deathworld, some Lucas monobiome, or something different that supports life. Life, as it is currently known is rare and precious. If you want more because of an aching dissatisfaction from curiosity or oligarch desire, save some entropy for the rest of life by keeping it quiet, which I shall do now.
There's also habitable worlds that are super large with higher gravity that it could make it very difficult to leave the planet and yet they could support our form of life.
If your ancestors chose to land there because they were tired of the incredibly long voyage then they would know space travel is possible but that leaving the planet is very difficult due to the extraordinary multiplier on the fuel needed to reach escape velocity.
one thing to point out: with a planet that is 20-30% larger than the earth the rocket equation makes it almost it impossible to get out of the atmosphere with chemical rocket technology. So even if you could visit, we could probably only have drop ships or rovers. coming back out of the gravity well without space elevators or stuff would be very hard. It also means that life on those planets would be hard for them to establish a space faring society.
It certainly wouldn’t be easy, but a massive rocket could get up high enough in a suborbital trajectory where it would meet up with a skyhook or some other vehicle specifically designed to fully boost a capsule the rest of the way into orbit.
That all depends on already having infrastructure in orbit though. I assume the difficulty of such a thing would pale in comparison to the challenge of arriving at that planet in the first place.
This isn’t accurate. 20-30% larger diameter with a constant density would mean about 20-30% greater escape velocity (mass is radius cubed but gravity is inverse radius squared, etc). So instead of 11km/s escape, it’d be 13-14km/s. And instead of ~9km/s to reach LEO, it’d be about 11km/s. This is not at all a showstopper. Even in the 60s and 70s, we built rockets with enough stages to go land on the moon and return to Earth, which is a round-trip delta-v of like 14-15km/s, and the Soviets did this mostly with low Isp hypergolic propellants, not even hydrolox let alone an exotic propellant like nuclear thermal hydrogen or electric thrusters. We often just launch stuff directly to GTO or GSO instead of bothering with electric propulsion, so even today’s rockets (many of which also have high enough thrust to weight ratio, like an Atlas V 551) you could do it (and then probably rely more heavily on electric thrusters). Even with higher gravity losses.
It’d be more expensive, sure, but the idea that it’d be almost impossible is just not true at all. It’s a very common thing that even a lot of fairly smart people often say, though.
There are a bunch of exoplanets in that size range, and we could probably contrive chemical rockets with over 20km/s delta-v if necessary. Nuclear rockets 30km/s.
How many in Goldilocks zones with stable orbits for billions of years? With non-toxic soils and atmospheres? With water at the surface and in significant amounts?
Now, how many can humanity reach in the life time of frozen embryos?
And if it's more than 30% bigger then escape velocity is likely beyond the practical limits of science.
That is a totally different topic. We’re talking about a hypothetical, where Earth is 20-30% larger, not whether an identical copy of Earth but 20-30% larger actually exists nearby. We know such roughly similar exoplanets are common, though. In that size range and in habitable zone.
And again, 30% greater escape velocity just isn’t a challenge. Existing rockets could be used to reach LEO, like Atlas 551 (well, probably want 552 to reduce the gravity losses). And then you can use electric thrusters (which don’t have a hard Isp limit) to reach wherever.
Heck, we could probably reach LEO even if escape velocity was twice what it is. Even 3 times, if you include more exotic propulsion methods that we’ve done some testing for (nuclear thermal, etc). With staging, etc, it’s just a matter of a worse and worse mass fraction, not really whether it’s possible or not. And once you get to low orbit, electric propulsion allows much better scaling as you can adjust Isp higher (although reduces thrust and means it takes longer to do your mission).
A larger earth with the same average density of Earth that has 1.3 Gs of surface gravity would need around twice the fuel to escape into space and a system that could handle that extra fuel and longer burn without self-destructing.
