Dead Horse Interchange

Also it'd be one hell of a long journey.

Rushy wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 05, 2019 11:34 pm

Kugelfisch wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 04, 2019 6:09 pm

But where to?

Didn't NASA say they've finally found an Earth-like planet?

Not exactly, no. It's not like humans will ever reach another star anyway.

Kugelfisch wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 08, 2019 6:20 pm

It's not like humans will ever reach another star anyway.

Well, they won't with that attitude, that's for sure

Keith Chegwin wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 08, 2019 6:21 pm

Kugelfisch wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 08, 2019 6:20 pm

It's not like humans will ever reach another star anyway.

Well, they won't with that attitude, that's for sure

It ain't happening.

I mean, who the fuck would fund an expedition that would take several generations to complete? We don't even have this whole cryogenic stuff figured out that harder sci-fi tales use for long-distance travels.

I'm more worried that Zerg invade the planet and some retarded Protoss nuke us from Orbit.

VoiceOfReasonPast wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 08, 2019 7:52 pm

I mean, who the fuck would fund an expedition that would take several generations to complete? We don't even have this whole cryogenic stuff figured out that harder sci-fi tales use for long-distance travels.

Any amount of effort spent on such an attempt - one that's very likely to be futile anyway and would span an amount of time unreasonable to expect any planning to be valid for - would be far better spent either to make our situation here better or on Mars.
Proxima Centauri is the closest star to us. That's still over four light years.
For some perspective: The current fastest man-made object will be the Parker Solar Probe. It's estimated to reach about 430000 miles per hour. A few calculations tell us that it would take about 6600 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

Now, the good news is that if you were ever able to make something approaching lightspeed in a meaningful way, you wouldn't need to worry about cryonic sleep too much. Time would pass slowly enough for the crew that it'd likely feel like a fairly short trip.
Bad news is that people will never, ever put in the effort to get there. Not to mention that the closest stars would be useless to reach anyway because there isn't anything interesting there.

No matter how you spin it, it's much more likely that people will either have wiped out each other over the next thousands of years or that something happens that did just that.
Look, I love Sci-Fi but people underestimate how unlikely it is that we'll ever travel the stars. It's the logical answer to the question why we haven't had first contact either. Civilizations just don't get that far. Shit's too far away to even attempt it. It's pretty much impossible that there isn't other life in the universe but it also just doesn't seem possible to travel around even a galaxy for a civilization. There's not necessarily always a forward progress and even less likely a reason for any living creature to attempt it.
Just imagine being able to upload yourself into a computer and live in the perfect virtual reality without bodily needs. I find it easy to imagine that being the end point for any civilization as far as star faring attempts are concerned.

That last bit reminds me how some transhumanist sci-fi settings accomplish FTL travel by just emailing your consciousness into another body. Of course mankind still somehow has to have reached your destination in the first place.

And to paraphrase Douglas Adam: space is fuckhuge. Though on the bright site our own solar system probably has all the raw resources we could ever need. If we can figure out how to mine that shit.

The time scale involved is just nuts. We'd need people willing to spend generations breeding and dying on a space ship, where the slightest mistake would doom the expedition. For thousands of years.

We went from swords to internet in a thousand years. Less. In another thousand, our species could be easily wiped out. I always liked the answer evolutionists give about how the universe tends towards entropy. They get asked if life doesn't disprove that theory. Their response is that life is a thin coat of paint over a single planet. It's a passing fad. Even the amount of time life of any kind has existed on this planet is nothing compared to the age of the universe. When you look at life as a percentage of the age of our universe, its presence doesn't in any way contradict the entropic principle. No more than a snowball disproves the existence of heat when tossed into an erupting volcano.

Movieblob can dream his star trek fantasies about a superior future, but what's easier? Making this world less shitty, or colonizing an entire other planet light-years away? And we can't even do the former. LOL

rabidtictac wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 7:41 am

The time scale involved is just nuts. We'd need people willing to spend generations breeding and dying on a space ship, where the slightest mistake would doom the expedition. For thousands of years.

Wasn't this the plot of a Star Trek?