What do you need faster than light travel for? Our system is big enough.
What do you need faster than light travel for? Our system is big enough
Luis Edwards
Gabriel Taylor
but it takes days and even years to get from one place to the other
plus most places are uninhabitable
Dylan Reed
Short term - Getting anywhere inside a solar system is a pain in the ass, inventing in-system FTL would let us do so at a fraction of the cost and much much faster.
Medium term - Just as there are planetary-scale disasters that make staying on just one world a bad idea, there are solar-scale catastrophes that can kill everything in an entire system. Gamma-ray burst for instance, not to mention the generic "whoops, humans are idiots and killed themselves" variety.
Long term - The sun isn't forever. We are in a race against entropy, and it will come for us all eventually. We need to buy time (say, a few billion years) in order to work out if there's a method of beating it forever.
Parker Miller
Once you have sufficient means to create a non-terrestrial economy, you'd have to ask why you'd bother landing on another planet in the first place? Terraforming any of the solar system would be extremely slow and costly, taking thousands of years if it could even be done. Constructing biomes or other planetary habitats is just as difficult as building space habitats, if not more so once you start mucking around with the difficulties of moving payloads from planets into orbit. There's no shortage of materials in the asteroid belt or on smaller moons, and plenty of room for space stations in orbits, whether around the sun or other bodies.
Lincoln Wright
Because it's fun.
Michael Smith
Potentially if you manage to find another already habitable planet it could be more efficient to colonise it even its a decent distance away.
Ethan Brooks
Well you don't need it. The stars aren't that far away, generally speaking.
Sure, crossing the 700 light years to Betelgeuse or whatever will take a few millennia. But if you're concerned about interstellar travel at all, you better have millennia of time to spare. If you don't have many, many millennia in your life span, you're not ready to leave your host system.
Noah Sullivan
Oh yes, if you develop decent FTL and find that one-in-a-million planet, but that kind of scenario is a long way off. I'd expect us to have sizable habitats in the solar system in orbit around various planets and at the lagrange points before that's a realistic possibility.
The issue we have with creating an off-world economy is the sheer cost of moving payloads into orbit. Once you have a manufacturing capacity up there (likely involving heavily automated mining of the asteroid belt to start with) then building things starts to become fairly straightforward.
Daniel Harris
lol, just lol, if you aren't riding seedships between the stars as a mind-upload and having your nanofabricators assemble you a new body when you get there
Heck, you can just "pause" 99% of the mind-cargo and let a small "skeleton crew" use all that processing power to experience massive time compression, so a 5000 year transit might take ~20 subjectively.
Bentley Reyes
The logical endgame for solar system habitation is a dyson swarm. Harvest as much of the planets and asteroid belts as can be salvaged, build trillions of stations that hover around the star, capturing errant hydrogen and helium and living off solar energies for billions of years.
Of course there will be splinters of humanity who careen off into deep space and stake out on other stars, the concept of "civilization" will become a strange thing.
Jacob Williams
You see any aliens around? Because I don't.
Hudson Wilson
>Because I don't.
That doesn't mean a whole lot, user.
Ayden Garcia
Planets are very wasteful use of space. All these resources could be used to make trillions of space stations with perfect living conditions, armored and armed to the teeth, and predictable. If you still want planets, you can always hollow them out and fill them with hydrogen to serve as fuel storage for your economy. On the bonus side, you get a bigger planet with the same gravity as it is less dense. Also, nothing stops you from making multiple layers.
Jason Cook
I've never understood why you can't just have FTL travel without any temporal issues. All you need to do is say that the speed of light isn't the fastest thing, and it's fixed.
Kayden Jones
No, it's a more much more fundamental problem. For the laws of physics to work there must be an universal cosmic speed limit. All massless particles travel, forever, at the speed of light. Photons just happen to be one of them.
youtube.com
Grayson Adams
And if they have FTL, you better pray to every god you can think of that they don't see you.
Joshua Cruz
Gabriel Roberts
>le Central Park at night meme
learn physics before you try and inject existential dread into space
Elijah Campbell
>For the laws of physics to work there must be an universal cosmic speed limit.
Just say that there's a Dark Limit that the 80% of the observable universe that we can't see obeys. :^)
William Phillips
Honestly I can see this being an option in the long run
Aaron Rodriguez
Oh yes, I forgot that F=ma prevents us from being wiped out completely by a rock the size of Australia traveling at 10% c. My mistake.
Christopher Lee
There's no reason for any of these species to not colonize the entire galaxy, and any relativistic projectile is very easy to track as it needs powerful radars and lasers to destroy grains of sands in their path.
Dominic Howard
Because Dyson spheres, ring worlds, and other megastructures take more to build than we could make in our own system.
Eli Rodriguez
>we've developed these weapons that can destroy entire planets, and we fear other people will invent these weapons so we will destroy them first
>even though we already have these weapons, and so we're much more likely to kill ourselves in a civil war between colonies
To say nothing of the dubious claims that these weapons can't be detected, which they can be, and can't be intercepted, which they can be, and could even be aimed, which they can't be.
Ethan Torres
>What do you need space travel for? Our planet is big enough.
>What do you need sea travel for? Our continent is big enough.
>What do you need horse travel for? Our village is big enough.
>What do you need travel for? Our house is big enough.
Ryan Morris
>All you need to do is say that the speed of light isn't the fastest thing, and it's fixed.
Why the FUCK aren't the massless particles moving faster
Adam Lopez
Biospheres inside your standard space station or spaceship are incredibly short-term. Planets are way more self-sustaining because they can prolong their inevitable atmosphere loss over eons.
Tyler Hughes
>big enough
too big, you mean
Josiah Jones
>humanity makes it to other star systems
>there is no competition because others are dead due to in-system relativistic warfare