Space(time) is absolutely, mind-boggling massive. Everyone knows it's big but it hard to comprehend how big and why there could be many alien civilizations out there capable of broadcasting or detecting but never intersect in any way because the detection windows of any 2 civilizations don't line up.
The Milky Way alone is ~150000-200000 light years across. Humans have been civilized for only some tens of thousands of years, and capable of sending and receiving signals for a mere century. Imagine that even at the speed of light the entire history of civilized life on Earth might come and go many times before something reaches us, or before the probe comes back.
There's no Earth-bound or common sense analogy that can convey this kind of vastness and emptiness.
[0]http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/alientech.php
Obviously their marketing department has given angels quite a rebranding over the last thousand-odd years, but still...
It seems that speaking to one would be quite a terrifying experience, especially if one were speaking in tongues.
And of course, many of Lovecraft's eldritch horrors were simply aliens that were so alien that the mere sight of them broke human minds, and that were no more concerned for humanity than humanity is for a particular anthill.
That's probably what an actual encounter with an alien is going to be like for us. We'll try to understand why a living infinite-dimensional hypersphere made of flesh made of time whose eyes are our eyes all at once just showed up and "unfolded" our sun into a non-Euclidean shape we can't even describe mathematically without being driven slowly to madness, while it won't even know we were there.
Which is just one of many bad assumptions in how people do these calculations. At a minimum you don’t get a straight path from A to B. Assuming any kind of limitation in distance traveled and your at the mercy of the distribution of whatever resource you need. Aka need rocky planets with liquid water, that’s likely going to be an very indirect path. Even just non binary star systems is significant. Further, assuming every trip is successful is again unlikely. How long you need to wait before the next trip is again a major qualifier.
For example, what happens if they first send a probe to verify habitability? Suddenly travel times more than double.
I have seen plenty of optimistic calculations that still add up to over a billion years before total colonization and sometimes much much higher than that. And that’s a billion years where expansion is a major priority at the frontier. Look at successful colonizations that don’t expand rapidly and again things keep slowing down.
This doesn't seem like a good idea if their method of traveling is generation ships. What would be the point?
I mean sure you could in theory send out an endlessly replicating probe that keeps going to other star systems, but that’s even more risky.
Now is that a large or small risk? I don’t have the technology but it’s something that could reasonably concern a civilization.
It's also entirely possible that we are the first, or one of the first, technological civilizations in the galaxy. Given how little we understand about the appearance of life, the emergence of multicellular life from single cell life, and the emergence of intelligence from multicellular life, there's not way to put an estimate on these probabilities.
Think about the fact that in 3.5 billion years there hasn't been any new abiogenesis on the only planet in the universe we know for sure can sustain life, and in this billion years a single life form has ever evolved from a single-cell to multi-cellular life, aren't the priors pretty decent that life is an extremely rare phenomenon? Given the fact that the Milky Way is somewhere around 13 billion years old, how often can we expect a once in 3.5 billion years event have happened?
Any freshly-evolved life would have to compete with organisms that have already been honing their survival strategies for literal billions of years. There's no reason to think such a thing is possible, and the lack of it doesn't speak one way or another to the difficulty of it happening in a virgin environment.
For a generation ship, are you referring to all the machinery that can maintain a balanced ecosystem of plants and animals and humans in order to provide food for the people during the trip to the new planet, and to make all the things needed to keep those people healthy during the trip such as medicine and drugs?
If so, there may be a way around that. Send all your colonists as frozen embryos or frozen sperm and eggs. Your ship only needs life support then to keep alive the people who run the ship. For food, don't grow it. Take it with you.
At first taking your food with you seems absurd, but if you had a food with the same caloric density as rice, enough of it to provide 2000 calories/day to one human for 100k years would fit in a sphere with a radius of 24.4 meters. So once your technological civilization figures out a way to preserve food such that they can make a rice ball equivalent with a 100k year storage life, a generation ship with a small crew becomes a whole lot more feasible.
