So when did you realize that space travel is inherently impractical and we should just focus on earth and shit?

what do you mean

if you mean just accelerate to near c and decelerate at half way, there's the issue of time dilation not happening significantly until you get really close to c, as well as the problem of space dust hitting your ship with the force of nukes
1 gram rock at 20%c is 4 megatons of pain delivered straight to your asshole, higher % just goes up exponentially

if you don't mean that, I'm confused

Don't worry, America won't last past the year 2100, and after that, neither will the rest of humanity. Kiss your interplanetary fantasy bye bye

I say we at least drill into Mars' core then we can call it a day. It'll prob tell us whatever we really need to know

We should focus on other technologies for a bit, then get back to space colonization later.

Imagine if humanity invested all its resources into trying to reach the moon in 1500, they would build massive cannons and fireworks and such and not really get anywhere. We are like that. We naturally evolved on earth and need expensive infrastructure to support us on mars while we mine minerals or build hydroponic farms and solar panels. It is never going to amount to much. We need to create a new form of life.

>9371538
>getting into space is impossible for all but a single specific country
>9371545
>technologies developed in a field can only affect that single field

fucking Australians shitting up everywhere

Just because something is impractical doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, you absolute shitlord

Accelerating to near-c is a good trick, even without the possibility of hitting a dust grain.

I wrote a program to solve those problems once.
Say you want gamma, the time-dilation, to be 4. Assume controlled nuclear-fusion rockets.
Look at the required mass-ratios at the bottom

Of course, you're not looking for a specific gamma. You just want to go some distance.
Here's 1 gee steady boost halfway to Alpha Centauri, at which point you turn-over.
Double both "proper" and "rest" times for the complete voyage.

>Long term survival is inherently impractical - we shouldn't do it.
This is sadly the attitude of the day.

Like there's one fucking guy in a basement doing all the science somewhere, so we can only do one thing at a time.

Plus, if we had started trying to get to the moon back in 1500, we'd have ludicrous technology today (and hell, almost certainly would have made it a lot sooner, had we kept at it).

You simply can't solve all the problems on Earth without going into space, and you only get so much time to try at the futile effort.

The moment I realized the Earth is in no danger of being obliterated in a gaint game of cosmic billiards happening all around us in a universe that is ultimately indifferent to our existence. Oh wait...

>warp drive is literally impossible because of relativity
Um... no. Relativity doesnt expressly forbid warp drives anywhere. In fact the only reason warp drives were thought up was to work with relativity for FTL travel. Im not saying that it’s possible, im saying that you are retarded for claiming to know for sure that it isnt.

I'm in favor of at least TRYING to build cities on the Moon or Mars.
Can't see any economic benefit; gold and diamonds wouldn't be worth shipping back even if they were lying on the surface, waiting for us.
But they'd be back-ups if we (deliberately or inadvertently) screw up Earth.

Well, he'd be closer to right in claiming it was impossible due to negative energy requirements.

But that's neither here nor there, as you dun need no stinking warp drive once you have near biological immortality or are willing to rely on embryo colonizers, and you also don't need warp drive to set up more baskets for your eggs in this same solar system - and by the time you've done the latter, you should have the tech for the former.

Relativity doesn't forbid warp drives. Alcubierre found a valid solution to the Einstein equations.
Still those pesky problems of exotic matter, being unable to turn the drive off because you're causally-disconnected, and FTL permitting time travel.
But those are only PRACTICAL issues. No theoretical objections.

I lost a lot of interest in space travel when I learned that 99.9% of the universe is and will always be out of our reach and even worse we'll not even be able to look at those 99.9% anymore in the far future.

That said, focusing on earth only is stupid because if we don't destroy ourselves, our species will need way more than one world to survive and evolve.