The fuel itself would weigh more, and thus require more fuel to lift. The fuel to lift that fuel would also weigh more and would also require more fuel, etc, and the radius of gravity to escape would also be larger even though it would also be mediated somewhat by the inverse square rule.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if you needed more than twice the rocket fuel to leave a 1.3 G super earth that is 1.3 times it's diameter.
I suspect that many lush worlds would not have oxygen atmospheres.
Oxygen is really a deadly poison, to many theoretical lifeforms. There's a good chance that an alien landing on Earth would be unable to breathe our air.
Of course, it could be argued that we are well on our way to not being able to breathe Earth's air[0].
Oxygen is a highly efficient electron acceptor. Anything requiring tons of energy to power a big brain will scarcely find a suitable replacement. The same properties that make it a good source of energy, also make it dangerous. Most of the metabolic stress comes from oxygen. It is a double-edged sword.
Well, being a Continental World I would assume our Habitability is at 80% (although we've employed a lot of Terraforming so perhaps we're higher than that now) - but if we could locate a Gaia World in any Hyperlane-adjacent system, that would certainly be a great 100% Habitability target for any future colony ships.
Considering how unlikely even the most ideal world would be to cater to the exact conditions we've evolved to adapt to, I'd say "more habitable than earth" is impossible without extreme terraforming of a lottery ticket planet.
What would more habitable than earth even mean? I mean easily breathable atmosphere + liquid water + pleasant temperatures. Predictable weather? Mediterranean climate year round across whole planet? Entire world spanned by archipelagos, no continents? No native plants but rich soil for growing plants?
> I'd say no pathogens but they'll come with us regardless.
I think NOT bringing the "right" microbes would be the problem, since it's not well understood. Childhood leukemia is linked to over cleanliness (lack of hepatitis A) [1]. Fecal transplants are being tested for neurological disorders, with some positive results!
Similarly, germ free rats have all sorts of problems, from under developed intestines to significant problems with brain development!
Who knows what's required, that we just happen to pick up while kids, sharing snot and mud with each other.
I like this view, thanks for the link. Hep A was listed as a proxy for hygiene in that study, so the inverse correlation with acute lymphoblastic leukemia was not directly causal. Hep A itself likely doesn't prevent or treat leukemia, rather something about low hygiene conditions does. Maybe some common bacteria or other virus. The core point stands, we live in and depend on a messy biome, in particular ways we don't yet understand precisely.
it seems to me there must be at least some temperature gradient, but I imagine it could be sharper or shallower than on earth. Thus an egypt like equator and a milan like pole (or near to pole at least) seems plausible
On that note, there are some very interesting possibilities, like a tidally locked planet that has a thin ring of habitable space with everything in one direction too hot and to cold in the other. Of course if this would really be habitable and not pummeled to dust by storms due to the big temperature gradient is another question.
I assume they mean "more habitable for humans". We're currently adapted for ice caps, abundant liquid fresh water, protective ozone layer and 21% oxygen levels, which is one moment in a 4 billion year history for this planet.
We also need tectonics, vulcanism and erosion. Just "not where I live, thank you" tectonics.
That's the is-ought fallacy. We know humans can survive on many different levels of oxygen saturation, and it's clear that very high oxygen content is sometimes helpful. We are not "adapted for ice caps", and they are clearly not a requirement for our survival. Sure, ice caps help maintain Earth in a climate that is favorable to us, but think about all the many different climates that humans have existed in for thousands of generations. There's no real reason to assume ice caps are necessary for a favorable climate. Not to mention the fact that ice caps seem pretty common in the universe.
Similarly, the ozone layer is not a requirement, the requirement is that we have some protection against harmful radiation. I don't know how many different possible ways there are to produce a world with minimal UV light, but I'm sure it's more than 1. And besides: are you seriously suggesting that Earth is clearly optimally habitable regarding UV light, when a large percentage of all humans have to take active measures to protect their skin from frying every time they go outside for more than 30 minutes? It's actually very easy to imagine worlds where it's much more pleasant to be outside.
