Spaceship Earth
There's been a couple of space items in the news in the last few weeks. First, Stephen Hawking renewed his call for interstellar travel:
Source
Elon Musk, meanwhile, has unveiled his plan for the colonization of Mars (and I, for one, believe that if anyone can make it happen, it's him.)
And whilst I think it is quite feasible - although possibly not all that useful - to get to Mars, I don't believe that interstellar travel will ever occur within the technological means we have at our disposal. The distances are just too vast - the Voyager 1 probe travels at the rate of 1 light year per 10,000 years or thereabouts. All the very nearest stars are at least 5-7 light years distant, and heaven knows ( ;-) ) how far the nearest life-bearing orb might be. And I, for one, don't believe that 'warp speed' will ever exist outside of Hollywood.
And speaking of Hollywood, I honestly think that the Star Wars fantasy of interstellar travel is really our sublimated longing for the heaven that our technological age has declared is no longer 'up there'. It is the nearest we get to our version of heaven and immortality - the only kind we can believe in - not least because it is populated, in our mind, with actual Hollywood stars (and how aptly titled they are!)
All that said, I like the idea that we're already on a spaceship - namely, Spaceship Earth. After all, it is able to sustain vast populations for millions of years. It has the resources and life support systems that are needed to cover vast distances through space. And if you wanted to equip something that could voyage for literally millennia, then a big round sphere with its own atmosphere and oceans would be hard to beat.
So I would like to think we're actually already on an interstellar mission. I would like to think that some ancient civilization foresaw what it would take to colonize space, and created a self-sustaining system which was capable of doing it - and here we are doing it!
All we have to work out is, how to save the ship. And it's going to take some doing.
Stephen Hawking:I believe that life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as a sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go to space.
Source
Elon Musk, meanwhile, has unveiled his plan for the colonization of Mars (and I, for one, believe that if anyone can make it happen, it's him.)
And whilst I think it is quite feasible - although possibly not all that useful - to get to Mars, I don't believe that interstellar travel will ever occur within the technological means we have at our disposal. The distances are just too vast - the Voyager 1 probe travels at the rate of 1 light year per 10,000 years or thereabouts. All the very nearest stars are at least 5-7 light years distant, and heaven knows ( ;-) ) how far the nearest life-bearing orb might be. And I, for one, don't believe that 'warp speed' will ever exist outside of Hollywood.
And speaking of Hollywood, I honestly think that the Star Wars fantasy of interstellar travel is really our sublimated longing for the heaven that our technological age has declared is no longer 'up there'. It is the nearest we get to our version of heaven and immortality - the only kind we can believe in - not least because it is populated, in our mind, with actual Hollywood stars (and how aptly titled they are!)
All that said, I like the idea that we're already on a spaceship - namely, Spaceship Earth. After all, it is able to sustain vast populations for millions of years. It has the resources and life support systems that are needed to cover vast distances through space. And if you wanted to equip something that could voyage for literally millennia, then a big round sphere with its own atmosphere and oceans would be hard to beat.
So I would like to think we're actually already on an interstellar mission. I would like to think that some ancient civilization foresaw what it would take to colonize space, and created a self-sustaining system which was capable of doing it - and here we are doing it!
All we have to work out is, how to save the ship. And it's going to take some doing.
Comments (60)
With all due respect, Mr. Hawking, it's too late. The means to wage a terminally devastating nuclear war are at hand. The missiles and bombs are ready to go. Genetically engineered viruses (or bacteria, let's not slight bacteria) may or may not already be in the freezer. Smallpox was eradicated, but the US, for one, Russia I believe also, has kept a few samples of the virus. It wouldn't wipe out the species, but most people under 50 have not been vaccinated. A reintroduction of smallpox would be pretty bad.
Mars? We don't have the means yet to send several people to Mars in good health, let alone several thousand or a million; and even if we did, Mars is not open for business. Mars might never be open for business, and even if it was, it is much smaller than earth--about half the size.
Proxima Centauri is the closest star, about 4.3 light years away. We could send a probe out there at a speed considerably greater than Voyager's, but even if it was 1/10th the speed of light...