Without space industry earth depletes essential resources within a few generations. And I'm not even talking about oil. But things you need for a technological society to exist.
In practical terms It's a now or never kind of thing.
Establishing viable and self sustaining industry and colonization of space means you also effectively eliminate a lot of the root causes of modern day problems. Population pressure vanishes when you can cart cities of people to off planet facilities. Economics as we know it stopsworking when raw resources like iron, gold, nickle, rare earth metals, hydrogen, and helium are so abundant that you couldn't charge money for it. Things shift towards a resource based economy. Plenty of volatiles and water out there, you could have giant orbital green houses that grow zero-g tomatoes the size of watermelons in a pest free climate controlled environment. You dont need to worry about water tables, topsoil erosion, bugs, disease, just breeding and modifying bigger and better strains. No one should be starving.
Space colonization is the solution to humanity's problems. We're a species that survived because we're adaptive colonialist and explorers as our default setting.

I'll never give up hope in FTL-travel. If we can't accomplish that, then what was the point in all of this?

Humans are weak and fragile, its legacy will be carried on by A.I.

We'd still be good to go, it'd just be a lot slower, so we'd need some elements of transhumanism first.

I mean, unless you were hoping to go to alpha centauri in your lifetime, in which case, yeah, yer fucked - but probably are either way.

>I mean, unless you were hoping to go to alpha centauri in your lifetime

Just anyone's lifetime. I don't want our species to blip out before meeting other intelligent life - that is, if we don't do it to ourselves.

Dun need FTL to rig up backup plans on the local planets. By the time you've done that, you've probably got the biotech and robotics for the next step, FTL or not.

Not that having FTL today would guarantee we'd ever meet other intelligent life, should it be rare enough.

humanity will die without ever reaching another star, the interstellar space belongs to robot waifus

This depressing attitude about humanity destroying itself is peddled by those who benefit from people believing it.

It's also an illogical argument. If you truly believe humanity will destroy itself, then how would moving to another planet solve the problem? Surely they'd destroy that one too?

If we were going to destroy ourselves, we would have done it already.

>If we were going to destroy ourselves, we would have done it already.

Before nukes we only had idiots. Now we have idiots with nukes.

>Now we have idiots with nukes.

What's taking them so long to use them? I'm not even convinced they're actually real.

Nukes wont destroy humans. The only thing that will wipe out all of humanity is an act of God type of event, like a super-nova or a moon sized asteroid hitting us. We are to spread out and ingrained to be killed by our own devices.

>I'm not even convinced they're actually real.
Not him, but jeeze /x/ gets in here a lot.

Meh, if we're lucky, we'll develop defenses that make nukes obsolete before we have a major exchange - or at least prevent a sudden instance of masses of ICBM's flying around - the occasional terror attack maybe less civilization ending, and just really annoying.

But the idea is that the robot waifus will be our children, I suppose. Just as likely we'll modify ourselves beyond recognition at some point, and be capable of doing it the hard way. If we start colonizing the local neighborhood, we'll have a lot more breathing room to work on the next step. (Maybe a 5 billion year max, or better, instead of 1 billion year max.)

>anything is possible if u believe in urself :) humanity rules!!

why does everyone immediately jump to interstellar exploration when talking about space travel?

we have another 10,000 years of just dinking around in our own solar system before we should even think about going beyond.

Why haven't they been used yet, especially before defense technology can be developed?

If you convince people nukes are real, then that's just as useful as actually possessing such things. They are an extremely useful concept for politics and control.

Well, I'd hope we'd *think* about it before then (I mean we are now). But yeah, aside from suicidal Mormons, or the like, I don't see anyone *attempting* it en mass before then, lest FTL turns out to be a thing.

Probes maybe - though even that would be a monumental effort.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo

Yes, nothing you haven't seen with your own eyes is a grand Jewish conspiracy attempting to deceive you, and the political fallout from risking MAD is just an illusion pushed by that same Jewish media. You're clearly too smart to fall for it. The Earth is flat, and satellites aren't real. Stay woke. Better yet, stay on the board with the woke folks and stop bothering the sleepers:

...

