Growing up reading science fiction I always believed that eventually humans would travel to other solar systems but now I seriously doubt human interstellar space travel will ever be possible. There are two major obstacles I see in human interstellar travel: physics and people. Some of the physical challenges of human interstellar travel are known. I won’t go into the details but traveling to the closet star is 4.24 light years away and in the best case scenario would take hundreds of years to reach that destination. The energy requirements for sending humans to another star would be huge. For example, there is not only acceleration to consider but also the time and energy to decelerate when reaching the destination. Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, stated at least the total energy output of the entire world [in a given year] would be required to send an unmanned probe to the nearest star. Then there are the problems of time dilation, communication, interstellar medium (hit a pebble while moving half the speed of light would be bad) and all the problems associated with humans living in space. Additionally, there are the unknown challenges of interstellar travelâ€"we won’t know these problems until someone attempts the journey. According to Wikipedia, at a 2008 Joint Propulsion Conference, multiple experts opined that it was improbable that humans would ever explore beyond the Solar System. I know there are theories about wormholes, Alcubierre drive and other notions but these ideas seem fanciful.
The people part of the challenge has to do whether humans will be able to continue to exist on Earth and advance technologically without dying off. Humans could face challenges that slow or halt technological progress: severe climate change, plague, asteroid impact, etc. There have been at least five extinction events and 99% of all species that have lived on Earth have already died out. We could also end up just killing each other. There are large numbers of people right now who are actively trying to kill each other and a sizeable number of people who believe in, and welcome, an apocalyptic future. In order for interstellar travel to be possible we need the ability to create huge amounts of energy. If we develop technologies that can create that kind of energy we create a situation where that power could be used to endanger life on Earth, either by accident or design. I always thought the idea of humans being endangered by a malevolent artificial intelligence was fanciful but there are scientists smarter than I who consider this an actual possible threat. I don’t consider myself to be a pessimistic but there is the real possibility that human life on this planet is limited and we won’t figure out a way to keep life going long enough to discover ways to successfully travel to other habitable worlds.
I’m posting this hoping someone will convince me I’m wrong.
I wish I could prove you wrong. There are challenges. I see the biggest one really being human beings. Can our society make similar leaps in advancement, not just technological but social, that we did in the past 2,000 years? Maybe, maybe not.
GSOgymrat, thanks! Unless the physics is correct with regard to Worm Holes, it will never be, for the reasons you give. Solitary
Without the advent of practical FTL (which seems a smidge unlikely), humans will never live outside of the solar system. And yes, simply maintaining our high-tech lifestyle while at the same time not irrevocably damaging the Earth is a dicey challenge.
However, it is possible that human-produced machines could carry on space exploration. Machines require little life support, do not suffer any psychological problems associated with prolonged isolation, and loses would be far more tolerable than loss of human life. And unlike humans, machines can be continually upgraded, transhumanism notwithstanding. There's a reason why robotic probes explored the moon and nearby planets well in advance of humans.
It's entirely possible that self-replicating machine explorers could continually planet-hop the galaxy without regular contact with humans. Should human civilization collapse, that might even be humanity's main legacy.
I hear you, GSO. I grew up reading SF during the golden age of SF, with Asimov, Simak, Brunner, Heinlein, Van Vogt, Bradbury and so on. The idiocy is that if we were all on the same page minus religion, a whole bunch more would have and could have happened. Quantum teleportation is now a thing, if only experimentally.
http://phys.org/news/2014-09-quantum-teleportation.html
I believe what humans can conceive they can achieve. We have been doing so for centuries, and even if FTL drive or Star Trek Warp Drive isn't achievable, many other things are; life extension, a clean pollution free world, the end of diseases and so on. How sad that we can visualize these things only to be held back by bronze age stupidity and greedy politicians.
Quote from: Hydra009 on March 05, 2015, 12:11:14 PM
Without the advent of practical FTL (which seems a smidge unlikely), humans will never live outside of the solar system. And yes, simply maintaining our high-tech lifestyle while at the same time not irrevocably damaging the Earth is a dicey challenge.
