And if you want a long-term happy Earth civilization, what’s better than digging out Helium-3 from the Moon to run clean fusion plants hither and yon?

Sef, your attitude is pretty defeatist. You’re giving up at the foot of a barrier that looks insurmountable to you, but you’ve forgotten about the many barriers we’ve already passed, barriers that looked insurmountable just decades or centuries ago: steam- and internal combustion-powered vehicles, computers, lasers, flight, space flight! There were likely plenty of people who scoffed at all of those things, but thank goodness for those who persevered.

That’s not an argument against trying, but we have to keep it in perspective. Building a complex system that has to remain in service for 70000 years is like buying a really expensive lottery ticket. If it can’t be justified at a near-certain probability of failure, it can’t be justified.

Viewing it on a galactic time scale, we’ll be out of here in the blink of an eye.

Sef writes:
Industrialisation of the outer solar system is not remotely feasible.

And your source for this opinion would be … ?

Sef can’t contemplate such an undertaking, therefore it must not be possible.

Hopefully, Sef is not in any position to dictate policy to scientific minds.

And your source for this opinion would be … ?

To inhabit and industrialize, one needs people, mechanisms, raw materials (for both people and mechanisms), and energy. Raw materials are found everywhere.

The only thing the outer solar system does not have is an abundance of solar energy. Large, very thin, very lightweight mirrors accomplish concentration of solar energy. The mass fraction of an energy collection system dedicated to concentration necessarily increases the further out you go, yes, but it’s not overwhelming until you get to Neptune-ish. Technically viable solutions for further out exist, though mass of collector dominates once you get out to fractions of a lightyear.

In some cases? The burning stupid threatens to burn up our potentially last window off this planet. And yeah- perhaps confining such stupid to a single world makes sense to the inhabitants of all spaces surrounding us. Sucks to be Human from their viewpoint? The concept of H.Sap being the Multidimensional SAP, AkA Punch Line of the bad joke is not how I want to think of us!

The way to write a different story is to DO IT for real.

One example being the concept about making enough Antimatter to become an Interstellar Travel Capable species “Bankrupting” the planet. Bullshit. Pure Bullshit. That’s based on a concept of “spending” which ignores the inherent creation of true wealth En Passant while doing some grandiose projects.

NASA for example. Robert Heinlein wrote Chapter and Verse upon how much ROI our species really got from “space Programs” and Spin offs. Let alone the other continued revenue streams that get handwaved away as “not a factor” even though they ARE a factor.

GPS? The computer we’re all using to participate in Boing on?

Oh, some of my thoughts and facts may be vexing to folks that have a closed mind or apparently- a loathing of thought itself. Faith’s a wonderful thing and not to lightly be deprecated insofar as it does not become the demarcation between science and species suicide. Suicide’s antithetical to many faiths. Being anti-science=anti exploration is species suicide. Gee, Logic can interact with Faith to alter our chances of survival. I hope..

The closer? Antimatter as a power transfer medium- I doubt calling it anything else is accurate, might make our survival assured. Denying our need to get off this single planet is species suicide of a when, not if scenario. What part of- Get off this planet or we all die here is needing further explanation? Dying here may be a thinkable option for some folks. Some of us want to live. Both here and eventually elsewhere. Please don’t try to force your chosen suicide on our species and all others we share this world with..Please?

Turning the entire solar system into a space ship that we could move through space to visit other star systems.

I thought one of the points of solar sails was that, once you built them, all the energy was free: from the sun. Why would you need a multimillion-gigawatt laser?

SamSam,

If you can find it, read Rocheworld (or The Flight of the Dragonfly) by Robert Forward.

Do they all go inward, obsessed with their own simulations? Do they kill themselves off? Do they have singularities? Fermi paradox stuff…

Even if mind uploading technology existed, though, getting a ship up to relativistic speeds (even 10% of light speed) might be pretty difficult…Project Daedalus assumed fusion explosions initiated by powerful lasers (or electron beams) which I think would be pretty far beyond anything that can be built today, might it turn out there are basic physical problems with building a laser of sufficient power whose mass isn’t too gigantic? One alternate idea for interstellar travel that keeps the ship light is to have a ship pushed along by some sort of beam from the solar system–perhaps a huge laser pushing along a solar sail type craft, or perhaps a stream of pellets of some kind accelerated to fast velocities by a giant mass driver. One interesting variation I’ve seen is that the pellets might include some basic nanotechnology that allows for course correction, so that the beam doesn’t suffer from the spreading effect that a natural laser or particle beam would. Another variation is to make the pellets themselves into miniature sails that are continually pushed by a laser from Earth…both ideas are discussed in this post from the centauri-dreams blog, and also on p. 142-146 of the Centauri Dreams book, you can see this section on google books here.

