Will space opera ever be possible?

Will space opera ever be possible?

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>what is Metabarons.

At some point we'll get out to space with enough development that someone will fund an opera production, so sure.

No, because Humanity lacks the reproductive capacity to actually expand beyond our own world anymore.

Case in point: the only countries with the capacity to launch starships lack the capacity to maintain their own population. You think Africa is going to have 4.7 kids per woman when they're all living like Americans?

This is the only world we will ever have, might as well get comfortable with our grave mates.

Give it a few million years. Enough for humans to develop the galaxy and die out, and for all our pets and rat-stowaways to evolve into distinct different races.

>lack the capacity to maintain their own population
The majority of countries are still expanding in population, including first world ones, the countries that do have declining populations are declining slowly and are already on the limit of how many people they can support, and they may well just float at a stable level, not really decline past a a certain point. We can't predict that far into the future.
But with the rise in automation, how is fewer humans much of a bad thing? Most of the highest class of society gets their money without having to work for it, either through inheritance or through non-constructive work, like trading stocks or currencies, only leeching off of society but much more efficiently than the dole.
With fewer people, unemployment would be down, housing would become affordable again, there's less strain on the environment, etc. And who's to say that humans won't be the elves in a space opera setting, being uncommon sights even when they're fully integrated due to low populations?

Space is the only option for humankind. The discovery of the universe, its facets and physics, presented a new environment of which we only recently have been able to theorize on the effects of. History has impeded us so much so that only in the 20th century have we been able to achieve spaceflight, and this shows the ever-present nature of our fixation on the past; we work to perpetuate the powers we were born into, rather than recognize the historically evidential decline of all powers. This is no surprise when we take into account that we have been confined to our planet and its geographic mundanities for the entirely of our existence. We have built off of our dead empires of old and of the ruins of our brothers before us, each new copycat society further cementing itself to our dying rock. The wars of history have given way to a separatism of the human mind from itself. We have advanced in this separatism now to a point where we have made imaginary borders no longer imaginary, where the earth is now sectioned off into one hundred ninety six separate modes of autonomy, only autonomous in their autonomy from other autonomies of the same nature. The course of history taking place solely on earth and solely relating always to an established state on earth has given way to a societally geocentric view of ourselves. We are too focused on our tiny rock in the great big universe.


>can't maintain population, space unsuitable environment for humans, geopolitical restrictions, etc.


The universe will compel our biological, emotional, and spiritual minds forward in a way that is unprecedented. Every human childhood has taken place on this placet, every defining memory and influential event that serves to shape the humans we consider great. This fact has gone, and still goes unrecognized in its importance because of the now realistic possibility of space residency.

In the theorizing of us as a spacefaring people, the revision of our great epochs can be sheared away to these: The transition of civilized ape to civilized human and the rejection of feudalism for the rational science of the renaissance. Our evolution from the anthropoids of the past gave us the knowledge of evolution, and that we as we are now do not represent the pinnacle of our species. The renaissance, unprecedented in its newfound rationality and acceptance of technological progress, presents the possibility for greater movements of rebirth in our future. The harmony of insight drawn from these two definitive epochs gives us greater sight to the nature of our cosmicality. The transition of our species into space will expand the human mind to greater lengths through the implementation of our own technological and circumstantial progress.

Honestly it just makes me sad to think about it.

What if we're alone in this universe? What if there are no other sentient lifeforms at least in Milky Way, and never will be? Then that means we've been given a unique and singular opportunity to conquer the cold dead stars, to explode them into vibrant fireworks of life. Even after we are gone, those worlds we once seeded would continue evolving on their own, perhaps one day giving birth to new spacefaring beings.

And we're fucking squandering it. We're going to stay down here, pollute this world, focus in our own petty selfish bullshit, and probably ultimately kill ourselves in some nuclear war for some stupid reason. And then once we are gone, that'll be the end of it - the universe will be dead, forever.

I just want all the world to see this and understand this, and work together to reach that final frontier. Then once we're there, we can be selfish warmongering bastards for all I care - it won't matter if a single planet kills itself once we've gotten a couple dozen colonized and have begun to spread.