For replacement crew throughout the journey, you can do a mix of using whatever kids the crew produces the old fashioned way and using kids produced from some of the frozen embryos/eggs/sperm.
I think technological civilizations will reach the point of being able to do this well before they are millions of years old. We aren't too far from being able to do it ourselves. We are probably farther out on the propulsion for the ship itself.
Science fiction set on generation ships tends to be extremely gloomy for good reason.
It's particularly interesting I think because now that you've brought it up, it seems to me there is a similar issue with much Earthly colonization or frontier expansion, and I've never seen it mentioned.
For example, anyone who left England to start or join a New World colony early on, when settlements were far apart and it was a struggle for each to survive, was entering an environment where their children would have a much harder, much more constrained life than they could have had back in England.
Were there debates back then about the morality of moving somewhere where you descendants, possibly for generations, would have harder lives than if you stayed where you are?
Of course I'm also assuming that the majority of the colonists were not only dirt poor, but also ignorant and uneducated and shamelessly lied to by the promoters of colonization.
In outer space, cosmic rays will make this process faster. Also, in outer space, it will need a constant source of light for biological reactions, and also just to keep from slowly cooling down to 0k through heat emission.
A more human-sized comparison is "100 average single-family homes in the US, all filled to the brim with rice". Or 60 ISSes, all filled completely with rice. Per person. And this is volume, not taking into account the weight of rice.
Minimum sustainable population size seems to be about 100 people, so consider how large a ship you'd need just to fit all that rice storage.
On the other hand, it is under two Mount Palomar observatory domes full.
I'm assuming anyone building a generation ship is going to build it in space, not build it on a planet's surface and then try to launch it, so size is not really going to be an issue.
The big engineering issue will be propulsion. We don't have anything now that could drive such a ship. My guess is that this is either something we'll have within the next couple hundred years or we'll never have it.
I'm assuming that by the time you want to build this kind of ship, you've gotten raising people from frozen embryos or frozen eggs and sperm perfected, and that is where most replacement crew would come from. That should greatly reduce the crew size needed.
I think we'll be able to handle the biological side of this within a hundred years, with a good chance of it being quite a bit sooner than that.
Keeping a computer running in outer space for a few thousand or hundred thousand years is a gigantic engineering task, far beyond anything we could achieve today.
And of course, in reality its unlikely you could rely on a single computer system and on 0 propulsion. It's far more likely that you'll need life support, engines, complex medical equipment, cooling systems, lights, all sorts of mechanical parts that will need power, replacements, and that degrade in time, especially at such huge scales.
Forgive my confusion.
If 100K light years is 100K years at c, how can
> 0.00006 c
yield 0.00150K (150) years?
Generally on Earth colonization has happened in order to provide a tangible economic benefit to those supporting the colonization effort. With someplace that you can only travel to and from by slow generation ship its hard to find any such economic benefit in having a colony there.
If you look at how quickly life began after the oceans settled out, then look at precisely how complex even the most primitive forms of life are (in terms of likelihood of stochastic construction to the point of sophistication to support evolutionary mechanisms) it seems incredibly unlikely that we originated here.
The vastness of this universe leads me to believe that it's impossible to dismiss the idea that there is an intelligence/lifeform sufficiently advanced as to appear to be a God to us.
If you have a few minutes start here for a broader context (starts of wholly unrelated but with some great concepts):
https://youtu.be/P-2P3MSZrBM?t=10084
If not, he drills into it here:
* We are a computer simulation (hence there is no colonization, we are in an experiment)
* There are like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 habitable planets in the universe. Just because something is "extremely unlikely" doesn't mean that it didn't happen to us. I.e. whomever this happened to, would ask himself that question. We may just be the ones it happened to.
Also: Why would they settle species from millions of years in their own past. If they wanted to colonize, they could start with their own life-forms.
