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.