No. Space opera is impossible. It cannot be done.

you understand me so well. That is exactly true. We are in a massive universe, and the posibility of finding life any time soon is slim, but I wholeheartedly believe it will happen one day. And it will truly unite us as a species.

Eh, not really. Space opera combines humans as they are today in mind, body, and social mores with easy interstellar travel.

The galaxy could be colonized with relative ease - less than a million years for total assimilation, using STL Von Neumann ships. But in that time, humans are liable to change dramatically. The average modern would shrink in horror from ordinary cultures of old Europe. Many consider commonplace memes only a decade or two, like 'gay marriage = bad' old borderline evil.

There's basically zero chance our descendants a thousand years from now, let alone twenty thousand, will indulge in generic 20th-century moralizing about equal rights or generic 18th-century conflicts with ships-of-the-line.

you have a tremendous overestimation of humanity's current space travel capabilities.

No, but hard scifi might be. The thing about space opera is that it tends to present space travel as inexpensive, reliable, and fast, in order to use multiple planets as dramatic settings. Even if we develop sme form of FTL travel, it's unlikely it will be as convenient as what's depicted in Star Wars. The most probable way people will ever be able to experience living in a space opera setting would be in a simulated universe constructed to provide such a setting.

Obviously we can't just go ahead and do it right now. But if we won't focus on it, we will never get to go out there at all.

You mean the BD?

you have a tremendous underestimation of the ability of humans working to survive in the universe. Space travel and colonization is the only way of mankind.

...

The future in general is unpredictable. For example just go back even 20-30 years and no one has any idea of the extent at which the Internet and Social Networking would become part of the way we live our lives.

>simulated universe constructed to provide such a setting

That is ironically what an advanced society capable of spacetime engineering might do.

Space isn't a small, quick to reach zone nor is it brimming with novelty. It's a bigger, deadlier, more boring desert. After a point (building a backup civilization, perhaps), exploring the desert stops being as economically valuable as sitting at home inventing new things.

VR sims of space operas with custom tailored alien cliches would be the cheap, effective alternative to wasting precious physical matter on energy-intensive interstellar flight.

Yeah, it sucks that we don't have starships and colonies on the Moon and Mars yet, but you gotta keep shit in perspective. Its not so much that people don't give a shit about spaceflight and would rather bomb each other or make a fancier smartphone (though that is a factor), it's the fact that our spaceflight capabilities are still very limited and its gonna take a lot of time before we can really break out of our backyard and start expanding into space.

Take Mars for example. Now back during the Apollo Program getting people to the moon was "easy" in the sense that all we needed to do is build a big enough rocket and let physics and gravity do the rest of the work. It typically only took a week to get to the moon and back not counting the days spent on the moon. For comparison, the closet point between Earth and Mars is still 225 million km away and takes at least a couple months to get there and back.

What that means is that the all the space agencies in the world are running into the same problems; they have to figure out how to make a manned spacecraft for a mission that could take 1/3rd or even half a year to complete. That means trying to figure out how to provide enough oxygen and supplies for the trip, a power enough communication system so that the crew can stay in contact with Earth, engines and a power plant able to haul the craft to its destination and back, and ways to counteract joint problems and muscle atrophy that could theoretically arise from extended periods in space. On top of that we gotta make sure all of that shit is reliable, easy to repair, and that there is a reliable escape system. Because if an Apollo 13 happens to craft in the middle of their mission, the crew is fucked.

Nah, unless we find a way to develop FTL travel, something we don't even know if it's possible, we'll just rot with earth and a few moons.

Finally, there's the mental and psychological aspect of extended space travel. A lot research into a manned flight to Mars involves sticking astronauts in confined spaces with each other for extended periods of times. That's because we're looking at sending someone into a months long journey through the black void of space with their only contact being the same 6 or so people every day. We have to find a away to do that without one of the crew going stir crazy and trying to through everyone else out of the airlock. That involves a combination of figuring out how to make the spacecraft as habitable as possible, having reliable contact back with Earth so that they have the means to reach out to their friends and loved ones, and ensuring that we're picking astronauts that have the mental fortitude for the trip. That's all a fuckton of work to do.

