There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with staying put.
In fact, technically, there's nothing here. It's all out there.
Jupiter: ~0.095% of the total mass, and ~71% of the non-solar mass.
Saturn: ~0.03% of the total mass, and ~19% of the non-solar mass.
Uranus and Neptune: Contribute a small percentage to the remaining non-solar mass.
All other objects: (inner planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc.) account for less than 0.002% of the solar system's total mass.
Your brain mass is about 3 disposable water bottles in weight and we can debate what parts of that are thinking and actually "you".
You are insignificant on the scale of the solar system let alone the universe.
>Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she would see in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain...
~Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
For whatever reason, humanity's attitude in this regard has changed drastically in the last century. We can't even bother to make the next generations, and a shrinking population eventually (quite quickly, really) shrinks to zero. Not only do they want to "stay put", they want to lay down and die.
That doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. It seems like a distraction from the crowd that would save the planet by extinguishing humanity if that's what it took. Though what value the planet might have with all of us gone I leave as an exercise for the reader.
The first priority of any society that wants to continue to exist into the future must always be to make the next generation. If you do not do this, or if you just leave the task to others hoping that someone else will do it, then you are behaving in a way that will in all probability lead towards there being no next generation sooner or later. The "global warming is the apocalypse" movement constantly talks about how the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to have no children.
>The only large-scale planetary engineering in humanity's history is Veniforming its home world.
So it is claimed, but from my point of view it looks very much as if it's intent on making itself extinct through fertility decline. But at least carbon dioxide levels will return to normal, eh?
By "literally nothing there," I mean there's literally nothing for us. Three stars and a few Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone that are, more than likely, uninhabitable by humans. There's nothing there worth going all that way for.
I like sci-fi as much as the next person but the reality of the situation, it seems to me, is that the universe is mostly empty, vast, and inhospitable to human life.
So is the Pacific Ocean for practical definitions of emptiness. You don't got to the empty places.
I’m not sure that after spending a lifetime in an ample space colony its inhabitants would feel nostalgic of the time we spent sitting on round rocks cooking around a star.
Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars
That's the fallacy in the given argument.
Might very well be the last question we need to ask ourselves.
“Literally everything is in space.”
There was literally nothing there? Why go all that way? To see what was there. And then to make something there.
[Edit, because I'm rate limited: No, interstellar space is something to cross, to get to stellar space. You think the New World was rich? How about a whole solar system of untapped resources?
That's why people will try to go.]
No there wasn't. There was a whole continent of untapped resources.
You can argue that the solar system is a lot of untapped resources too. Harder to extract than sailing a piece of wood across an ocean growing some food, and killing the people who are already there. Harder than colonising Antarctica or the surface of the sea too, but there are resources - not just minerals but solar energy too.
But interstellar space? Beyond the Oort Cloud? There's no evidence of anything other than perhaps some very sparse dust. That is nothing, and (jokes aside) completely incomparable to Ohio.
The hypothetical riches were quite obvious: same stuff we have over here, but not owned by someone yet.
What are they hypothetical riches of outer space?
This is a question we should think about clearly and logically without resorting to stuff like "oh tally-ho the adventure!" type nonsense.
Just imagine the economic output of a civilisation a million times the size of ours.
Then we can use all of that new productivity to start working toward the next rung?
Our economy is not currently throughput limited on water or space so I don’t find this compelling.
The odds of a spacecraft hitting a single particle of dust while in space are 100%.
A spacecraft hitting a single particle of dust at 0.2c will impart tens of millions of joules into the body of the spacecraft, the equivalent of getting hit with hundreds of pulses from the most powerful laser ever created by humanity-- simultaneously.
Or concentrating several kilogram's worth of TNT into the size of a particle of dust and detonating it.
In any case, we should launch more than one.
Most of the designs for a system like this are "chip" designs where a single 1cm x 1cm silicon wafer is towed by the sail.
This design prevents the need for lasers so large that they create enough ozone to kill the entire human race.
The contents of the chip vary, based on who is speculating, but tend to contain exotic, uninvented, circuitry capable of both harvesting energy from the laser and doing "something" of use besides zipping by the target at 0.2c deaf, dumb, and blind. Sometimes it's even an AI-enhanced swarm! (Shoulda figured out how to work blockchain in there, post-doc guy)
Regardless, during the 40 trillion kilometer voyage to Proxima Centauri, that 1x1cm silicon wafer (and the sail) will hit space dust, and numerous other atoms and molecules (including carbon rings) because empty space... isn't.
Technically yes. I think there's a significant variety of sizes of dust or larger-than-dust particles in interstaller medium but I don't really have much to back that up.
> how often you’re likely to hit one in the interstellar medium is quite speculative.
Also technically yes. But unless you can map every single particle of dust, and their trajectories, I think the risk is absolutely real.
As far as i see with today's tech - like Starlink's ion thruster + classic nuclear reactor - we can get to 300km/s in about 4 stages. Straightforward improvement of ion thrusters - mainly voltage increase and associated engineering (which will immediately happen once we start flying to Mars and beyond as ion thruster currently our best/fastest option inside the Solar system) - can get us to 1000-2000km/s, i.e. under 1000 years to Alpha Centauri (that for a large populated spacecraft, and for just tiny probe to announce our existence (and to send back photos which we'd receive using Sun's gravitational lensing) we can do even better). And using interstellar gas and dust scramjet-style will improve on those numbers (as such ship is mostly limited by the working mass it starts with while the reactors would be able to continue produce the energy much longer).