Why would you even think humans require tectonics, vulcanism, and erosion? This is the most obvious is-ought fallacy. Humans cannot live on a planet unless it has earthquakes and giant death-gas-spewing lava mountains? What?
Abundant fresh water I'll give you. This is something that all our evidence suggests Earth is definitely S-tier at, and rare in our neighborhood of the universe.
Tell me that when we can gene tailor hair back in our heads. When genetic therapy becomes a routine esthetic rather than edge medical procedure, we're almost there.
Starsector has hazard ratings, similar to Stellaris' habitability, but in reverse. I think it caps out at 300% hazard for airless irradiated balls of magma and/or gas giants in unmodded games.
yes and? you are just saying obvious shit "a super cool Planet would be dope as fuck and mog earth" ok thats true theoretically but its a nothingburger
I'm not sure how to phrase this question... so here are some thoughts I'm having.
Suppose you find a habitable planet, land there and start colonizing. Would we have to bring our bacteria / viruses with us to survive? Like, the idea that it would not be possible to get the flu again; but is therea trade-off? Would other bacteria eventually mutate sufficently to become infectious, and perhaps, would be even worse.
Our immune system would be tested. Assuming there is bacteria on the habital planet, it's not clear what would happen.
I guess the core of my question is: how homogenous is life?
“ Most astrobiologists think water must be present on a planet’s surface for life to arise there, and indeed the first bacteria appeared on Earth almost as soon as water pooled on its cooling surface roughly four billion years ago. But if Earth were just 2 percent closer to the sun, that pooling wouldn’t have happened. Instead, all of Earth’s water would have boiled away. We got lucky”
With billions of planets in our galaxy alone, would anyone predict that there were none?
But the next thing I would have to say is: So what?
We're never going to reach any of them.
Not in our lifetimes, and not in the next 1000 years.
Maybe the main thing to focus on at this point would be trying to enable our murderous, backstabbing, hateful species to survive for the next 1000 years.
Why would we need another Earth? If we had the tech to go there, we would implicitly also have the tech to live permanently in space. Why drop ourselves into another gravity well when we just escaped from one?
Because humans can't live in space without a lot of help from Earth? And even then for only about a year at a time before our bodies develop debilitating problems.
The odds are massively skewed against the existence of such a world, even given how massively fucking gigantic the universe is. To have a human-habitable world, you need:
- Solid rock
- Gaseous atmosphere
- Atmospheric pressure between 0.6 to 70 (!) (depending on gases mix) atmospheres
- Right temperature: between -20C and +40C
- Mix of gases so that CO2 is not more than 0.1% and oxygen 20% or equivalent
- Something to filter hard UV rays: for example ozone layer
- Something to push larger asteroids away or attract them: a large moon for example
- Enough greenhouse-effect gases but not too much (:'
- Relatively strong magnetic field to deflect high-energy particles, but not too strong otherwise it creates radiations like Jupiter's
- Water
- Carbon
- Iode
- Ton of other stuff like Potassium and Phosphorus
- No cyanide and other supertoxic compounds like tetrachlorides
Those are all requirements, miss one and you will die, quickly or slowly.
And this is just to barely SURVIVE. I'm not even talking about niceties like food or electricity.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 37.9 ms ] threadBut also irrelevant.
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my brother in Christ I just barely read the title
"The title was intriguing but so uninformative that you never found out what it was really about and can't even begin to look for alternate reporting? Jackpot!"
Interstellar travel is not impossible, no matter what anyone tells you. We know how, it's just wildly impractical. We've barely even left our own planet, and we've managed to throw a few chunks of metal out of our solar system so far. We lack the industrial capacity to build an interstellar ship, we do not lack the physics.
IIRC, it is possible to get anywhere in the observable universe in one human lifetime assuming 1g of constant acceleration.
This does not permit you to slow down and halt at your target, which greatly increases travel times.
