Assume that FTL travel is semi-casual (a small starship is equivalent to a private yacht)...

Small automated buoys that jump from point to point, carrying information.

There absolutely will be fucking yachts. Hell, there will be fucking cruise lines.

youtube.com/watch?v=SWyxZR69CI0

this guy get's it

small AI operated spacecrafts being sent back and forth constantly. staying in a system only long enough to send out info

Yeah, because everyone will want to take a three month vacation to mars. And pay millions of dollars for the pleasure. It'll be a novelty and then no one will give a shit but government and corporations on government contract. And that's how it'll go until the bottleneck, one of any number of extinction events. Sorry to ruin your sci-fantasy.

>And pay millions of dollars for the pleasure

Price of a 24'' TV in 1955: $249.50. Adjusted for inflation, that's $2,246.92

Price of a 24'' TV today: Between $100 to $200.

Luxury items and services (provided they aren't a limited resource) are subject to the same supply and demand rules as anything else. In the 1950s, TVs were brand new, no one had them, everyone wanted them, but they were a pain in the ass to make because they were, again, new, so a lot of the techniques to make them faster and cheaper just hadn't been figured out yet.

The same would apply to interstellar, or even intra-stellar, cruises. They'd start out as phenomenally expensive, but as time went on they'd become less and less expensive as more ships were built.

As another point of comparison, the world's first purpose-built cruise ship was the Prinzessin Victoria Luise. She cruised the Caribbean. 1901 ticket price for her started at $177.50, which is $$5,190.99 in 2016 dollars. Today, Carnival offers Caribbean cruises that start at around $200.

It's not the same as shrinking components and increased demand for a product driving down a price. It's a factor of energy, racing against constantly depleting resources, and traveling into the most dangerous place a human can go. Then there's the initial prep for just traveling outside of the atmosphere. Sure, if we can find ways to subvert physics and generate energy thousands of times more efficiently, the price will drop absolutely. But we won't and we can't.

So, about an order of magnitude drop in price? Right now the technology basically exists to take a pleasure cruise around Mars. Could you afford it if it were 1/10th its current price? Even if it were 1/100th?

Even if it becomes popular enough to support a steady business, which I agree it might, most people will never be able to afford it.

There would be news anchors, but they'd be limited to their system.

Probably relevant: what-if.xkcd.com/31/

Of all the words of tongue and pen, these are the saddest:
"It'll never happen!"
Because those who dare to speak them, are always shown wrong.

>Traveller

Never played it.

Grow up and accept the filter.

What does that mean?

The realistic answer would be something similar to the pony express except instead of messages (or more like, in addition to) they'd upload massive data dumps to the local net, "updating" with current-as-of-when-they-left version of the internet from where ever the hell they came from.

You'd have your local net, you're Sol net, ect ect ect probably. But the interstellar net isn't updated in real time.

If there is a unified government of any kind they'd probably have priority access and a command circuit to get messages around very quickly in an emergency type situation (unless FTL travel is retard simple and common, it's be reserved for needed situations, not just something they do to pass memos)

So you want to know what's happening on earth, you go to something like CNN's website. You'll just have to live with the fact that CNN's website only gets updated like once a month (or year, or hour, it would depend on how frequently these couriers make their rounds) but it's an entire month (or year or hour) worth of news and content.

If you can move matter faster than light for cheaper than information, what's stopping you from just putting the information on the fucking ships and moving it faster than light anyway?

...something eats the information...

Everyone prays no one decides to send a message from a spaceship going faster than light.

Maybe that thing... will learn to eat spaceships too.

>Never played it.
Not that guy, but it's a really fun game.

>If you can move matter faster than light for cheaper than information, what's stopping you from just putting the information on the fucking ships and moving it faster than light anyway?
That's how they do it in Traveller.

>jump into system
>beam your mail to the local satellite
>receive outgoing mail from local satellite
>jump to next system

Sure, but the communication then isn't instant.

To welcome death is the most immature thing anyone can do.

It's FTL with a bottleneck at the transmission sites in system.
Depending on how FTL works and its capabilities, and I'm assuming it's not of the "wormhole" variety, you could build exceedingly small, unmanned ships that are almost entirely data capacity.

Think of them as the cosmic, FTL equivalent of those pneumatic tubes in banks. It takes some time to get the information out of the capsules, but the actual travel is exceedingly fast.

To force something to live in a horrible suffering state of existence for no reason they want it to be alive is the cruelest thing a person can do.

IIn a nutshell. t's an attempt to explain why we can't find any other extra terrestrial civilization signals. Which given the staggering number of planets in the universe even if only .000001 would have the possibility of life there would still be a staggering number of planets that would be observable to us.