...

Well, there goes another thread - not that this one wasn't shit to begin with.

If it was flat someone could just go outside and measure it...

beyondhorizons.eu/2016/08/03/pic-de-finestrelles-pic-gaspard-ecrins-443-km/

Pretty spot on Mr Scientist, although I think the whole Jewish thing is a red herring.

I'll let you get back to your government worship.

Even that picture is of a flat earth. You can't escape it.

dizzib.github.io/earth/curve-calc/?d0=440&h0=2820&unit=metric

>Now we have idiots with nukes.
>What's taking them so long to use them? I'm not even convinced they're actually real.

THIS convince you?

youtu.be/ROAO1saHEvs

Coincidentally, I'm reading amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-Mountains/dp/1605986801
Nuclear power plants cannot go up in a mushroom cloud (though there have been plenty of screw-ups over the decades which released radiation.) Good book. The author is in favor of nuclear energy -- he just wants the public to be aware it's not to be treated casually.

Your video is irrelevant since is NOT about power plants but about some severely unhinged people running countries. Countries with bombs and missiles.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood

You don't need FTL to travel the stars
you can go to all the nearby galaxies at sublight speeds, if there are aliens at all, we're more than able to meet them

Quite interesting.
But don't see what this has to do with subject of thread -- prospects of interplanetary/interstellar travel, and if expending resources on this is essential.

Even on this board we get flat-earth /x/fags and /pol/tards, christ

...

You can go sublight --- but it's a loooooooog voyage. and and show how difficult it is to travel at more than a few percent of lightspeed.

Andromeda is about 2.5 million lightyears distant. At 5 percent of cee, that's 50 million years of travel. I find it hard to imagine anything lasting 50 million years -- no machinery and not you, even frozen to just above absolute zero.

With giganigga point defense lasers, we could probably safely get up to 20%
hyper accurate LIDAR and as many lasers as you can fit, and just ionize any rock large enough to do damage, dodging the ones you can't
might be able to get a bit faster with that, but that might be tempting fate

A one planet species is the definition of the ultimate Yolo

It's not the rocks or the pebbles or even the dust you need to worry about. Individual atoms hurt at those speeds. They make X-rays (or gammas) when they hit hull material. Arthur Clarke suggested carrying a shield (of ice) like an umbrella.
Reaching 20% cee (and stopping again) isn't completely out of the question; a 2 or 3 stage rocket could do it. Flight to the nearest stars is possible. But not flight to another galaxy.

According to NASA, "To keep the sphere inflated in spite of meteorite punctures and skin permeability, a make-up gas system using evaporating liquid or crystals of a subliming solid were incorporated inside the satellite."[3]
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo

youtu.be/N-vUkZHnjGI

...

The 30.5-metre (100 ft) diameter balloon was made of 0.5-mil-thick (12.7 μm) metalized 0.2-micrometre-thick (0.00787-mil) biaxially oriented PET film ("Mylar") material, and it was used to redirect transcontinental and intercontinental telephone, radio, and television signals.[2]

Honestly, user. Your space balloon spam is getting rather annoying. I'm glad you've taken such interest in this experiment but it was done back in the 60s m8. It it proved useful, we'd be using it, and your endless reposting of all this crap isn't going to get NASA, any politicians, or any American voters to change their mind.

Furthermore, you really should look into orbital mechanics a bit more before you continue to spam this shit all over every space thread you can find.

You'd be better off just using a large mass like mentioned. At relativistic speeds most "objects" are more like clouds of atoms than they are rocks or dust. These atoms will embed themselves into the mass, ballooning it outward on the front side, turning into a growing shield. If you come up with a way to deal with the heat, hopefully by parting with some of the mass, you could hopefully find some equilibrium where the mass shield stays roughly the same size maybe the hot mass you want to get rid of could even be used to accelerate the ship more.

