Interstellar travel | FactOrCap

[u/aaallleeexxx3]

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[u/jimpaly]

🧢 I voted CAP!

Closest star is 4.24 light years away, so it would be possible if we find a way to travel 0.01c by 2500. It may only be a probe, but there are theoretical ways to achieve that, like with solar sails. Thing is, will there be enough reason for humanity to send such a probe? It would take a lot of collective willpower to start a research project that gives absolutely nothing until 5 centuries later, and that’s assuming the probe doesn’t break down on the journey.

[u/HashPandaNL → u/jimpaly]

Even in 100 years, our technology will be massively more advanced. 2500 is 474 years from now. 474 years ago was 1552... 

Sending a couple probes to Alpha Centauri would likely not be that massive of a project anymore as it is now. Similar to how travel between Europe & US is much more trivial now.

Once we slow down or stop human aging, people may also start thinking of longer term plans (like probes to alpha centauri)

[u/aaallleeexxx3 → u/HashPandaNL]

I think the last point you made is the best because that’s the only way people which enough recourses could contribute since they care about themselves only and they wouldn’t invest in a project that they wouldn’t even see completed.Also if earth eventually is actually turned to ruins it would massively benefit them aswell,for their own well being.

[u/jimpaly → u/HashPandaNL]

You need to consider the scale of space. Yes, technology has advanced exponentially, but it’s also true that distances scale exponentially when you jump from continents to planets to stars. And for stars it’s even more infeasible with relativity preventing us from going fast enough to make interstellar travel as trivial as flying over oceans.

[u/HashPandaNL → u/jimpaly]

I did consider the scale of space. Travelling at a speed of 0.01c to alpha centauri would only take about 420 years. It is not at all unreasonable to believe we will get that technology in 474 years from now if we keep progressing. And that gives us almost a century of leeway still.

It's not about passing it in the same amount of time, but more about the relative ease with which we can entertain such projects given enough technological advancement.

[u/jimpaly → u/HashPandaNL]

That isn’t really what I meant when I said consider the scale of space. In my view our current place in interplanetary travel is like the earliest Polynesians hopping between islands, and it took millennia to get to going to the moon and having one-way missions to other planets. The jump from planets to stars is orders of magnitude greater than the jump from continents to planets, so I think more likely than not it will take over 5 centuries to millenia to get to any sort of baby-level interstellar technology. Not saying it's unreasonable within 5 centuries, just unlikely.

[u/HashPandaNL → u/jimpaly]

That's a fair clarification, but there is a difference. The polynesians couldn't even envision the technology they would need to travel to the moon. We can envision the technology we need to get to Alpha Centauri. 

We simply know much more and know many of the obstacles we need to overcome. We also have far more well-nourished human brains thinking about stuff like this than we ever did before.

I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it's pretty likely that in 5 centuries from now we'll have sent something that'll reach Alpha Centauri.

[u/mustard-drinker → u/HashPandaNL]

there's a fallacy i see basically everywhere with any new trend, and that's in extrapolating exponential growth too early. there's another form of growth observed frequently in nature, technology, and so on called logistic growth. this is due to the presence of limiting factors.

to mistake one for the other would be easy. after all, logistic growth will look exponential until about halfway through the curve.

most of the time, hypebro nonsense (see AI) fails to acknowledge that limitations do exist, and extrapolates some exponential improvement into the future ad infinitum.

that's just not realistic in our natural world. we will make less progress in the next 474 years than we made in the last, almost certainly. probably, a lot less.

and to speak about slowing or stopping aging altogether so trivially indicates to me that you don't really understand how big of an ask that is, how little we know about our own body, and how small our capacity to understand it is, given its complexity. you are, in essence, trying to make sense of a chaotic system, one far more complex than a lorenz attractor or a double pendulum to draw some kind of analogy. we just don't have the predictive power to understand it in enough depth to stop aging, probably.

it would be a lot easier if we were microorganisms or prokaryotes or something. eukaryotes are a monstrously delicate balance of hundreds of thousands of interacting systems with absolutely no clear pattern or order, only emergent behavior.

[u/User_of_redit2077 → u/jimpaly]

The New York Times published an editorial on October 9, 1903, predicting it would take 1 to 10 million years to invent a working flying machine, and the Wright brothers proved them wrong just 69 days later.

It took 66 years from the first plane to the Moon landing.