The idea looks at what it takes to get to the point to constantly be spamming observable universe and we'd pick up on and looks for what would stop that from happening. The great filter is some common event that happens before a species would reach the state where the rest of the universe would be able to observe them or cause the point and time to be so short it could be missed. The candidates are inability to survive a global catastrophe such as life destroying impact from an asteroid, the civilization destroying itself, or the civilization being unable to maintain for an extended period and falling back into intergalactic signalling darkness forever because all resources have been used up for that. Basically at the galactic scale it seems that the great filter has claimed everything and there is no ability to maintain a civilization that can broadcast signals to the universe at large. It's just a state of the universe like radioactive elements decaying into other elements, you may not be able to put a stamp on when exactly it is going to happen it but it's going to happen.

No one is forcing you to go to Mars spaceranon, if you're that depressed, go ahead and end it. We'll keep on chugging along without you.

>immaturity to accept an inevitable truth
Whatever you tell yourself to help you sleep, kid.

This.

Faggots like you are just baggage, a weight on folks like us who want to push outwards

>news ship prepares news for this week
>FTL to nearby system
>broadcasts it
>get news from this system
>FTL back to origin system
>broadcasts it

It's not hard. It can work like a neuron network.

You're burning the resources that we desperatly need so you can satisfy an exploration urge. So how many years are you willing to shave off the entity of human existence per person on a mission to mars? Hell possibly ruining the ability to for humanity to survive until a rock fucking hits us the resources used to develop and fucking make shit for space travel is fucking staggering. Resources aren't infinite you dumb cocksucker and you're taking it from everyone for your ego stroking.

How about you write up an article about it and then just post a link whenever a space thread comes up instead of shitting up the whole thread with your pedantic angry-ranting.

if we dont do that in like one or two centuries, we are already dead user.

That's called the filter. People really forget how big space is, how inhospitable it is, and how dangerous it is. Even the planets we find that we think may support life are light years away, and FTL isn't a possibility at all given our current physics models. Come on kids, I love the idea of space too, but it's just not likely.

> racing against constantly depleting resources

Once we achieve meaningful space travel, the only resource in serious danger of actual depletion is oil, since that is the only one that relies on strictly biological sources. Helium? It's the second-most common element in the universe. Water? Jupiter's moon Europa is almost entirely water ice - forty-eight sextillion kilograms of it.

The trick is getting to space. Once you're actually in space, you're halfway to everywhere and halfway towards anything. There are more resources in the Sol system than Earth could use in a million generations of first-world gluttony and avarice.

And that's just strictly within our own solar system, nevermind in other star systems as OP proposes. Because, in spite of your best efforts, I AM going to stay on-topic, and part of that topic presumes that FTL travel with ships is possible and fairly cheap.

>and traveling into the most dangerous place a human can go

...Detroit?

>But we won't and we can't.

Christ, that's a bit pessimistic, don't you think? I mean, there's nothing left on Earth that actually stands a real chance of wiping out human civilization.

- A nuclear war just isn't going to happen. The people who can afford to build enough nukes to start a nuclear winter are the very same people who stand to lose the most in a nuclear winter.

- As bad as Yellowstone erupting would be for the United States, and as irrevocably as it would change the global power balance, it would hardly result in the utter obliteration of mankind. There have been 3 supervolcano erruptions in the lifetime of humanity; the Lake Toba and Oruanui eruptions were larger than Yellowstone is reckoned will be. If we survived supervolcanoes when we were wearing animal skins and only existed in the few thousands at most, you think we can't survive them today?

- Global climate change, as well, will not kill humanity or anything like it.

*Addendum.

>...Detroit?

This was just meant as a classic jab at Detroit, a joke that dates back to the early 80s, and was not meant to start a race debate. So please don't start a race debate. Watch this scene from Kentucky Fried Movie instead:

youtube.com/watch?v=bVDDYQlmq0w

Yay, fucking thanks guys. I'm trying to get my mind off some serious shit and here come some faggots to remind me of the futility of all existence.

>ctr+f traveller
>3 hits (now 4)
You did good today, bros

>and here come some faggots to remind me of the futility of all existence.

Life has exactly the meaning we give to it. If you can't find a use for your existence, that's on you, not life.

Ha, ha.
You can delude yourself all you want with your fake meanings for life.
In the end everything stops existing and nothing matters.
For a while you live, and you are. Eventually you die and you are not.

>Once we achieve meaningful space travel
How many hundreds of people are you willing to starve to get the tech to even get to mars with people probably irradiated cause they dun fucked up the shielding.