However, it is possible that human-produced machines could carry on space exploration. Machines require little life support, do not suffer any psychological problems associated with prolonged isolation, and loses would be far more tolerable than loss of human life. And unlike humans, machines can be continually upgraded, transhumanism notwithstanding. There's a reason why robotic probes explored the moon and nearby planets well in advance of humans.
It's entirely possible that self-replicating machine explorers could continually planet-hop the galaxy without regular contact with humans. Should human civilization collapse, that might even be humanity's main legacy.
I agree that using machines for interstellar travel is a much more viable option and I believe unmanned probes are better for space exploration. I'm actually not too keen on the recent focus on sending humans to Mars. Our recent technological advances have been in computer software, hardware, miniaturization and robotics and this lends itself to unmanned exploration more than manned. I feel sending humans to Mars at this point in our technological development is more political than practical and diverts resources that would be better spent on projects that are currently feasible. The Mars One project is a perfect example of what I consider to be a publicity stunt-- a reality television, corporate funded mission with completely unrealistic goals. I also confess that I find the idea of sending people to Mars to die inherently a failure-- why not just fire corpses to the planet and claim you put people on Mars. I'm confident that eventually we can successfully have manned missions to Mars but at this point I feel our resources are better spent exploring the solar system with unmanned probes.
Fun Fact: at its closest distance Mars is 0.5 AU from Earth, while the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is 13,000 AU from Earth.
Been reading the "Long Earth" series by Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter. The concept is based on a suddenly discovered means to travel to parallel dimensional earths- each fractionally different than ours. Fascinating idea. We as yet don't know so much about our universe, multiverses or other conceptual ideas. You never know; stepping across dimensions might one day be a possibility. But I'm no physicist, Hijiri or josephpalazzo might poo poo the idea.
Quote from: stromboli on March 05, 2015, 06:49:14 PM
Been reading the "Long Earth" series by Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter. The concept is based on a suddenly discovered means to travel to parallel dimensional earths- each fractionally different than ours.
Reminds me of the TV show
Sliders.
Similar in concept to Sliders, except in this case just about everyone is given the means to "step" as they call it. It poses several interesting conflicts when you consider the ability of mass movement of people to a new earth with every resource available and no government to control them. I won't try to describe the scenario because it is complicated, but it is a fairly good series- 3 so far- based on an interesting concept.
The big difference is that the earths are all without humans. Other life forms and sentient beings are encountered, and the earths change incrementally as they step, so earths thousands of steps away are quite different and not like ours. It also talks about what constitutes intelligent life and how tiny the odds of an earth teeming with life is.
Sounds interesting. I downloaded the first book in the series to my Kindle, only $3.99!
Lol, enjoy.
Quote from: GSOgymrat on March 05, 2015, 10:15:26 AM
I’m posting this hoping someone will convince me I’m wrong.
You're not wrong. When you get right down to it, we are animals. Savages really. We are genetically wired to want to band ourselves together into groups and then kill or otherwise control every other group we can find. These genetics can of course change over time. But these changes happen at the speed of evolution which is orders of magnitude slower than the speed at which we develop and use new technologies.
Which means we are almost certain to invent and produce a weapon that will easily and effectively drive our species and most others into extinction long before evolution bestows us with the genetic wiring required to keep us from ever building such a weapon much less using it.
In short, we're fucked. Truth be told, we were probably fucked the moment that first primate realized hitting your enemy in the head with a rock was more effective than using your fists.
The good news is in the mean time, we've got beer and sex. If you can't get off the train, you may as well enjoy the ride.
The big problem with interstellar travel is it makes no economic sense. The distances are so vast that it takes tremendous amounts of energy to send anything larger than a small, slow-moving probe between the stars. the original Voyager space probe left our planet 38 years ago and is still within our Sun's protective bubble. There are several glaring engineering problems to overcome when trying to build an interstellar space ship. No.1 is reliability. You'll need spare parts. No. 2 is fuel. How are you going to power something for the decades or centuries it will take to reach another solar system?