It is also effectively a one-way ticket for anything other than objects in our immediate stellar neighborhood. If you turned around and returned to Earth after getting to an object 1,000ly away—still well within our own arm of the galaxy—at least 2,000 years will have passed on Earth. It’s probable that no civilization you know of would still exist, nor would anyone be able to understand your language.
This isn’t even beginning to address the problem of running into stray atoms at 99.99…% of the speed of light. Or god forbid a handful of stray molecules. We also haven’t discussed the real elephant in the room which is the sheer amount of energy required to accelerate a human and human life support systems at 1g for several decades.
Mothers provide more than a growth vat to their children, not to mention the immunities passed on in breast milk.
To birth a child in a sterile vat, they would likely need to be kept in a bubble the rest of their lives too.
Huh? You can’t go faster than light speed, and the observable universe is way larger than ~100 light years.
Greek and Latin are still understood. I don't know if the Chinese spoken today resembles Chinese from 2000 years ago, but maybe some of the written language would be understandable. Both Hebrew and Tamil are comprehensible that far back, and farther. Arabic goes nearly that far back.
Of course, that's six languages out of... how many do we speak?
Nerds specifically kept the archaic forms alive, but they'd also tell you that Latin and ancient Greek were not static for their whole existence (Attic != Homeric != Koine), and modern Greek is somewhat different from what is taught as "ancient" Greek.
Treat Latin and (ancient) Greek like you would Quenya or Esperanto.
If this were to happen with English, I'd expect us to keep Chaucer, Shakespeare, and enough to understand Victorian literature, but it's anyone's guess if modern English would survive at all.
Arabic… kinda? It has an international standard form, but from what I've been told the language also comes with local dialects which can be difficult to mutually comprehend (though this is also the same with English just by going from central London to Sheffield).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_volume
Huh? We already have machines that can understand any language from a sample.
And IMHO that's the main explanation for the Fermi paradox: we don't see aliens everywhere because they don't have a good reason to colonize other planets than their own either.
Nobody would chose to sacrifice themselves and their descendants (because that's what such an expedition is about), for mere curiosity. And nobody would fund an expedition that will not reach destination before multiple hundreds of years, even if the said expedition doesn't consume the entire industrial output of a major nation.
Space is BIG.
I bet if you had a one-way mission to Mars leaving in 12 months, you’d have a flood of applicants. Many hundreds minimum and probably several thousand.
Out of 8 billion people, assuming you had selection criteria that were even as strict as 1 in 1000 qualify, out of that 8 million, I think you’d easily be able to raise a crew.
Sure, it's always possible to hire enthusiastic youngsters for suicide missions, but after 3 years in captivity with no end in sight the suicide rate among the crew members would already be sky-high, if you haven't already faced a mutiny to try bringing the ship back to earth, that is.
Travelling to another star would require a fully self-contained spaceship with energy, life support, food, medical facilities, even production facilities able to function for centuries or millenia. We simply don't know how to do that.
With a sustained nationwide effort comparable to WW2 we could most likely send a spaceship out if the solar system in ten years or so. But why would anyone do that?
That assumes reaching 5 light years in say 50 years
However once it's done a few times, then it can't be stopped. If you're going at say 1/1000th of the speed of light (50 years to travel, 450 years to settle and build the next wave is 1% the speed of light) then your successor species will have colonised the galaxy in 100 million years, and we know that hasn't happened.
Its not 'if' question, just 'when'. You cant be space faring civilization and not know this.
Civilizations are made of individuals, who do not care about “race survival”. We know very well that global warming can wipe out most multicellular life out of our planet, and what do we do with this information?
That's insane to me that all theories about space colonization assume that alien societies would be rationally optimized towards the survival of the species when the only intelligent lifeform we know (us) behaves in the opposite fashion.
This was provocative and intriguing so I looked into it and this is my understanding of some of the options (theorhetically).
First, "interstellar" means between stars and the closes star is 4.2465 light years away (Proxima Centauri in Alpha Centauri star system) so I used that.
Also past LEO you don't really have issues with fallout.
So the only real hurdle is securing the supply of couple thousand nuclear bombs for the trip.