Could be several things as well:
* We are a genesis project and they will simply come back later and settle in what we left behind (i.e. they let the ecosystem build for a few million years before trying out this settlement)
* They don't want to create competitors
* We are a population bomb, i.e. they just sent out billions of probes trying to populate any given habitable planet, and they couldn't just spawn themselves there and instead had to start from somewhere where a sustainable ecosystem would derive from
Depressing fiction idea: our progenitors return, look at what we've done with the world, shake their heads and leave us to suffer.
And it's unlikely that there is only a single recipe. Most likely there are many (just on Earth all the others died out)
It has huge assumptions. Namely the assumption that the current problems to colonization can be solved in a cost-effective manner.
The longest continuous length of time spent in what limited space flight we have is just under 440 days. Not to mention, all of it was spent in low Earth orbit. Once we go beyond that, we lose all protection from the Earth's magnetosphere.
Then there's also the loss of bone density due to lack of gravity. 1% per month is nothing to sneeze at.
We are not built for space travel. We are built to inhabit this planet. We have evolved to the conditions here.
And before you say that the generation ships will just fake gravity and have appropriate shielding. Where do you get that assumption? We can't fake gravity. We have a space station where they take 10 times the radiation as here on Earth because we can't even realistically shield that.
And then we get to "autonomous probes", the great handwave of people who think they can cleverly sidestep the "humans aren't built for space" issue.
Who builds them? For what purpose? What's our expected return? How can you justify the investment in time and resources to shoot into space, with absolutely no hope of even knowing there's a chance for a return on that investment until generations later, a probe that can at best return data.
And then there's the issue of it being an autonomous probe. Two words that hide a lot of other problems. A lot of other assumptions. One being that we'll have created an intelligence capable of running this thing.
In other words, the Fermi Paradox just assumes that all of these incredibly hard problems can and will be solved and that the solutions are logistically viable.
What if they're not?
Just to add, there are plenty of valid criticisms or plausible solutions to the Fermi paradox but I think you've failed to identify a single one.
You say that my view is "painfully anthropocentric", but how?
It seems your only response is "but aliens". That is not good enough.
You want to say that it is foolish of me to try and guess their intentions and capabilities, but that's what the paradox does as well. It assumes their intentions are to colonize and their capabilities allow it. With no proof. The only life we have to base anything off of is right here.
And if you think I haven't identified a single valid criticism of the Fermi paradox, then I'm just going to assume you aren't aware of the criticisms.
I've basically touched on this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Economic_explana...
So no, I'm not saying that just because it can't be done now, it can't be done ever. I'm saying the Fermi Paradox is basically saying "Once you solve these incredibly hard problems, this becomes easy."
I think the Fermi Paradox is phrased wrong. It should state that if it were possible to colonize the galaxy, it would have been done by now.
I'm not OP but the idea of thinking in terms of "return on investment" strikes me as very 20th century humanity.
Who's to say a future society wouldn't consider finding another civilisation to be a massive ROI? Or that a post-scarcity society living under Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism would even care about a return, instead of just doing things because they care to do them?
Yes we can, it’s a standard part of fairground rides.
(I’ll agree that the unknowns of space colonisation, and of the automation we’d need to be able to afford the infrastructure to even launch a serious effort, may prevent such colony efforts from happening)
Not to mention, they work within Earth's gravity. Take a tube and spin it around you in space, it does nothing to you because there's no other forces working on you. Nothing putting you in the frame of the spinning tube.
Once you lose the Earth, it becomes a lot trickier to tie you to a frame of reference. Nothing we can make has the mass necessary.
The best we could likely do is accelerate a ship at 1G. But that has problems, because about halfway through your journey, you have to start decelerating. And there's also the issue of turning.
Yes, it does — if you are in contact with the structure, the force you feel is the outside acting against your inertia to keep you in uniform circular motion. There is a layer of air in contact with the structure at any moment, so it ends up co-rotating, so anywhere inside except the axis of rotation itself will feel a force proportional to the distance from the axis.