Now the good news is that once we've figured all of that out we have reached the biggest milestone yet. We would've gone from simple manned rockets to the first starship in history. That means all of those other big plans like large and self sufficient space stations, colonies on the moon and eventually other planets, mining asteroids, sending out more deep space probes, etc. become much more viable now. It will truly break use out of our little backyard and set us on the path of growing and thriving in space.

But again, that's still a lot of shit to do. It'll take a while before we can start going to Mars, but it will happen.

>Project Daedalus
>feasible and affordable
I want an interstellar probe too, but how delusional are you

No because in space no one can hear you sing

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>yfw they will never truly give billions for space

No. And frankly, space opera has a very limited vision on the future. It's just the same old thing applied to a future era. It is enjoyable, sure, but it is not a prediction of the future.

You are taking that as a constant, which is dumb.

People who live in good conditions have fewer kids because they NEED fewer kids. You don't need 12 kids to run the farm anymore, writing off half of them as dying to random accidents and illnesses. Your world is safer to live in, so you can afford to focus on quality rather than quantity.

Space is going to be harsh as fuck. Especially in the first generations of any new expansion. For the people pushing the frontier, mortality rate will be high. Birth rates will spike up again to match it.

I feel like having enough decency as a species to be worth continuing to exist in the first place, and funding space exploration are not mutually exclusive.

You sound like a callous, entitled douche.

user, we are already a space operat setting. This universe is merely a simulation of a quadrillion-years old super-advanced machine civilisation at the edge of a black hole. The stars, galaxies, and any biological lifeforms are just a memory.

Who cares about FTL when you are immortal? FTL is overrated.

Are you afraid? What is it that you fear? The end of your trivial existence? When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence.

joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

Scroll a bit. Bottom right you will find an icon for light-speed.

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What can we do against radiation in space?

I kind of want to update this with a couple of passages to explain why it is economically important for us to find life on other planets, even if it's just microbes or ants.

I've heard one of the possibilities is pumping waste-water into the ship's hull to act as another layer of protection before venting it out when necessary.

...

God. We're all going to die and never be known to another living thing in the entire universe, and there's no reason for it but our own worthless nature unfit for the cosmic scale, and the indifference of a trillion quadrillion googplexjillion miles of dark dead empty nothing.

The universe is a fucking burning void of tombstones waiting for entropy to win and for all that was to have never meant a damn thing.

You need a space diva for a space opera...

Does she look like she's not getting enough food?

Any society that would get advanced enough to effortlessly travel interplanetary distances would reach sufficient levels of technology not to bother doing it. In the end it will be billions of souls in the circuits, effectively immortal, each experiencing a heaven far beyond anything "reality" could offer at time scales that would be incomprehensible to modern human.

Some particularly stupid race of space travelers may come across such a world after needlessly crossing the black empty desert of space. They would find nothing but locked mausoleums on empty planets stripped clean of resources.

You know, if they can achieve time dilation to make an effective eternity in a subjective second within a virtual world, that'd conquer a lot of problems. It wouldn't matter when you died or if some cosmic disaster destroyed your entire galaxy when a black hole shits out a gamma ray burster, you'd effectively get to live until you were satisfied.

I like to think all the poorly-educated morons and autists and faggots will go for that route, leaving the smart and the ambitious in the waking world with free hands and free minds, capable of spreading to the reality of space without the ignorant masses holding them back.

Best of both worlds.

You pitiful, small minded creature.

>What if we're alone in the universe
Then we elevate animals and machines and sponsor the growth of bacteria on alien worlds.

No because space operas are not based on real technological impact, just scientifically fantastic worlds where the drama of the people is the main engine in the universe, and as far as we know the universe doesn't give a shit about us,

Basically space operas lack the sense of scale, thermodynamics, optimization, technological progression and implications that real life does, and hence they will never be possible.

They even tend to add anthropomorphic aliens and psychic powers.

I have none of that.

We could have conquered space after 1969, in fact the whole Apollo pogram was more about an overall expansion into space than just putting a human feet on the Moon.

Technology hasn't been the limit in all of this time, lack of will has been, just see what happened to NASA budget after the Apollo 11 and how much their ability to put payloads into space where reduced to almost nothing.

We could be in Mars right now, instead of relying on memengineers like Musk to keep the fire on.