Immediately upon consideration.

How they fuck is space going to save us from anything? It's literally a lifeless hell hole.
Lasting 10,000 years would be a miracle at the current rate. That means reproducing populations of humans. Technologically advanced humans, I give us 1000 years max, assuming there are some holdouts. Post industrial civilization probably won't make it 100.

>kansas is a barren wasteland

...and they needed a study to confirm this why?

If you drive your ship by throwing mass astern at V-sub-E and your ship runs into interstellar dust at MORE than V-sub-E, then there will be a net drag force. You can't "accelerate the ship more" by that method.

If something hits you at any noticeable fraction of lightspeed it doesn't just "pile up" on the front face of your shield. It plows right in and maybe on through because the energy release is vastly greater than the strength of the intermolecular bonds holding matter together. The impact energy will largely be converted into X- or gamma-rays.

If you are hit by a micro-meteor moving at "merely" interplanetary speeds, it hardly matters if your hull is steel or plywood. Tensile strength is irrelevant. Lead is better protection, simply because it's dense and more difficult to shove out of the way.

the most practical solution is to upload consciousness into robots

>Like there's one fucking guy in a basement doing all the science somewhere, so we can only do one thing at a time
There is still the question of how to distribute limited R&D resources.

It is important to get trekkies interested in actual science, maybe they could get into nanotechnology and make some progress there, then when new innovations have been made elsewhere we can apply them to space exploration.

So, patience my fedora'd friend. The scientific community is on your side.

Space is a waste of time. The best ways to fight overpopulation is miniaturization and developing underwater breathing. If we could shrink humans to 1/10th our current size the Earth would be functionally 10x larger and resources would last 10x as long. We could drive tiny little cars and current 3 lane highways could be 30x longer. On things like trains and airplanes they could be converted to be many stories tall so they could actually carry 100x as many people.

Underwater breathing would be fairly simple to genetically introduce into new humans, instantly 100xing the available space for living on Earth.

You dont need to wipe out all of humanity to condemn life to extinction. A collapse of high tech civilization is enough to ensure that humans will not be able to get off this rock before Earth becomes unlivable, and then it is all over anyway.

We have an unique opportunity here to spread to other planets and nobody knows how long will it last. Not taking advantage of this opportunity would be extremely irresponsible, not only for the sake of our descendants but for the sake of all life.

If we could shrink humans to 1/10th current size, resources would last 1000 times as long!!!
Bonus: You'd have the proportionate strength of a spider!

The best way to fight overpopulation is to kill most of the world's people.
If you happen to be one of the survivors, learn a little mathematics, engineering, genetics, and physics before posting again.

>A collapse of high tech civilization is enough to ensure that humans will not be able to get off this rock before Earth becomes unlivable
That's ridiculous. Even if our current civilization collapses, science and particularly the scientific worldview won't be forgotten.

I would be very interested to see what develops in a world with scientific understanding, but without large-scale civilization and deeply specialized industry. Right now it's just so easy to order a microchip, there's essentially no incentive to figure out how to make one in your basement. All we've got are halfhearted hobby efforts.

There's a very romantically appealing notion to me, of a chain of wizards and apprentices, preserving the knowledge of a lost civilization and little by little unlocking their applications, holding their secrets close and carefully trading with a few trusted neighbors for their immediate needs, finally emerging as kingmaker to a new civilization.

The Earth won't become unlivable for many millions of years. Plenty of time for all sorts of slow processes to do their work.

>A collapse of high tech civilization
Old meme. "All the easy-to-reach minerals are gone, so we'll be stuck."
People will just dismantle skyscrapers. Empire State Building has a higher concentration of iron & steel than any hole in Michigan.

>The scientific worldview won't be forgotten.
But all the technical literature, service manuals, textbooks, and tables might as well be in Assyrian if there are no e-readers left.
We really should keep backups on paper.