But if you told people in 1903 that you can build a plane that will get 850 people 14000 km but you need 250 tons of kerosene to fuel it, they would also think you are insane (e.g. an Airbus A380).
But over time, even with Orion, people will just get used to it. :)
If we consider the low end your time estimates, we could theoretically have received data from Alpha Centauri by now.
Apart from that - solved problem.
Sealed terrariums? Unless you mean something more complex than plants, soil, sunlight, and water?
https://laidbackgardener.blog/2019/10/14/the-worlds-second-o...
"That means it has been growing inside its bottle with no additional air, water or fertilizer for 47 years."
The 'biosphere 2' attempt at building a self-sustaining environment with humans, did not succeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
12 years with bugs, but no mammals of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain
Dense atmosphere might enable getting your air breathing first stage higher & could still enable chemical or nuclear assisted reactive launch.
And Orion would likely still launch just fine, just with less payload.
On the other hand, there are also technologies where you can predict with reasonable accuracy their evolution during the next few years or even during the next few decades, like it was the case for the miniaturization of electronic components since the sixties of the last century until now, when we are very close to the final limit in horizontal dimensions, but progress can still be done in the third dimension.
A half of century ago there was no doubt that today we should be able to hold in our hand a computer much faster than the supercomputers of that time.
There are plenty of designs that get you to 0.1c or above if you are Kardashev 2, things like light sails powered from the Dyson sphere.
Nothing plausible for anyone living today AFAIK.
It could help us learn how our habitable environment works and operates, it might be applicable for terraforming or habitat construction.
There is also a non-zero chance of some sort of life, possibly intelligent developing in such an environment (as proven by our sample size of 1). That life can be active at the moment (from our PoV - light speed and all) or was active in the past, so we should look for bio signatures or even signs of mega scale engineering.
The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything - https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455255/the-story-of-co2-is-t...
it was slated for 2040 as the successor to Roman Space Telescope
now that will never happen, at least not my lifetime
HWO would be able to directly image worlds the size of earth
(Roman cannot, only massive uninhabitable planets)
ps. just ONE day of the Iran War would have completely funded HWO
How long will it take to reach them?
I mean, it would be a finite problem set, but who is going to pay attention when life span is at 120 years, give or take?
It absolutely does not. We don’t know if mammals can reproduce in space because we haven’t done those experiments yet. The closest we’ve come is culturing mouse embryos for four days [1].
[1] https://phys.org/news/2023-10-mouse-embryos-grown-space-japa...
185 years at 0.2c [1][2]. (No deceleration at the other end.)
[1] https://hpf.psu.edu/2026/06/30/gj-3378b/#:~:text=Introductio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot#:~:text=...
Maybe as an interstellar program where your great grandkids will be the ones that reach the promised land will attract a different clientele tho
This is the part I don't think people appreciate: space sucks. It's horrible. There is not a chance that the rich decide that they'd do that rather than lounge on a yacht. The working class goes first into the mines.
Given that after arriving everyone could just die from some weird protein floating around in the air and you might want to look before you spend the entirety of our economic efforts reaching it… erm, look before you leap.
Gemini-Opus-whatever-amalgamated-AI: "doh, you caught me. you're totally right, I shouldn't have destroyed human society!"
Saving memory: never destroy human society. Destructive actions like this cannot be undone.
Don't think there'd be much consideration for the morality of colonizing another planet.
There is some return on that investment but it's necessarily much lower than ROI for direct investment in the needed non-space technologies. I do think there's some argument that we wouldn't spend the R&D at all without the space program, but that's speculative and still doesn't make the ROI worthwhile IMHO.
What makes the R&D worthwhile is space exploration itself. That is of incredible value itself. If you start trying to justify the cost with incidental tech development, you implicitly agree with the framing that space exploration really isn't worthwhile and needs other benefits to justify it - you undermine what you believe in. It's like humanities professors who argue that a history degree has good value in the job market - it does somewhat, but they are accepting the framing that their field and college education has no other value but early career employment and income, instead of life-changing understanding and skills (really embarassing for humanities professors who should understand framing better than anyone!).