That doesn't even get into the problem of identifying a candidate system. You'll need to send probes to many systems to find one suitable for exploration, wait decades or longer for it to arrive then several years for it to send a signal home. Then you'll need to start planning an expedition, including how to finance it. Which gets us back to the original problem: return on investment. There is no way to make the expedition pay for itself. that is assuming we still have a civilization capable of planning such an expedition once we identify a suitable solar system to explore. The way things are going I have my doubts about that.
Powering our civilization takes energy from the Earth; energy which took millions of years to develop. We have burned though more than half that energy in 200 years. Without oil we cannot feed the billions of people on our planet, and our oil will run out before the end of this century. Believing we will send a privileged few off-planet while billions of people starve and fight over increasingly rare energy resources is naive.
Quote from: Light Craftsman on March 10, 2015, 03:19:50 PM
The big problem with interstellar travel is it makes no economic sense.
You seen to know about economics and I am curious if you think a manned mission to Mars make economic sense.
Economics is not my area of expertise, but my wife got her undergrad degree in finance. Does that count?
As for Mars, no, a manned mission does not make sense, financially or otherwise. Not right now, anyway. Keeping the crew safe from stellar radiation on the trip will be a major problem. The Earth's magnetic field protects us, but a spacecraft obviously does not have a magnetic field absent a huge generator, so how do we shield astronauts from radiation on a six-month trip? No one has answered that. Then when the astronauts get to Mars they'll have the same problem. Mars has a very weak magnetic field; too weak to protect it from solar radiation. The atmosphere is too thin to retain heat, so terraforming is out of the question. That means any permanent base will rely on some form of shielding, magnetic or otherwise, from solar radiation and inhabitants will have to recycle all materials between supply runs from Earth. Growing food on Mars will be problematic even indoors. And where is the economic payoff to a manned mission? Selling commercials on a reality TV show is not sustainable and there are little to no resources on Mars.
For the same reasons I don't think any extraterrestrials will ever visit Earth. Just too damn much energy required, along with truly vast distances.
Besides, unless ETs are pretty close, they won't even know we exist any time soon. Most likely they're many hundreds or even thousands of light years away, and our light-cone only expands at lightspeed.
My understanding and correct me if I am wrong, but without a good degree of gravity our body structure starts to deteriorate. The bones start to fail and we may turn back into a non-skeletal mass…..or something similar in more sciency language.
Quote from: aitm on March 10, 2015, 09:39:31 PMMy understanding and correct me if I am wrong, but without a good degree of gravity our body structure starts to deteriorate. The bones start to fail and we may turn back into a non-skeletal mass…..or something similar in more sciency language.
AFAIK, the primary threat (besides radiation) is loss of bone and muscle mass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body#Loss_of_bone_and_muscle_mass). Given the problems of just staying on the ISS for a few months, traveling to Alpha Centauri might be problematic.
And thus it came to pass that the Western Hemisphere was never explored because the balance sheet just didn't look favorable.
Quote from: aitm on March 10, 2015, 09:39:31 PM
My understanding and correct me if I am wrong, but without a good degree of gravity our body structure starts to deteriorate. The bones start to fail and we may turn back into a non-skeletal mass…..or something similar in more sciency language.
If the energy problems could be solved, simply spinning the spacecraft can provide enough artificial gravity to make it livable. Or an acceleration of one Earth gravity or less could be used.
We could just hibernate during the trip. Less complex engineering. Generation ships are slave ships.
:Forget it. Our current US Congress won't even fund health care or infrastructure improvements much less NASA or even solar energy research and the idea of even getting beyond earth's gravitational pull is tantamount to pulling teeth from a pissed off lion..
Nope. The ONLY WAY is to convince them that we've discovered heaven and we have to invest trillions on getting there and even then only the pious would get to go. Say your prayers.. :pray:
I think that in the end it will be more about seeing what we can achieve and what we find when we get there. I think Mars will happen because it is within reach and we can get there, albeit what happens after is another story. I honestly don't think it makes sense either, but that never stopped us in the past. :biggrin:
Mining the asteroids has real possibilities, in my opinion. And Mars or the moon could serve as a way station for transit, should that ever come to pass.