>Your world is safer to live in, so you can afford to focus on quality rather than quantity.
It's also becoming progressively more expensive to live in, so increasing numbers of people can't afford to focus on anything.

I hope he'll find something really valuable and worthwhile out there to get a space gold rush or some shit going.

15 g/cm^2 of material around the ship is enough, in case of solar storm you can put the crew in a small special compartment to wait for it to pass on

Space radiation has been a problem overrrepresented, and I guess it happened through the phobia people have to radiation on Earth, I have seen people terrorized when some low alpha emitter material was accidentally sprayed on their houses.

And even if accumulating around 1 sievert every 500 space days is totally true, you just augmented your chances of getting "some" cancer by 5% under linear no-threshold model.

Won't happen. We could find a habitable planet orbiting a star 7 Light-Years away and all we'll say is, "NEAT!" Maybe throw a couple messages that way, and catalog the finding.

I don't think he'll find many government subsidies on Mars.

There are a lot of valuable things in space, we just need the logistics to get there, a single refueling station can do wonder with deltaV budgets, or even an actual economy of scale(what Musk is trying to achieve) for spaceships should push the human limits further enough to reach asteroids(some even have horseshoes orbits, so they come and go to Earth periodically).

And even if you are not interested in asteroid mining, the Moon has rare elements away from ecologists and international dynamics(you also create infrastructure for the Moon which is a win-win since it gives you a lot of leverage in prestige and influence over future space endeavors , and I know China was interested)

>Project Orion never came to happen
>with 50s technology it would have been possible to put 7000 TONS on the moon in a single lauch
>DUR HUR NUCULAR NERGY IS VERY UNSAFE GUISE
>the military continuted to test literally thousands of explosions around the world.

A reminder, most galaxies will become unreachable as the universe keep expanding eternally.

Even if this chart turned out to be wrong, by 10 years we would have solved many energy problems, and these problems can be the cause of famines, wars and refugee crises, you know the ones that causes brexits and /pol/ whining.

And even if you are a hardcore antipacifist, imperialist, racist crisis lover, fusion would give even more abilities to the military to deploy more awesome and powerful stuff. In fact the first one interested should be the military, medium fusion powerplants improve your military on a fundamental level; on energy, and energy is the coin of the universe to do anything, don't think on only lasers, think about easier and more massed deployments through better powered logistics, bigger aircraft carriers that rely on deuterium(which you can find on the sea, something the US is not lacking)...

Nonsense. Space is slow relative to human events; space exploration could easily wait three or four centuries—hell, a few millennia—while human technology improves and our collective prosperity increases. It would easy enough to conquer poverty and then space, and we wouldn't miss anything much by doing so. (If the return on space mining was high enough, we might do both simultaneously.)

The space program was actually pretty unpopular at its peak, because it did, in fact, take up a heck of a lot of money— about 4% of the federal budget. At that time, we really did give billions for space.

Well, yes. The alternatives appear to be really, really improbable.

...And you go into one of Veeky Forums's Lovecraft threads and they'll tell you that cosmic horror is outdated because everyone is used to being small and unimportant in this enlightened modern age.

I think we've just gotten good at not thinking about it.

US People think NASA is a waste of money but have no problem with the huge military budget?

>It would easy enough to conquer poverty and then space, and we wouldn't miss anything much by doing so.
Live Aid was 30 years ago and we still haven't fed all the starving African children. If it was that easy we would have done it by now.

They've been brainwashed into thinking that's the case, yes.

I only hope Saint Musk can break them free.

>If it was that easy we would have done it by now.
We ARE doing that, right now.

We could do it faster.

But I'd encourage you to take a longer-term view of things. We could easily wait a few centuries, rather than 30 years. (If industrialized civilization can't go that long without nuking itself or choking on an environmental catastrophe, space wasn't going to save it; odds of the simultaneous death of industrialized civilization in Earth and in space would be non-negligible.) We might actually solve relative poverty within that timeframe.

>durr why dont we feed all the stupid niggers who breed like rats before taking steps to avoid extinction?

Look up african demographics before you go "MUH POOR PPLS :((("

>space exploration could easily wait three or four centuries

Nope

Humanity, as a whole have around 60 years to achieve space exploration in any meaningfull way.