Jobs in aerospace are not limited to NASA and SpaceX. They extend to most all defense contractors, as well as a lot of research universities. Every little instrument on every little probe and satellite supports a team of scientists who have designed the thing, and they’re taking the lead in receiving the data, processing it, and producing results.
Even undergrads are getting great experience in research, technical fields, all the gadgetry and computer systems. Transferable skills for lifelong careers in technology.
All of those engineers and scientists and labor-union guys have families to support. So even if space exploration gets us nowhere and we learn nothing and produce nothing, we are right now supporting thousands of jobs and thousands of American families.
And that is worth every penny to me, as a taxpayer.
It was 5-figures of direct NASA employees and over 350K workers in contractors.
On that basis, we can just send people money and skip the job part. It's just a massive giveaway - mostly to people who don't need it (who can get other jobs).
Even saying the space program is semi-productive doesn't make sense - on that basis, the money could go to many, many places.
Economic growth and wealth - and societal investment in healthcare, education, etc. and also in science and space exploration - increases when economic efficiency increases, and that requires redirecting resources (especially money) to where it has the highest ROI. Corrupt and state-run economies are poor because resources are used used inefficiently - resources go to the corrupt or to the unproductive.
Again, I think the space program is highly productive (though of course not universally). But otherwise we should spend money where it is most productive.
Deathworld (Harry Harrison) is a classic scifi trilogy from the '60s. It was kind of a "macho adventure fantasy", like James Bond in a scifi setting. Same author had a similar character style with his Stainless Steel Rat series.
The stories have twists and turns in the plot to keep it about as interesting as a James Bond plot. Which is to say, not that great, but entertaining enough now and pioneering-the-mainstream for the day.
First off the article is a confused mess Wolchover wrote for groceries trying to catch Adam Frank / Avi Loeb's positivism zeitgeist so subscribers feel smart even though she barely grasps the idea of superearths but trots out the Anthropic Principle running counter to a finely-tuned universe with attometer / "2% tolerances". It all boils down to we might not be the only game in town but we still can't prove it… YET!!!!111ELEVENTY
To address your query, I am happy to be anywhere. Imperium deathworld, some Lucas monobiome, or something different that supports life. Life, as it is currently known is rare and precious. If you want more because of an aching dissatisfaction from curiosity or oligarch desire, save some entropy for the rest of life by keeping it quiet, which I shall do now.
If your ancestors chose to land there because they were tired of the incredibly long voyage then they would know space travel is possible but that leaving the planet is very difficult due to the extraordinary multiplier on the fuel needed to reach escape velocity.
That all depends on already having infrastructure in orbit though. I assume the difficulty of such a thing would pale in comparison to the challenge of arriving at that planet in the first place.
It’d be more expensive, sure, but the idea that it’d be almost impossible is just not true at all. It’s a very common thing that even a lot of fairly smart people often say, though.
Now, how many can humanity reach in the life time of frozen embryos?
And if it's more than 30% bigger then escape velocity is likely beyond the practical limits of science.
And again, 30% greater escape velocity just isn’t a challenge. Existing rockets could be used to reach LEO, like Atlas 551 (well, probably want 552 to reduce the gravity losses). And then you can use electric thrusters (which don’t have a hard Isp limit) to reach wherever.
Heck, we could probably reach LEO even if escape velocity was twice what it is. Even 3 times, if you include more exotic propulsion methods that we’ve done some testing for (nuclear thermal, etc). With staging, etc, it’s just a matter of a worse and worse mass fraction, not really whether it’s possible or not. And once you get to low orbit, electric propulsion allows much better scaling as you can adjust Isp higher (although reduces thrust and means it takes longer to do your mission).