This is a Bussard ramjet [1]. The interstellar medium is too thin to make it work. (Maybe we'll find the husk of an ancient ramjet from an earlier era of the universe floating around one day...)
Edit to add: we basically understand the physics of accelerating something to a high speed, what it would need to be made from, etc., afaik all within the realm of possibility- if we could gather and direct that much energy and then wait long enough to decelerate at the other end.
It seems like the questions that are completely unaswered are: keeping people alive and healthy for that long, and how the ship could survive if it hit something.
Whipple shields [1].
> Something that's not "energy shields"
The interstellar medium contains lots of charged particles [2]. Electromagnetic deflection is perfectly realistic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
[2] https://www.space.com/interstellar-space-definition-explanat...
As far as the laser goes, ~2MJ is the total output. Energy that reaches the fuel pellet due to inefficiencies throughout the path of the laser, the actual "hitting power", is hundreds-ish kJ.
the other thought is a space ram jet sucking in particles heard of some idea like this
>I just wonder if humanity’s adventurous nature is leading us away from a proper focus on the sustainability of our civilization, our specie, and our fragile planetary environment?
But we still need spaceflight at least for planetary defense against asteroids, mining asteroids(so we don't have to mine Earth), etc.
With chemical rockets, not much.
With "a propellant-less propulsion propulsion system such as solar sails or electric sails," bringing water (propellant) to low-earth orbit starts making sense [1], as does mining platinum, but only if "the quantity of platinum from space would substitute an equal quantity of terrestrial platinum," i.e. moving heavy industry off the Earth's surface [1].
Given asteroid-mining profitability is dominated by "the throughput rate, which depends on the mining process," it's possibly to see a path to certain rare-earth minerals becoming profitable to mine in space if environmental controls on Earth are tightened while constant-thrust propulsion technologies advance.
Yes. (Deöbiting from LEO is cheap, like 90 m/s for the Space Shuttle, because you can use the atmosphere.)
I suggest re-framing the the question as the cost of preserving the objectively limited and to the best of our knowledge singularly unique in the Universe resource, which is the surface of Earth.
Acquiring resources that do not deplete or spoil the future of life on this planet should be in everyone's best interest.
The reality is that saving our environment will be a whole set of difficult and profoundly boring solutions to real, known problems.
Would be cool if we could solve it with badass rockets, explosions, big noises, and adventure, but the complete lack of even remotely convincing answers to first order questions on how this actually works belies the fact that it doesn’t. It makes no sense.
We need to develop better plastics, proteins, and pesticides. Not send protein blobs to other planets because it looks cool in sci fi movies.
The reality is more people get passsionate about working on things that look cool in sci fi movies than developing plastics, proteins and pesticides for a mediocre paycheque. This lesson--that the path to groundbreaking technologies is through inspirational moonshots, not committees prescribing what is and isn't necessary--is so thoroughly repeated throughout history that it's a wonder we keep missing it.
Groundbreaking technologies are not created via moonshots. They’re created by decades of slog. Moonshots can launch from an unremarkable platform of slog, but the slog had to happen. You just cannot speedrun the vast majority of questions that need to be answered to power a breakthrough.
That’s why I’ll question glory-chasers who want to sit on the rocket but can’t take a few thousands of pay cut to stare for a few years at a true problem that needs solving.
Our species’ actual heroes are those who powered through the slog.
At 53 and good health, i'm contemplating that my end in 30-40 years would be me buying a one way to Mars and just exiting the habitat out without suit after enjoying a dinner with a Martian sunset view, breaking, even in such a small way, the chains of "We come from the earth, we return to the earth" :)
Seems much easier to reframe the "chains" of earth into acceptance of a remarkable cycle that we're privileged to get a glimpse of from the inside and just die happily here with your loved ones.
This works for most people. Most humans didn't leave Africa or Mesopotamia or the Old World, either originally or in the Age of Exploration, and most Americans today don't have a passpport.
The acceptance would have me still in Russia :)
Novelty, for one.
Obviously one is free to want that. When I think of the opportunity costs involved, it seems repugnant to be honest. The opposite of glorious.
Current thinking is quite hostile to doing the work. You might not be able to build the things you think you can. You certainly won't build the things you think you can't.
More than barely. "A 40-year one-way interstellar flyby mission to the nearest stars will require a relativistic spacecraft speed in excess of 6000 AU/yr (i.e., > 0.1c)" [1].
That means, practically speaking, nuclear-fusion, antimatter-annihilation and directed-energy propulsion. All of which are TRL ≤ 2.
My bet would be on fusion propulsion. It's inherently easier than fusion power since you don't need to bother converting the energy to electricity. That said, solar sails [2] and directed-energy anti-drone weapons [3] are seeing quiet progress.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200000759/downloads/20...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/mission/acs3/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_(laser_weapon)
Nobody debates this. The point is that 0.1c propulsion is not necessarily 100+ years away. And its 40-year transit time is not "barely feasible," it's comparable to present deep-space mission timelines [1].
KineticLensman•3h ago
You can't do a solar slingshot like you can with (say) Jupiter because the sun is essentially at rest with respect to the rest of the solar system. You could still do an Oberth manoeuvre.
ta1243•2h ago
Your speed once you get to 1AU would I assume be far higher than if you had simply started at Earth
KineticLensman•2h ago
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/its-surprisingly-hard-to-g...
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
But not with respect to other star systems.
KineticLensman•2m ago