They usually talk about the great filter like its about wars or other disasters that happen naturally or through the natural progression of war, but what about lack of resources to get into space?

Resources are finite, and oil is an energetic goldmine that also serves for material production of a lot of things, uranium is also finite and so on.

And think that everytime a uranium atom is extracted and suffers fission its not going to become uranium 235 again, everytime cadmium or vanadium are applied to electronics and discarded into some dump waste you might recover 60%-70%(90% for aluminium but we are not going to run of Al anytime soon) and everytime we delve deeper into the Earth to find new deposits, costs skyrockets while our ability to provide the complex systems and energy needed can't keep up with the geometric consumption.

If by the time we reach peak oil(along with other resources)and humanity, as species, haven't found a solution to this, there won't be any other window of opportunity for space expansion, no other period of such richness, knowledge and stability and we would have to wait millions of years until all the elements are eaten by Earth's crust and spilled again, and life covers the Earth as it did in the Cambric-Triasic, then there would be another chance, and could anyone dare to say that human civilization can stay as complex and technological as it is now for millions of years, or even humanity as species?

And before we go "buh technological progress" to reach orbit you need energy, that energy can only be delivered through its explotation and transport be it; uranium, oil, fusion... and the more exotic technology becomes the more elements and rare compounds are involved in either its production or actual final product, do you really expect... a miracle?

Solid state silicon batteries are better than lithium ones already, and fusion is nearly limitless. Solar sail ships require only the energy to leave orbit, and I think a rail gun can do that with enough solar cells. Practical now? nope. but eventually. And nothing even has to be burned for it. You are welcome. You can now calm down and enjoy the future.

>and we would have to wait millions of years until all the elements are eaten by Earth's crust and spilled again, and life covers the Earth as it did in the Cambric-Triasic, then there would be another chance

Wrong. Many of the deposits are from rocks older than a billion years old and we only got about a billion years till the expanding sun slowly increases in luminosity and scorches the Earth barren. Carboniferous forests, vdense microbial mats able to produce oil in large quantities and fissible materials never come back either. The only chance any post-apoc society would have is antarctica drifting north and becoming green again.

Also, most people are not even aware of it but we are running out of ludicrous things like sand. Good construction grade sand is extremely rare and we all used it up. Rare earths will run out in scant decades too, customer electronics will become prohibitively expensive again.

There's a technology now that makes something oil-like from water and CO2 using electricity at something like 90% efficiency.

If we really can't send a ship to space without oil, we'll just make our own.

>t. moron who has no idea how industrial processes work and how much resources it takes just to maintain what we have

Wow, nice 19th development there. Sythetic hydrocarbons are anothing new, getting enough energy to avoid society collapsing is

Would you trust your colonies in other star without FTL communication?

>getting enough energy to avoid society collapsing is

If only we could access some form of energy more powerful than chemical bonds. Cracking atoms, maybe. Then we could use it for tens of thousands of years or more while we researched fusion.

Would you trust your colonies in other continent before telegram?

It would be great. Too bad all fissible materials will be gone within two hundred years even with just current usage.

Not if they have nukes.

>Solid state silicon batteries

Mind you to provide any links, google returns lithium-silicon batteries, and lithium is already an endangered element

The next step is looking into its production to see how much energy does it cost and what elements are involved, either as catalist or as rare exotic compound)

>Wrong. Many of the deposits are from rocks older than a billion years

Well, its a matter of scale that I don't have in my mind right now, I would think that if every 1.5 billion years the Earths does an entire "oil cycle" might be enough, but there are other elements involved.

>Good construction grade sand

Isn't that made of higher proportion of silicon? In terms of construction, it doesn't seem like such a rush since people could literally live in caves if necesary.

>oil-like from water and CO2

Thats the point exactly, and a mistake that people who talk about antimatter as energy usually make.

When you create oil, instead of exctracting it, you are condensing energy not exploiting it, so at the very least you would need an equal(usually higher) ammount of joules to do it.

Now if your next answer is about extracting energy from sun and air and just scaling up the amount of generators, then you have to notice that you will have to do humongous things like covering Spain in aerogenerators and solar cells to totally compensate for our own energy consumption, plus the storage of our own.