>all the technical literature, service manuals, textbooks, and tables might as well be in Assyrian if there are no e-readers left.
>We really should keep backups on paper.
There's lots on paper, and most of the really important stuff fits in a small notebook, and is common knowledge among well-educated people (though there are few enough of those):
- the periodic table, the concepts of molecules and ions, molecular diagrams
- electrons, protons, neutrons, and the concept of isotopes, radioactive decay, fission, and fusion
- the rest of the Standard Model
- basic quantum mechanics
- cartesian coordinates, vectors, matrices, tensors, basic calculus
- Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations, relativistic corrections to each
- the laws of thermodynamics
- basic electrical engineering equations and passive components
- simple descriptions of high-precision measuring instruments, methods of isolating elements, a brief overview of semiconductor technology, lasers, superconductivity, cryonics, plasma torches, particle accelerators, steam/gas turbines, piston engines, firearms, rocketry, spectrometry, electromagnetic and electrostatic motors and generators, chemical batteries, etc.
- living cells, the germ theory of disease, DNA, proteins, membranes, organelles, vaccines, antibiotics

Though we've had industrial society for centuries now, a lot of this stuff was only discovered within living memory. The endless reams of specifics are far less valuable, most of it only useful in the industrial context where it was written.

A lot of people will remember a lot of things.
I know a lot. (Much good it does arguing on this board.)
When was the last time you came across a book of log-tables? Even the 2nd-hand bookstores don't want 'em.

Just imagining all the fucking metal and ice we're going to get our grubby hands on someday from those rocks excites me.

This.

>we have another 10,000 years of just dinking around in our own solar system before we should even think about going beyond.
10,000 years ago, we didn't even have writing. 1,000 years ago, we didn't have the rudiments of scientific thought or industry. 100 years ago, we hadn't sent a single object into space. 50 years ago, man had barely gone to LEO. 5 years ago, we had only made one experiment with reusability and it was a colossal failure. 5 years from now, we're likely to have an orbital airliner and a permanent presence on the moon.

History is a track of accelerating technological progress, as each advancement gives us more freedom and power to work on more advancements. To say something as easily envisioned as interstellar travel is farther in the future than the invention of written language is in the past is madness.

Perpetual motion is easily envisioned too.
But I take your point. Science and technology build upon what's been done before.
In general, short-term predictions tend to be overly optimistic, long-term ones overly pessimistic.

But I remember a trend-line drawn in the '60s. Speed of transportation; year vs. maximum velocity. Human feet, horses, steam locomotives, propeller driven airplanes, jets, satellites. Each one rose rapidly, then leveled off as it reached its full potential, only to be replaced by something better. An overall curve arced upwards as it moved crest-to-crest, continually becoming steeper. In fact, the vertical velocity scale was logarithmic to squeeze higher speeds onto the paper.
Sometime around 2015 (as I recall) it passed the speed of light!
Obviously, the prediction was wrong. You can't extend lines indefinitely -- any more than you can expect Bitcoin to rise forever and ever.
I expect interstellar flight someday. But I also expect it to be slower-than-light. Probably much slower.

>Perpetual motion is easily envisioned too.
Not as realistic physical proposals. We can plan out a ship to travel to Alpha Centauri, we just can't afford to build it.

>I expect interstellar flight someday. But I also expect it to be slower-than-light.
Well, I'm not expecting FTL travel. There's no science to suggest that.

However, 0.05-0.1 c on big, comfortable ships doesn't look all that hard. Achievable with fusion rockets, for which fuel is abundant, or with antimatter, which can be made using abundant solar energy, or even with nuclear pulse propulsion. Together with life extension or generation ships or suspended animation or cloning vats and nursery robots (at least one of these approaches should be feasible within the century), that's sufficient to enable the beginning of mankind's expansion through the galaxy. We may colonize our neighboring stars before 2200.