Answer this carefully because this unit of cost might be a European dollar or a japanese Yen. It'll be really good to forcibly subjugate nations for their resources so we can do a harebrained scheme that after billions starve or live in an Ethiopian poverty existence we find out we won't have enough resources to do any operation they'll save humanity. I guess a "If it worked we'd save everyone!" apology is good enough for forcing people through hell. Humanity at this point should honestly just try and gain a stable existence and just accept we'll die out rather than make a dystonia of major chunks of the world so that we "tried".

It's a how much would you stop saying it's worth it to save someone from cancer because of just how much sheer cost is involved and space programs can impoverish nations for what realistically they do it at a scale of regularly. Fantasy they save everything and we have teleportation but reality we burn tens of tons of fossil fuels just to deliver the shit to a launch pad that has a good fucking chance of exploding cause someone forgot to carry the 1.

>In the end everything stops existing and nothing matters.

Do you know how I know you don't actually believe this?

Because you care enough to harp on about it on a Singaporean mosaic website, and more than that, to KEEP harping on about it to other people, rather than just stating it and then leaving the rest of us to our delusions of relevancy.

A real nihilist doesn't post of Veeky Forums; he sits in corner and starves, or lives off the charity of others, or at most just works day in and day out without ever trying to do anything than continue his self-described unimportant existence until its sudden and inevitable end.

By simply being here, you're proving that you think life has SOME meaning or point, even if that point is only to try and convince others that you're right and they're wrong. Or in other words, you can't claim to believe that nothing matters and then expend effort into trying to convince people of this fact, because if nothing matters or is important to you, why are you expending the effort?

So, like I said. Life is what you make of it. And if you're not satisfied with how it's turned out...try something new. Or don't. Either way, the choice is yours.

But don't come here trying to convince me that nothing matters to you, when your every post clearly indicates otherwise.

You, on the other hand, are a bit of a different animal, though at least not one couched in a high schooler's understanding of nihilism. I'll need more characters to tackle you, so I'll see you in the next post.

You're wrong. The reason I'm still alive is because
>death is terrifying
>whatever my conciousness is can derive certain pleasures from life even if they are ultimately meaningless

Your stance is one that I can, on a fundamental level, actually respect, since it at least appears to be born from a genuine concern for one's fellow man. The issue is once of scale, specifically the scale of time. You are in essence writing off tomorrow for the sake of today, without realizing that you never really get anywhere by doing that. You're the person who never buys a lottery ticket because the odds of winning are so phenomenally small - while missing the fact that without buying a ticket, you don't have any chance at all.

Or more relevantly, you're like someone who doesn't try to get promoted to a higher-paying position at work, out of fear that if you do so you might prevent someone else from getting the position who needs it more.

You speak about people in Ethiopia dying while we try and colonize space or Mars or whatever, which is fair enough, but you realize that by worrying about them, you're dooming all the people on the entire planet, right? I might as well ask you if saving Ethiopians today is worth dooming China, or America, or wherever, tomorrow.

Beyond all that, there is the more fundamental problem. The will to live is one of the strongest instincts. A whale that can't swim anymore will beach itself and spend hours suffocating in agony as its own bulk crushes its body on the land, rather than allow itself to drown in a matter of minutes in the open ocean.

You're holding life sacred while missing the fact that the people who are trying to get cold fusion online or the Alcubierre drive's math to work, hold life just as sacred. They're just trying to think beyond the people counting on them today, and instead on the people counting on them tomorrow, and the day after that, on and on and on.

Or let's phrase it in a more fundamental way. If you went up to an Ethiopian and told them that they could live a long life, but in return all their children would die at age 10, what choice do you think the majority of Ethiopians would make?

By definition, if you derive any sensation at all from a thing, then the thing can't be meaningless.

Ok you're saying that it's passive effect, I'm saying this is active desperation.

>You speak about people in Ethiopia dying while we try and colonize space or Mars or whatever, which is fair enough, but you realize that by worrying about them, you're dooming all the people on the entire planet, right? I might as well ask you if saving Ethiopians today is worth dooming China, or America, or wherever, tomorrow.

No I'm not, what I'm saying is that we'll turn the middle east,north africa, canida, and whatever places we need to into Ethiopia because we need to strip the resources out of it and fuck the people living there because we need to go to space. There is a mind boggling amount of resources required for space travel and there is going to be a point where force is required in some fashion and impoverishment happens because of this exploration, as for

>If you went up to an Ethiopian and told them that they could live a long life, but in return all their children would die at age 10, what choice do you think the majority of Ethiopians would make?

That's not the question, the question is how many children are you going to stave or live through objective hell so your child can might past 10? Maybe outright killing them, maybe forcing them to work in mines for heavy metals and other resources for the rest of their lives. Hell maybe at that point we can sweat shop them to make electronics for the vast complex required for developing the next iteration of vast complexes so that we can start building the first in a line of test engines?