And I haven't even looked at the chemicals involved in solar panels, but as soon as some catalist like platinum or even wolframium is implied in the industrial process that means that you have to find less efficient substitutes(or totally forget about production).

In fact, even if you managed to make it a biological technology with bacteria; you are going to be left at some point without phosphor and sulphur which makes around 90% of living things.

Good thing ~capitalism~ has discovered how to make artificial sand for concrete then. It's so easy, Pakistan does it.

I guess that's one more failure for Malthusians. Rare earths aren't physically either btw. They're scarce because they are so common, there is barely any profit in extraction, so only the cheapest, poorest countries bother.

Not at all, in fact if your colony ship needs to go around 30% the speed of light to reach another planet you probably wouldn't even really know if they made it or not.

And if they made it, time passes and people forget about their home and concetrate on the present, they would end up feeling nothing about Earth or whatever home planet they came from. They would see it like some relic of the past that appears on the books, if they suffer some kind of cataclism the name of the home planet might be lost or become irrecognizable if the language doesn't become something alien itself.

You've confused proven reserves with total reserves. There's only a few million times difference in scale, so nbd.

We can live off of renewable energy (and nuclear and possibly thorium) comfortably for a few centuries. The point is that we could not store electricity in a meaningful way, but this method is ridiculously cost efficient, so if we need fuel we want to carry on long voyages (i.e. space travel) we do have a substitute.

>I would think that if every 1.5 billion years the Earths does an entire "oil cycle" might be enough,

We dont have enough time for a cycle like that and the biospheres and climates able to form large hydrocarbon deposites are long gone anyway.

>Isn't that made of higher proportion of silicon? In terms of construction, it doesn't seem like such a rush since people could literally live in caves if necesary.


Particle size, shape and compositon too. I guess a couple million people can get comfy in caves while the rest of the seven billion will die off.

Good thing ~capitalism~ has discovered how to waste like half the worlds sand deposites in decades building ghost towns in China and replace it with an inferior and more expensive substitute. You cant just mill down rocks and expect good sand.

>Rare earths aren't physically either btw. They're scarce because they are so common, there is barely any profit in extraction,

Factually incorrect.

And some wishful thinking.

>We can live off of renewable energy (and nuclear and possibly thorium) comfortably for a few centuries.

No we cant unless you want to go 1984 style distopia with rationed water, electricity and food and no customer goods.

>No, because Humanity lacks the reproductive capacity to actually expand beyond our own world anymore.
Most modern emigrations, from the Irish, to East Euros like myself, are done while their population and natality is pretty shot to begin with.
And given standards of living have been decreasing for the past 50 years, and combined with the looming threat of automatisation, we might find people, even in developed nations, that may want to fuck off to Venus or whatever for a better life.

What would we eat in space?

Supposedly the next big thing are sodium glass batteries, but it's too early to say for sure if they actually work.

This.

The whole point of space opera is that it is fantasy with a thin veneer of science-iness.

If the ancient greeks had had our scientific knowledge when they cooked up their myths, then they'd look much like space opera, too. The scientific advances even during their own golden age made their mythology seem ridiculous.

So then you get fantasy writing from later eras. Again, each time they start with what we know and go from there. Not terribly concerned about scientific accuracy, but also not blatantly violating what they think they know about the universe, either.

These days, that frontier of what ordinary people know and are willing to suspend their disbelief to accept has been pushed back. In prior eras, magic was just how the world worked and believable since the world itself was filled with mystery. Then it all came from God or the Devil or some being that fit the beliefs of the era. Now it's "other dimensions" or "psi" or something. Even where magic is some deeper truth, there's an attempt to make it believable given that it manifestly DOESN'T exist in daily life.

Hence why Vulcans are Elves are Nymphs. They went from daily spirits who you could conceivably meet, to a race of beings separated from man (why we can sail the world and nobody's met them), to beings from another planet. Always beautiful, remote, alien, and somewhat dangerous. In the hard sci fi of a century or two from now, if we've met real aliens and they're nothing like us, then the trope will be filled by transhuman super-beings who've transcended the singularity and whose ships occasionally still visit lone human travelers bearing wonder, power, and peril. Maybe some experiment gone horribly right, or maybe humans from an alternate timeline. Or maybe the future. Who knows?