A more sophisticated method of momentum exchange (throwing and catching reaction-mass slugs with extreme accuracy) could enable much higher speed transportation, and recycling of the energy of the system to transport a stream of traffic for the cost of a single trip.

All possible, except maybe for the date.
John Barnes made most of the same assumptions you did and set up a spreadsheet to model technology, world politics, population, etc. to see when Earth might launch starships. Antimatter rockets and suspended animation. He laid out all his assumptions in "Building a future" in
amazon.com/Apostrophes-Apocalypses-Collection-Acclaimed-Writers/dp/0312850697
The limiting factor is energy to make the fuel. The answer came out 3100 AD. That was too far in the future. Can't realistically extrapolate that far. So he threw in von Neumann machines which reproduce themselves and then build solar power satellites. That brought the first mission back to 2290.

Insufficient room here to detail all features of his model, but it's a fascinating piece of work and a good example of the technique for any SF writer or futurist.

Aside: He said that his spreadsheet was "huge". And so it was in the 1990s. The size is trivial by current standards.

>John Barnes made most of the same assumptions you did
No he didn't.

>he threw in von Neumann machines which reproduce themselves and then build solar power satellites. That brought the first mission back to 2290.
He must have assumed an absurdly slow rate of reproduction. Some algae can double in population every few hours. Even if you assume a doubling of population every year, which ridiculously slow (considering that, due to the advantages of the orbital, vacuum environment, most of the sunlight collection area will likely be material only a few atoms thick), that's a billion-fold increase every 30 years.

The surface area of a sphere with the radius of the Earth's distance from the sun is about 3*10^17 square kilometers, so starting from a single square km unit and year-long reproduction time, that would be about 6 decades of growth. That should be considered as a loose upper bound for building a dyson sphere with mature von Neumann machine technology. In other words, it would probably go much faster than that. Exponential growth is powerful.

I would be interested in reading this analysis if it were on the web, but I'm fairly confident I'd be tearing it apart rather than learning something from it.

Read the article before jumping to conclusions.
Material still has to be moved to where it's needed. Algae and bacteria only grow like that if you can feed them. Nanotechnology is not magic.

Use WorldCat to find the nearest copy.
worldcat.org/

By accelerate more I merely meant to slightly counteract the drag. It you can direct the heat and explosions mostly in the direction of your acceleration or velocity vector, you can reduce the drag a bit.

We literally can't do what you want to do. We'll run out of resources and die. It's also well known that you don't keep all your eggs in one basket. Humanity's fate should not be tied to Earth's. One fucking comet shouldn't be the arbiter of human existence. We just need cheaper launch options to bring resources back from space. They exist. We'll build them.

Focusing on space IS 'focusing on Earth and shit'.

youtu.be/CWLzGGKV0jI
youtu.be/zSimYARyL2w
youtu.be/LMbI6sk-62E

never because i am smart enough to understand that space program leads to tech innovation

This, I am hoping to one day accelerate the AI apocalypse

Ad hom and sarcasm is a clear indicator that you are upset, yet not smart enough to explain why I am wrong :)

shut the fuck up and do your scifi roleplaying somewhere else

cry harder you ignorant faggot. stay mad and jelly

ai and tech isn't there yet and to be realistic won't be there for a few years, unless people have real drive and determination or a real cause to leave earth they won't leave because why would you? If one day humanity entered a situation where we would need the means to travel in space or use AI to survive as a people, we would have more drive and determination to et through it and prevail like humanity always has before. Moving on to the topic of ai i believ it's completely useless because the only reason we would need ai or androids would be to help humans and in the examples that you've given us we would have no reason to engineer sentience, because there would be no real gain for humans.

just because space itself is lifeless does not mean it has to remain lifeless
Space is filled to the fucking brim with resources, countless asteroids that could be used to create habitats for humanity

no one gives a fuck about the opinion you just pulled out of your ass

>Launch loop (Large)
>those numbers
jesus fuck