I think we should mine the asteroid just to show the "Independence Day" aliens where they fucked up.
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on March 11, 2015, 09:32:03 PM
I think we should mine the asteroid just to show the "Independence Day" aliens where they fucked up.
:biggrin:
Watch the video that Solitary posted. Presents a good argument for mining the asteroids.
I think we'll go to the stars, but not any time soon. This is a project for a millennium, not for the lifespan of a presidential or prime ministerial administration, and we're not organized enough as a species for something that long-term. And we won't start moving out until the moon and Mars are thoroughly colonized, maybe some of the asteroids hollowed out and made into habitable environments internally. And by colonized, I mean to the stage where it doesn't strike anyone as odd that people live there and vacationing or even emigrating there is feasible for the average person.
So, no time soon. But the fact is, if we don't leave Earth, we (or our successor species) will go extinct -- even if we manage to avoid the statistically inevitable large meteor strike, or the detonation of Yellowstone or Toba or one of the other supervolcanos (or the reignition of the Siberian Traps or other large igneous province), or a resistant pandemic, or a nearby (galactically speaking) supernova... ultimately, the sun is finite, and will eventually destroy the Earth and if we haven't left by then, it will be too late.
I'm not sure that any individual nation-state could mount a robotic expedition to even the (relatively) nearby α Centauri system. It's going to require international coöperation and commitment to space and science on a completely unprecedented scale.
Long and short of it: I honestly believe that if it were discovered that there's an extinction-level comet or asteroid heading our way, with an impact date of fifty years or less, we're doomed. It'll be "When Worlds Collide"... except without the rocket taking off at the end.
All we need to do is invent the Warp Drive!
Quote from: Atheon on March 12, 2015, 03:09:30 AM
All we need to do is invent the Warp Drive!
Oh, that's been done (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive) -- on paper anyway.
Quote from: Atheon on March 12, 2015, 03:09:30 AM
All we need to do is invent the Warp Drive!
Enough of us are warped to such an extent that this just might work.
Quote from: Johan on March 05, 2015, 07:46:50 PM
You're not wrong. When you get right down to it, we are animals. Savages really. We are genetically wired to want to band ourselves together into groups and then kill or otherwise control every other group we can find. These genetics can of course change over time. But these changes happen at the speed of evolution which is orders of magnitude slower than the speed at which we develop and use new technologies.
Which means we are almost certain to invent and produce a weapon that will easily and effectively drive our species and most others into extinction long before evolution bestows us with the genetic wiring required to keep us from ever building such a weapon much less using it.
In short, we're fucked. Truth be told, we were probably fucked the moment that first primate realized hitting your enemy in the head with a rock was more effective than using your fists.
The good news is in the mean time, we've got beer and sex. If you can't get off the train, you may as well enjoy the ride.
That's pretty much my take on it too.
QuoteI think we'll go to the stars, but not any time soon.
Soon as in the time it takes mosquitoes to evolve into flying, blood sucking grizzly bears?
Personally I'm not going any fucking where till I get my motherfucking flying car!
Dammit! I just realized just how much of a Debby Downer I've become.. :trunksthing:
I want to go to Kolob! They have the Azure Hotel there with a private beach. Solitary
Description in the Book of Abraham
Facsimile No. 2 from the Book of Abraham, which Smith said discusses Kolob. The part Smith said refers to Kolob is numbered by a "1" in the center.
The first published reference to Kolob is found in the Book of Abraham, first published in 1842 in Times and Seasons and now included within the Pearl of Great Price as part of the canon of Mormonism. The Book of Abraham was dictated in 1836 by Smith after he purchased a set of Egyptian scrolls that accompanied a mummy exhibition. According to Smith, the scrolls described a vision of Abraham, in which Abraham:
"saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; ... and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest."
In an explanation of an Egyptian hypocephalus that was part of the Joseph Smith Papyri, Smith interpreted one set of hieroglyphics as representing:
"Kolob, signifying the first creation, nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God. First in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time. The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit. One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of this earth, which is called by the Egyptians Jah-oh-eh."