I'm fine with people fucking running themselves into the ground trying to get something that could help them or their family, but what is going to have to be done for this pipe dream is people running other people into the ground to keep what will have to be a generational line of development and testing going. It's going to be horrific how many resources for space flight at a large scale what is required.

>No I'm not, what I'm saying is that we'll turn the middle east,north africa, canida, and whatever places we need to into Ethiopia because we need to strip the resources out of it

Actually the vast majority of the resources we need a) can be found in the United States, and b) don't require stripping the land anyway.

Honestly the biggest one is helium (it's necessary for a lot of heavy industry). The second-most common element in the Universe is actually kind of rare on Earth in a useful state; America controls the vast majority of the world's natural supply, with almost all of it coming from Oklahoma. However, Helium is created as a by-product of natural gas refinement. CHEAP helium is on the decline; we won't be able to buy it for birthday balloons for much longer. But we'll still have centuries of helium left for industrial purposes before we cross the point of no return on that front on Earth; by then there's no material reason why we can't be making use of Sol's larger resources to provide us with effectively limitless mineral and chemical resources.

>There is a mind boggling amount of resources required for space travel

Not really, and none of it is particularly rare on Earth save oil. We just need another propellant. There are plenty of options on that front, such as electromagnetic acceleration, or if we want to be more primitive than that, space guns.

>the question is how many children are you going to stave or live through objective hell so your child can might past 10?

My issue with this is you can apply this to any major human endeavor, even ones with unarguably positive effects: the Panama or Suez Canals, for example.

>Not really, and none of it is particularly rare on Earth save oil. We just need another propellant. There are plenty of options on that front, such as electromagnetic acceleration, or if we want to be more primitive than that, space guns.
I'm talking about moving shit for that. You know like trucks, freight trains, and cargo planes. The spacecraft is impressive but it's the top of the pyramid for all the shit required to make it.
>My issue with this is you can apply this to any major human endeavor, even ones with unarguably positive effects: the Panama or Suez Canals, for example.
Yeah and that's horrible and possibly not worth it but this is worldwide with actual percentage of the world population. Forced upon people who probably won't benefit, when the space travel is reliable their great grandchildren aren't going to have climbed out of the hole and frankly if we can get a few thousand heading to mars and the Earth hasn't run out of oil they're not going to put random guy who's only usefulness is breaking his back moving rocks and hand him a pink slip if it's not worth doing anymore.

>You know like trucks, freight trains, and cargo planes

All of which can be made, again, using common materials available in the United States, or even just extant trucks, trains, boats, etc. You don't need to build a new boat every time you need to ship something.

>and the Earth hasn't run out of oil

Oh, that's gonna happen b 2060 at the latest, and CHEAP oil (which is what our society really relies on) will run out even sooner. It's just not going to matter in the grand scheme of things. For everything we use oil for, we have some manner of alternative - both power-wise (coal, natural gas, wind, hydroelectric, solar, nuclear, geothermal, probably some other stuff I'm forgetting, are all currently-existing, viable alternatives, nevermind if we can ever get cold fusion up and running), and industry-wise (several synthetic alternatives to petroleum-based plastics exist). Honestly the only reason why we still use oil is because it's still there to be used and it's still the cheapest option, but that doesn't mean that it's oil or nothing.

>Forced upon people who probably won't benefit

This is a rather limited way of looking things. So because some people won't benefit, no one should benefit? In the worst recorded polio epidemic, only around 3,000 people died from the disease. Should we not have wasted the effort?

> when the space travel is reliable their great grandchildren aren't going to have climbed out of the hole

But what about their great-great grandchildren? Or the ones after that? Increase the available resources and the available jobs (space trucker! Whoo!) and you increase the average wealth and standard of living.

>want to feel better
>come to Veeky Forums
What the fuck did you expect?

If travel is easier than communication then the rise of the messanger class will happen.

People or even trained animals whose only job is to get somewhere, hand off the communication medium, and ride off again.

Perhaps tradition shall be revered and they will dress in their big hats with big feathers, spandex with cod pieces of some modest majesty, and riding genetically engineered horses.

...

>it's a question of how news services would function.

How do you think they function today? You think Korean TV just broadcasts news from Peru as is? You'd have local news and interstellar news would come in packets, maybe once a day a ship jumps in and drops off not only physical mail but also infopackets, which get streamed to the correct services. Local news stations would cipher through the feeds and pick what they want to run. Larger services could have their own stations in systems that receive outside programs and news and broadcast them as is.