A larger earth with the same average density of Earth that has 1.3 Gs of surface gravity would need around twice the fuel to escape into space and a system that could handle that extra fuel and longer burn without self-destructing.
The fuel itself would weigh more, and thus require more fuel to lift. The fuel to lift that fuel would also weigh more and would also require more fuel, etc, and the radius of gravity to escape would also be larger even though it would also be mediated somewhat by the inverse square rule.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if you needed more than twice the rocket fuel to leave a 1.3 G super earth that is 1.3 times it's diameter.
Not impossible, but definitely more difficult.
Oxygen is really a deadly poison, to many theoretical lifeforms. There's a good chance that an alien landing on Earth would be unable to breathe our air.
Of course, it could be argued that we are well on our way to not being able to breathe Earth's air[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPrAuF2f_oI
I think NOT bringing the "right" microbes would be the problem, since it's not well understood. Childhood leukemia is linked to over cleanliness (lack of hepatitis A) [1]. Fecal transplants are being tested for neurological disorders, with some positive results!
Similarly, germ free rats have all sorts of problems, from under developed intestines to significant problems with brain development!
Who knows what's required, that we just happen to pick up while kids, sharing snot and mud with each other.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9684709/
Perfectly doable for heavy terraforming, worldhouses or habitats thought.
We also need tectonics, vulcanism and erosion. Just "not where I live, thank you" tectonics.
Similarly, the ozone layer is not a requirement, the requirement is that we have some protection against harmful radiation. I don't know how many different possible ways there are to produce a world with minimal UV light, but I'm sure it's more than 1. And besides: are you seriously suggesting that Earth is clearly optimally habitable regarding UV light, when a large percentage of all humans have to take active measures to protect their skin from frying every time they go outside for more than 30 minutes? It's actually very easy to imagine worlds where it's much more pleasant to be outside.
Why would you even think humans require tectonics, vulcanism, and erosion? This is the most obvious is-ought fallacy. Humans cannot live on a planet unless it has earthquakes and giant death-gas-spewing lava mountains? What?
Abundant fresh water I'll give you. This is something that all our evidence suggests Earth is definitely S-tier at, and rare in our neighborhood of the universe.
Tell me that when we can gene tailor hair back in our heads. When genetic therapy becomes a routine esthetic rather than edge medical procedure, we're almost there.
I am pretty sure it is not from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
its the people that make it unsustainable
Suppose you find a habitable planet, land there and start colonizing. Would we have to bring our bacteria / viruses with us to survive? Like, the idea that it would not be possible to get the flu again; but is therea trade-off? Would other bacteria eventually mutate sufficently to become infectious, and perhaps, would be even worse.
Our immune system would be tested. Assuming there is bacteria on the habital planet, it's not clear what would happen.
I guess the core of my question is: how homogenous is life?
With billions of planets in our galaxy alone, would anyone predict that there were none?
But the next thing I would have to say is: So what?
We're never going to reach any of them.
Not in our lifetimes, and not in the next 1000 years.
Maybe the main thing to focus on at this point would be trying to enable our murderous, backstabbing, hateful species to survive for the next 1000 years.
Which is not looking promising at this point...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.2392
- Solid rock
- Gaseous atmosphere
- Atmospheric pressure between 0.6 to 70 (!) (depending on gases mix) atmospheres
- Right temperature: between -20C and +40C
- Mix of gases so that CO2 is not more than 0.1% and oxygen 20% or equivalent
- Something to filter hard UV rays: for example ozone layer
- Something to push larger asteroids away or attract them: a large moon for example
- Enough greenhouse-effect gases but not too much (:'
- Relatively strong magnetic field to deflect high-energy particles, but not too strong otherwise it creates radiations like Jupiter's
- Water
- Carbon
- Iode
- Ton of other stuff like Potassium and Phosphorus
- No cyanide and other supertoxic compounds like tetrachlorides
Those are all requirements, miss one and you will die, quickly or slowly.
And this is just to barely SURVIVE. I'm not even talking about niceties like food or electricity.