The Book of Abraham describes a hierarchy of heavenly bodies, including the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun, each with different movements and measurements of time, where at the pinnacle, the slowest-rotating body is Kolob, where one Kolob-day corresponds to 1000 earth-years.[8] This is similar to Psalm 90:4 which says that "For a thousand years in [God's] sight are but as yesterday when it is past" and 2 Peter 3:8 which says, "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years". Additional, similar information about Kolob is found in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, constituting manuscripts in the handwriting of Smith and his scribes.
Quote from: Solitary on March 12, 2015, 09:47:59 PM
I want to go to Kolob! They have the Azure Hotel there with a private beach. Solitary
Description in the Book of Abraham
Facsimile No. 2 from the Book of Abraham, which Smith said discusses Kolob. The part Smith said refers to Kolob is numbered by a "1" in the center.
The first published reference to Kolob is found in the Book of Abraham, first published in 1842 in Times and Seasons and now included within the Pearl of Great Price as part of the canon of Mormonism. The Book of Abraham was dictated in 1836 by Smith after he purchased a set of Egyptian scrolls that accompanied a mummy exhibition. According to Smith, the scrolls described a vision of Abraham, in which Abraham:
"saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; ... and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest."
In an explanation of an Egyptian hypocephalus that was part of the Joseph Smith Papyri, Smith interpreted one set of hieroglyphics as representing:
"Kolob, signifying the first creation, nearest to the celestial, or the residence of God. First in government, the last pertaining to the measurement of time. The measurement according to celestial time, which celestial time signifies one day to a cubit. One day in Kolob is equal to a thousand years according to the measurement of this earth, which is called by the Egyptians Jah-oh-eh."
The Book of Abraham describes a hierarchy of heavenly bodies, including the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun, each with different movements and measurements of time, where at the pinnacle, the slowest-rotating body is Kolob, where one Kolob-day corresponds to 1000 earth-years.[8] This is similar to Psalm 90:4 which says that "For a thousand years in [God's] sight are but as yesterday when it is past" and 2 Peter 3:8 which says, "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years". Additional, similar information about Kolob is found in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, constituting manuscripts in the handwriting of Smith and his scribes.
Funny how nowhere in there does ol' Joe give the right ascension and declination of this world, so we could, you know, demonstrate the truth of what he says by actually looking to see if there's a star there, then looking to see if there's a planet around it.
Also, a rotational velocity to give a 'day' of 1000 years is almost certainly unstable -- besides rapidly becoming unbearably hot on the near side and unbearably cold on the far (assuming it's in the vicinity of a Terrestrial orbit), it's awful damn close to becoming tidally locked and would become so in fairly short order. Anything nearer than 100AU will have a day longer than its year, and Pluto is only 39.4 AU out.
And if you want this thousand year day to be the same proportion of Kolob's year that an Earth day is to an Earth year, you're at an orbit of
3/
8 of a light year.
Better wear a scarf. :)
No surprise here.
"Remember Mars One? The mega-hyped, one way ticket to go start a colony on Mars assuming it could get a ship and funding and capable colonists and training facilities and the major technological advances necessary to make it all happen? Surprise! According to one finalist, the whole thing is pretty much a scam..."
http://gizmodo.com/mars-one-is-broke-disorganized-and-sketchy-as-hell-1691726224
Quote from: GSOgymrat on March 17, 2015, 07:04:36 PM
No surprise here.
"Remember Mars One? The mega-hyped, one way ticket to go start a colony on Mars assuming it could get a ship and funding and capable colonists and training facilities and the major technological advances necessary to make it all happen? Surprise! According to one finalist, the whole thing is pretty much a scam..."
http://gizmodo.com/mars-one-is-broke-disorganized-and-sketchy-as-hell-1691726224
It had farce written all over it from the outset.... :rotflmao:
I must admit that human interstellar travel doesnt seem like a terribly practical idea at this point. I think we will have to know where to go first, and why.