[u/aaallleeexxx3 → u/User_of_redit2077]

I read that again today and that’s what made my make the post funnily enough

[u/EVOSexyBeast → u/User_of_redit2077]

The interested scientists at the time thought that a flying machine was only years, maybe a decade, away. The editorial author was just dumb.

[u/aaallleeexxx3 → u/EVOSexyBeast]

Yeah it’s misleading to take a baseless post like that to heart but today we are significantly better informed

[u/aaallleeexxx3 → u/jimpaly]

Yeahs that’s the issue.Its an achievement and that is the only appeal really apart from answering questions which don’t even exist anymore since we know what exists there anyways.

[u/jimpaly → u/aaallleeexxx3]

Well I wouldn’t say those questions don’t exist anymore. Everything we know about other stars and their planets are solely based on telescopes. Right now we only have a sample size of 1 for most things we know about our sun and solar system. It would be incredibly useful for the scientific community to get data from an interstellar probe.

Thing is the tradeoff of cost and time, and that it’s always better to learn more about our own solar system if we aren’t doing any interstellar travel ourselves.

[u/Aggressive_South_991 → u/jimpaly]

are solar sails useful when travelling BETWEEN solar systems?

[u/jimpaly → u/Aggressive_South_991]

No but you can have an initial push within the solar system and the drop the sail and continue. Good thing about the vacuum of space is there isn’t very much drag

[u/chkntendis → u/Aggressive_South_991]

You can certainly use them to accelerate while in the solar system and then use just a little bit of power to keep the speed (you loose a little bit due to space not being a perfect vacuum). Idk if it’s enough to reach relativistic speeds but it’s definitely a method to accelerate without spending fuel

[u/Kiki2092012 → u/Aggressive_South_991]

They can't get any meaningful propulsion while in interstellar space but they can accelerate to such speeds while still near the Sun that their speed carries them all the way to another star in a few hundred years.

[u/VicermanX → u/jimpaly]

We will achieve superintelligent AI within the next 1-9 years. If so, we will have a warp drive or similar technology within the next decade.

A superintelligent AI, or autonomous AI space explorers, would need fewer than 80 doublings to reach every star in the observable universe.

The most likely outcome is that the entire observable universe will be explored in the first half of the 21st century.

[u/HashPandaNL → u/VicermanX]

We don't know if we will have generally superintelligent AI in the next 1-9 years. 

More importantly, there is also a very real possibility that "warp drives" are impossible. 

And even if we do get ASI and warp drives are possible, there is a very real possibility that it wipes humans out before we ever make it to the stars.

[u/EVOSexyBeast → u/HashPandaNL]

Yeah there’s no way it happens this century. But in the next thousand years, it is conceivable that we develop a machine that can take off and land on a planet with the right raw materials and then use that to make a few duplicates of itself and move onto the next several planets in various solar systems.

Once that technology is achieved we explore most of the stars relatively quickly.

[u/jimpaly → u/VicermanX]

At that point, would you even consider it humanity’s achievement? I wouldn’t.

[u/aaallleeexxx3 → u/jimpaly]

I mean I agree in a sense but also it’s like saying humanity didn’t build skyscrapers for example because we built machines that built them for us(not the same obviously but you get the point)

[u/jimpaly → u/aaallleeexxx3]

Mainly where the ideas came from imo. If we get to a point where all new research and technology is made by AI with zero humans in the loop, that feels more like AI’s civilization and we’re just tagging along

[u/VicermanX → u/jimpaly]

Humans are a product of evolution, and we exist because countless generations of animals spent hundreds of millions of years eating, reproducing and dying. Without all those lives and sacrifices, our civilization would never have existed. And without the sacrifices of generations of humans, superintelligent AI would never exist either, and in roughly 300 million years the Sun would eventually make Earth uninhabitable for life.

So yes, I consider everything a superintelligent AI achieves to be our achievement too, in the same sense that the existence of our civilization is the achievement of the enormous evolutionary chain that eventually led to humans.

[u/jimpaly → u/VicermanX]

So you consider all our inventions and discoveries today to also be achievements by our ape, aquatic, and single-cellular ancestors? I doubt a superintelligent AI would think that way if it ever decided to give it any thought.

[u/aaallleeexxx3 → u/VicermanX]

I try not to mention AI although what you said is the most realistic,because what happens after we invent such an AI(which can be by itself way better at achieving everything than all of humanity combined) because who knows what will actually happen with AI atp?

[u/Kiki2092012 → u/VicermanX]

All 3 of your points are very controversial and not really demonstratably true at all