Icarus, son of Daedalus: who in his youthful exuberance flew too close to the sun and melted the wax in his wings and plummeted to his doom?

Fitting analogy.

Thank you for the honest article; but the point is made: this rock here is all we get. No new life. No new civilizations. No boldly going etc etc. . .

I hate to be a downer here, but facts is facts. I mean, look at the humans around you: we can’t even get it together to feed all the people on this planet, and the food is ALREADY HERE! Yet somehow a global culture of aquisitiveness and xenophobia will *Transform!* into one of unity, purpose and vision?

Hey, if you gotta dream, dream big. It’s the dreamers and explorers that brought much of the great things we have in this world to light (and, ahem, a few of the not-so-great. . .)

“Or, more probably, we could squander our resources and experience profound and irreversible technological regression.”

Yeah. That unfortunately seems like a head clearing dose of reality to me.

Oh well: Excelsior!

Constructing an interstellar sail would probably cost far more—and that’s not including the truly astronomical electric bill associated with powering the multimillion-gigawatt laser that would need to shine on the outbound sail for years on end.

I thought one of the points of solar sails was that, once you built them, all the energy was free: from the sun. Why would you need a multimillion-gigawatt laser?

Of course, all my knowledge is from A.C. Clarke’s The Wind from the Sun, so there is much I don’t know.

The primary driving force of colonisation, as it has always been, will be economics. There is trillions upon trillions of dollars to be made out there, all it takes is the means to become cost effective enough. It doesn’t make sense to say that ‘we can’t solve world hunger, so how can we do this?’ European nations were corrupt, diseased, unjust places when they set out to take over the planet. Getting your house in order before you go take over another one is a nice idea, but it isn’t necessary & it simply isn’t how human civillisations operate.

Essentially *when* it becomes profitable, we will do it, and like all human endeavors it will create as many problems as it does solutions.

Is the best we can think of to do with our $150B investment in the ISS to DE-ORBIT it? Is NOONE thinking of ways to, say, push it farther out there for ‘safekeeping’ until we’re ready to make a serious commitment to off-world living?

It’ll be a looooooong time before we’re able to ‘terraform’ even a small area of any moons or planets. Until that day, ‘space is the only place’. Maybe the serious thinkers should start looking around for visionaries like Gerard O’Neill’s students and ask: What MUST we do? And then *commit*.

==

Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean.
- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859)
Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy

I think it’s a safe bet that by the time humans are up to a jaunt outside the heliosphere, we won’t be at all confused by robot missions vs manned missions. Even to ‘step foot on another world’ may well be something robots get to do, and still have it count.

I’m less certain that this species will ever get it together enough to do business on these local worlds, never mind the larger neighborhood. And even if it’s ever possible, I’m not sure we would want to.

Most people I know don’t understand or care about the difference between the dots of light in the sky that are stars, and the dots of light in the sky that are wanderers. If I can imagine a world where this post would matter to them -in a positive way- then I can imagine a world where there’s quite a bit else that’s changed for the better.

Even Carl Sagan was sort of bitter about the chances that Earth might escape our isolation. He speculated that this planet and this species might not ever be important enough for ET to even talk to us, never mind an actual visit. If *this guy* is cynical about it, I don’t know that I could say much different.

There’s a lot of reason to believe that Luna is as far as *this* human civilization will ever send humans to. A future human culture that could land on the nearby rocky worlds would be different from ours, in the same way Inuit are different from Dorset.

(I suppose we could build an enormous focusing mirror instead, but that would be silly.)

Also, the environment would thank us.

“We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” – Carl Sagan

Much love to you all !

Throw your computer in the trash. You don’t deserve the benefits of exploration.

As to the need for very long term planning to justify space travel- I suspect that will take care of itself, but not in my lifetime.
For 400 years or so, human energy use has risen by an order of magnitude per century. At that rate, in 300 years, we’ll be consuming all sunlight that reaches the earth- no more local room for consumption growth.
The human body is a physical system- in time we will learn to repair all damage to it, vastly expanding our lifespans. The brain is an informational system- in time we will learn to upload minds into more durable computers.
If people knew they were likely to live many thousands of years, but had no room to grow without space travel, then they’re going to try and figure out space travel. They may take a thousand-year or so detour to build a Dyson swarm, but that’s infinitesimal on a cosmic scale.