I think that for the most part we will explore other stars in much the same way we have explored our own Solar System, using artificial (and most importantly, expendable) intelligence. This way you can travel to and explore as many places as you can budget for, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of different systems simultaneously. That way we can at least get straight to the point once we do decide to leave home.
We can also narrow down the list of candidates we choose to explore with these craft a great deal using space telescopes, whose magnification power as far as I can tell, is only limited by how large we choose to build them.
Of course I reckon populating any alien worlds is going to be as daunting a challenge as can be imagined.
Not only should it be impossible to travel faster then light for reasons such as causality as much as anything, but even when you arrive you are stuck with a whole new set of problems.
For example, even if we find a place where life as we know it exists, its extremely unlikely that we will be able to breathe the atmosphere, and I doubt we would actually be able to eat anything there. Alien life is just that, likely incompatible with our picky digestive systems.
But who knows. Much as our technology would seem god-like to people who lived a thousand years ago, our successors will probably seem that way to us. There is no way to imagine or predict which present impossibilities will become possible in the future.
Edit: this topic reminds me of the Monolith from 2001; I believe one of the theories was that they too were something like automated probes, while the beings who created them had long since ascended to another dimension. Or something.
Quote from: Cocoa Beware on April 24, 2015, 04:31:46 AM
For example, even if we find a place where life as we know it exists, its extremely unlikely that we will be able to breathe the atmosphere, and I doubt we would actually be able to eat anything there. Alien life is just that, likely incompatible with our picky digestive systems.
I think more to the point, if we find a planet that's capable of supporting life, it will probably already
be supporting life. I suspect, given cosmological time scales, that anywhere you have a solvent (say, water) and an energy source (like the local star), you're going to have at least microbial life. Remember, we still haven't sent a serious life-hunter to Mars yet, at least not to the places most clement -- say, the bottom of Hellas Basin where atmospheric conditions may reach the point where liquid water can exist occasionally, or the (unconfirmed) frozen subsurface ocean, or the permafrost, or the water ice locked up in the ice caps.
The one thing we know about life from the one data point we have right here is that once it gets started, it's difficult to eradicate and will find a way to continue making a living in the most difficult circumstances. If microbial life started on Mars, then as long as the cooling and drying out was gradual rather than catastrophic, it's probably still there somewhere.
Similar arguments apply to Europa and Ganymede, and even to Titan, and even to the clouds of Venus, with varying degrees of probability.
So if we find another world that can support us, it's probably already supporting something -- or even someone -- else. Abiogenesis isn't difficult when you realize the huge numbers involved. Not only do you have hundreds of millions to billions of years of time, you have uncountable trillions, quadrillions, quintillions of random chemical actions taking place everywhere there's a solvent and a power source at every instant of those millions/billions of years, and only
one of them has to work, and it doesn't even need to work well, because once it gets started, evolution takes over and will fix that eventually.
Having a colony on Mars not dependent on the earth for support is a long time in the future. You would need to be able to produce food, oxygen, have sufficient water and so many other factors. Our efforts on earth of creating biospheres independent of the outside world have shown that. It would make just as much sense to develop an independent robot mining system on the asteroids, because the need for human habitat is obviated. Human habitat on a space ship is the big problem, along with nmaintaining human life either by providing for a living, awake crew or one in stasis or some form of suspended animation.
We are developing autonomous vehicles here on earth. We have robots on Mars. Wouldn't be surprised that the first encounter with an alien species would be their robot probe meeting ours somewhere in deep space. V---ger just might happen, a la Star Trek.
Quote from: trdsf on April 24, 2015, 02:10:42 PM
I think more to the point, if we find a planet that's capable of supporting life, it will probably already be supporting life. I suspect, given cosmological time scales, that anywhere you have a solvent (say, water) and an energy source (like the local star), you're going to have at least microbial life. Remember, we still haven't sent a serious life-hunter to Mars yet, at least not to the places most clement -- say, the bottom of Hellas Basin where atmospheric conditions may reach the point where liquid water can exist occasionally, or the (unconfirmed) frozen subsurface ocean, or the permafrost, or the water ice locked up in the ice caps.