Anyway, space opera is a world of myth and the impossible. It will always expand to be more than what a society is capable of.

You have to consider the metaphysical world people lived in. Ask any citizen of a polis the Big Questions, how humans came to be, how the Earth was was made, what is the purpose of life, what is the nature of existence, is there an afterlife, what are those white dots on the night sky etc. and no matter how intelligent he was(after all, you could be asking someone like Aristotle) his knowledge base runs dry rather quick and he will be forced to make educated guesses at best and fill the rest with gods and legens. Ask the same things of some random 20st century guy and he will smugly lay on you a digest of the vast amounts of knowledge we've aquired. Genetics, astronomy, physics, geology, evolution, biology, chemistry etc. Even your dumbest motherfucker will know about the basic concepts of the big bang, other galaxies, the germ theory, atoms, evolution, the formation of earth etc.

People need bigger, more elarborate fantasies with more versimilitude and more science because our everyday lives are filled with knowledge and technology. Wonders like talking to someone on another continent, flying,antibiotics or even just having an accurate map of the earth are mundane things now.

If you mean what we call space opera today (ie star wars or its ilk), then I'd say still no.

FTL implies time travel, for one. There are all kinds of problems with that, but even if it all works then you still have the problem that the time travel part is a WMD of unparalleled power. Or (if time is fixed) then it's useless for changing events but we'd have seen it by now (ie million-year-old human colonies planted in the past and now far beyond us in technology).

Second, speaking of WMDs. Space opera usually includes easy access to space travel. A ship has the expense and crew requirements of at least an old Age of Sail vessel, often much better. These ships can go ground to orbit to orbit to ground repeatedly without refueling (and that's assuming no use of FTL). Well, the problem is this: any ship with that much delta V is a world-ending WMD dinosaur killer waiting to happen. It would be easy to get to a Killing Star scenario, and someone somewhere (human or not) would be willing to do it. The social or technological controls you need to prevent that also make it impossible to have the scrappy owner-operators who fill space opera universes.

That large number of habitable planets. Where do they come from? The society that can engage in that much terraforming had better collapse in the The Distant Past because otherwise the societies won't look very Space Opera.

Or maybe you have panspermia. Precursors who seeded the galaxy with life from the same root stock so that all our aliens have the same molecular chemistry and DNA.

Rubber suit aliens? Unlikely without panspermia, and IMO even WITH panspermia. Sorry. At best, this is the Far Future and you have divergent evolution and transhumanism, followed by a collapse.

My feeling is that you can hand-wave most of this, but the FTL and delta V problems are unsolvable. They might be possible, but the world that results won't be space opera.

>Will space opera ever be possible?
Even if it is, I highly doubt that anyone would go for it.

In space, no one can hear the fat lady sing.

Well said!

Yes, the Smart Set often makes educated guesses based on what they know. That becomes tomorrow's received wisdom, then the next day's dogma, and so on until it passes into myth. The central kernels of the world views that resulted in what we read as mythology probably originated in exactly the way you describe.

I don't have a lot of praise for 40k usually, but you've got to give them credit for this one. Nearly all the fundamentally fantastic elements of the setting were all stuck in an unfalsifiable parallel universe that can't be detected right now. All of it: psi powers, demons, magic, rubber suit aliens, superscience, FTL, cheap space flight, why even shitty spaceships aren't cheap planet-killers, etc.

It's all The Warp's fault.

So that's a helluva leap, but it's just ONE big leap of faith. Accept that, and everything else falls into place.

pottery

When we start becoming Newtypes yes. Then we'll have wars where the Spacenoids fight the guys on Earth because we forced all the poor people into colonies and now they want revenge and to protect the environment left behind. Also somewhere in there I'm sure the spacenoids will give monkeys some giant robots and fuck some humans up.

Not to mention that by 2100 ad half the world's population will be Muslim, and those fuckers don't invent or even manufacture anything high tech. China might be the only country that manages to colonize outer space as they have tech and the will to make sacrifices.

This chart is completely delusional garbage.