> When we're talking about a generation ship, we're talking about something a little larger than the Gravitron.
Naturally. You can still spin them along and axis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
We are a long way from been able to build such structures, and I have doubts about the suitability of human political psychology given the travel times involved and how long countries last for on average, but the physics of spin-gravity is fine, even though there may be noticeable Coriolis effects depending on scale.
Humans evolved specifically to live on Earth, to live somewhere else, they need to be severely altered. Now you just seeded civilization of another species, that might turn out to be confrontational or outright hostile. Why would you do that?
Too see how well this works out on the local scale see colonization of Americas.
There is definitely motivation. Some people want to colonise Mars. Not everybody, but likely enough people to make it happen. Elon Musk wants to make it happen, and while there is no guarantee he'll get his wish, I think he has a decent chance of succeeding.
And establishing a permanent base on the Moon probably falls into a similar category. Moon has certain attractions over Mars – e.g. much more feasible target for space tourism, as a near-Earth testbed for developing technologies that may then be deployed to more distant parts of the solar system.
If the US (or a US-led multinational consortium excluding China) establishes a permanent base on the Moon and on Mars, that would increase the likelihood that China would do it too, in order to prove themselves equal to the US. (In principle other countries might feel the same urge, but China is possibly the only country who feels that urge strongly enough, and has sufficient resources, to actually pull it off; the US policy of excluding China from space ventures also gives China a motivation that does not apply to many other countries with which the US is willing to cooperate.)
Whether there is a "need" – the boundary between "wants" and "needs" is a value judgement. People who want to colonise Mars likely have different values from people like you who don't see it as worthwhile.
This is one of the reasons (he's spoken of) that he's having a decent amount of kids and also doing things like Neuralink.
They are supposed to be going back in 4 years time. That's probably going to be delayed, but still people will probably be back on the Moon before the end of this decade. And this time they are saying they plan to stay.
> Both projects have been financed through relatively undemocratic, non-market means.
So are LHC, ITER, the International Space Station, Project Artemis. The US is unwilling to spend the massive amounts it spent during the Apollo project on space right now, but it still spends a lot of money (NASA's budget is about 22 billion USD a year, and the military space budget is about 14 billion USD – over 36 billion spent on space every year) and has been pretty continuously since Apollo was closed down. It would have achieved more by now if it had been spending that money more efficiently. The advent of SpaceX and other commercial providers is changing that.
Our current gas emissions would disagree.
Also, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, curiosity, sheer ambition, etc, etc.
The thing is: we don't need to convince all of mankind to colonize another planet. All it takes is a few people. Crazy rich Mr. Musk is one example. He may not be able to achieve it, but maybe all we need is a few other Musks in the next generations and suddenly we'll be in other planets.
The Fermi Paradox discussion is fascinating.
> suddenly we'll be in other planets.
Who is “we” in this case, how does it affect you and me? (The point being is that such long-term projects are beyond current society capabilities)
I don't see any scenario where a generation ship can plausibly be expected to colonize another planet.
While at first it might seem that Mars or any other planet is the solution to our environmental problem, the easiest solution to the problem would be fixing this planet. Colonizing Mars would take up so many resources that fixing Earth might be more cost-effective.
Teraformation and space conquest are fassinating topics, but "fixing our behavior to avoid to fuck up the only accessible viable environment we have" is far from deserving only a mere "might be more cost-effective".
Or we could, you know, just transfer our consciousness to machines that can easily survive Mars and other environments and start our colonization after declaring ourselves to be Homo-sapiens-machina.
[0]https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/gravstat....
Bending spacetime enough to make a difference — even just to the time taken between here and Alpha Centauri — is beyond any known mechanism humans could build, even in principle, using the total resources of our entire solar system.
(Using unknown mechanisms: perhaps, but they’re unknown)
A constant-acceleration spacecraft could reach the opposite side of the galaxy in 24 years ship time. (That'd be over 100,000 years of Earth time, however.)