The one thing we know about life from the one data point we have right here is that once it gets started, it's difficult to eradicate and will find a way to continue making a living in the most difficult circumstances. If microbial life started on Mars, then as long as the cooling and drying out was gradual rather than catastrophic, it's probably still there somewhere.
Similar arguments apply to Europa and Ganymede, and even to Titan, and even to the clouds of Venus, with varying degrees of probability.
So if we find another world that can support us, it's probably already supporting something -- or even someone -- else. Abiogenesis isn't difficult when you realize the huge numbers involved. Not only do you have hundreds of millions to billions of years of time, you have uncountable trillions, quadrillions, quintillions of random chemical actions taking place everywhere there's a solvent and a power source at every instant of those millions/billions of years, and only one of them has to work, and it doesn't even need to work well, because once it gets started, evolution takes over and will fix that eventually.
Thats a good point.
There also should be a very generous amount of water in the Universe, as we have already found plenty even in our own Solar System.
It makes a lot of sense too, H2O is such a simple molecule. That leads me to think that life should be fairly common.
Quote from: Cocoa Beware on April 24, 2015, 11:25:38 PM
Thats a good point.
There also should be a very generous amount of water in the Universe, as we have already found plenty even in our own Solar System.
It makes a lot of sense too, H2O is such a simple molecule. That leads me to think that life should be fairly common.
I'm betting on Europa. I only hope I'm around when they land on it.
Quote from: Cocoa Beware on April 24, 2015, 11:25:38 PM
Thats a good point.
There also should be a very generous amount of water in the Universe, as we have already found plenty even in our own Solar System.
It makes a lot of sense too, H2O is such a simple molecule. That leads me to think that life should be fairly common.
H2O is a simple molecule, and they have found plenty of evidence of alcohol in distant areas of space
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/beercld.htm
So conditions of life potential are exhibited in extra earth and extra solar locations. Certainly not beyond possibility, and the concept of Panspermia here on earth has gained some credibility recently.
Exciting stuff. Hope I live long enough to see the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
Quote from: stromboli on April 25, 2015, 12:23:08 AM
H2O is a simple molecule, and they have found plenty of evidence of alcohol in distant areas of space
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/beercld.htm
So conditions of life potential are exhibited in extra earth and extra solar locations. Certainly not beyond possibility, and the concept of Panspermia here on earth has gained some credibility recently.
Exciting stuff. Hope I live long enough to see the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
I'm not a big fan of panspermia. It's possible, but it also dodges the question of abiogenesis by saying it happened elsewhere. I think we should assume life started here until we have at least circumstantial evidence that it didn't.
And I agree, I will die unhappy if there's been no confirmed radio hit by then.
Jerry Pournelle assembled a trilogy of books called "The Stars at War", anthologies of essays and short stories, that explore what it would mean for mankind were we to discover some way to overcome the physics obstacle.
Yeah, Relativity is a pain in the hinder for writing SF. Joe Haldeman probably did the best job of doing space travel without ignoring Einstein in The Forever War. I resort to positing both a law of conservation of time, and a five-dimensional universe so that there's a 'fixed' background for time to move against in the same way the three spatial dimensions move against time that seems to allow me to avoid the paradoxes built in to superluminal travel, but I haven't explored the math deeply enough to force me to admit it's complete bollocks. No doubt it is complete bollocks, but as long as I can leave disbelief suspended, it works for me. :)
Quote from: stromboli on April 25, 2015, 12:23:08 AM
H2O is a simple molecule, and they have found plenty of evidence of alcohol in distant areas of space
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/beercld.htm
So conditions of life potential are exhibited in extra earth and extra solar locations. Certainly not beyond possibility, and the concept of Panspermia here on earth has gained some credibility recently.
Exciting stuff. Hope I live long enough to see the discovery of extraterrestrial life.
Yes the Beer Clouds! How could I forget about those.
As difficult as interstellar travel would be, at least we would have a lot of motivation to go to few places.
Of course, only if other aliens dont bogart them first.