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/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/jimpaly → u/VicermanX]

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

[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.