Conventional chemical propulsion don't have high enough impulse to do that. Possibly some kind of nuclear or matter-antimatter propulsion could?
> When it comes to [high thrust, high specific impulse] propulsion systems we might actually be able to build in the near future, the list includes Orion drives, Zubrin's nuclear salt water rocket, and maybe Medusa.
There have been many studied variations of Orion. Atomic Rockets cites hypothetical Isp between 3,000 and 12,000 seconds. Vehicles with delta-V of up to 100,000 m/s have been proposed. These could definitely be built, and would definitely work, but would require constructing, co-locating, launching, and detonating thousands of 5- to 15-kiloton nuclear explosives.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php...
Medusa is basically Orion crossed with the image of a sailor blowing into their own sails. A huge parachute is deployed in front of the spaceship, and the nuclear explosives are detonated between it and the bow of the spaceship. The parachute can capture more of the explosive output than Orion's pusher plate can, it weighs less (because all of its members are in tension), and it can use its rigging's elastic properties to dampen the intermittent thrust, as opposed to Orion's (heavier) hydraulic dampers. The proposal study for Medusa (which assumed thirty 25-kg explosives) came up with an Isp of 106,220 seconds, and a delta-V of 4775 m/s.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php...
The Nuclear Salt Water Rocket assumes plausible (but completely untested, so maybe impossible) continuous nuclear fission in a stream of uranium-salt-y water being sprayed into the combustion chamber. Assuming that this can be made to not blow itself up, 20%-enriched salt nets a theoretical Isp of ~7,000 seconds, and 90%-(weapons-grade) enriched fuel, with somewhat more optimistic efficiency assumptions, has a theoretical Isp of ~400,000 seconds and a delta-V of 10,000,000 m/s.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php...
There are also lots of other currently-less-plausible proposals for high-power high-efficiency rockets. (Many of them assume things like efficient proton-proton fusion, which might be possible, but we have no idea how to do it.) Atomic Rockets is a great website for reading about these.
My takeaway is that it's almost certainly possible to build spaceships that can travel at >0.01c, but it would take a great deal of resources organized by a society that is more trusting and responsible than we are now. After all, any vehicle with that kind of power is also an equally powerful weapon.
[0] spinning is accelerating, and you can do that forever, but it won’t help you get anywhere
I know it sounds depressing but I keep getting reminded of this [0] when thinking of loneliness in the universe. It's the most apt description I came across in recent memory.
It's almost like all intelligent life in the universe was put into escape-proof cages.
We need to rage against this! Do it for all the others who can't.
That's giving humans a lot of credit. Civility has been regressing. I would be embarrassed for another civilization to find us now. Sure, we may have more technology and scientific understanding, but how we treat one another needs another world than civil.
If you are wondering where we might find a definition matching that sense, try the first sentence of the article you linked:
“A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, a form of government and symbolic systems of communication such as writing.”
The notion that we'd all be roughly at the same level of advancement is statistically impossible pop-sci-fi fantasy.
In my opinion, it's unlikely that they are even organic individuals anymore. Even the separate alien "entities" might have a process of merging once they achieve a certain advancement.
We are like fungus to them.
Maybe the fungi think that about us? They've been around longer than we have and take up more of the planet.
It looks like that to us, because our influence is visible over 80+% of the ground, but there's fungus IN us and covering more surface area than you can see. Imagine anywhere there's water (including from the air and including the oceans), there's fungus over a % of the land and organisms that you can see with a microscope. Fungus influence covers far more of the surface.
Fungi are very much overlooked, their role in forests alone is amazing let alone everything else they do.
If someday, some scientists discovered some kind of conscious fungal intelligence, i would not be surprised.
Just like a goldfish in your apartment. To you, you are alone, goldfish don't count as company. And to the goldfish, it is alone, as humans don't count as whatever a goldfish thinks a friend is.
What new discoveries, specifically?
Let alone recognize another savage on a different continent who might be doing the same experiment.