You are exactly right, Wayfarer. We are already on our spaceship. We may or may not be doomed (in the near future, anyway) but here we stand, and here we are going to stay standing.
Humans would most likely bring with them their nukes, viruses, and other dangers. Space might have no future after humans begin to colonize it.
Yes he's right, also about what he said recently about A.I.
We will have to go into space, or at least colonise a neighbouring planet. Hopefully we will have a few hundred years grace before it is necessary as our space technology is still very clunky. Perhaps the first priority should be to develop a self sufficient space station. So that should a large asteroid hit the earth, there will be some survivors. Even this is some way off.
In the meantime we just have to survive the crises brewing at the moment and try not to commit hari kari.
It's going to be a rocky ride the next 1or 2 hundred years.
I expect that what is more likely is another fall of civilisation, followed by another dark age. It does have the feel of a post apocalyptic novel though.
a. wiping us out or
b. colonizing us or
c. ushering in a new renaissance or
d. wondering, WTF?
So, we should rush out into the stars, (were we able) and trip up some alien plan and piss them off? Doesn't seem like a good idea.
There is no point building a lifeboat in orbit, on the moon, or on mars. Earth is our all in all, and manufacturing a satisfactory substitute isn't possible. It isn't that something can't be constructed. What is impossible is for this organism to survive and flourish in a small hot-house environment over the long run (say, 20 generations), and even if we could, what's the point? A life boat is a dead end to start with.
What about it? Everybody knows it's happening and is an accident not an act of aggression. The chances are that it will pass off without incident anyway given that the chances of anything big enough to cause damage first surviving the re-entry and then hitting occupied land are minimal.
The mounted police going to go to Beijing eh? Do what, apologize for having not provided a comfortable enough landing spot?
Don't think lightly of the Dragoons, they have like super secret special training with Wayne Gretzky.
As for colonizing Mars, NASA already has a reactionless drive straight out of Star Trek and they are now preparing to test one in space. The physicists disagree about how the damned thing works, but work it does without spitting anything out the back! Theoretically, you could equip a spaceship with a nuclear engine used for a submarine and reach the moon in four hours, Mars in two or three weeks, and Jupiter in perhaps six months. Thanks to not requiring any propellant it can provide continuous thrust and you would simply turn the ship around at the half-way point to decelerate.
The latest estimates are that even classical computers will be capable of revealing the mathematical foundations of a Theory of Everything within the next twenty years.
You should go to SAND, I think you would find much of interest there.
I googled 'reactionless drive' but from my 3.2 minutes of research, I ascertain that they are not actually real yet.
One of the great science fiction reads is Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama:
An earth expedition manages to board and indeed get inside this vessel, which is like a self-contained artificial world, full of crystalline cylinders containing holographic images of what seems like the ingredients for a planetary culture. It rotates along it's axis, thereby creating gravity.
At the end of the encounter, when it nears the sun, the earth expeditioners get off it, it slingshots around the sun - and off it goes. Earth realises that the whole vessel was prepared for just such an encounter, but that it is going somewhere else, and the Sun was just a pit-stop along the way. Best overall inter-stellar fantasy I have read.
On a completely different level, I think that ultimately the task of physically 'going somewhere' is impractical. I think an advanced intelligence would work out ways of simply encoding its ideas as energy and having them manifest wherever the conditions were suitable.
No, they don't. Not even close! The physicists are still very much at the stage of arguing about whether it works.
Quoting wuliheron
In a perfect Universe in which materials were resistant to collisions with particles at high speeds and astronauts were able to cope with G-Forces off the charts, perhaps. In any case you'd still need standard fuel rockets to get parts up there to build the ship and transfer the astronauts to it and then to transfer them from the ship to the moon at the other end.
The physicists can argue all they want, but several labs around the world have tested the damned thing and it produced thrust including NASA testing it in a vacuum chamber. They would not be preparing to launch one into orbit at a cost of $100,000.00 a pound if they were not sure it has a fair chance of working in space.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&client=ubuntu#q=nasa%20reactionless%20drive
I have a free standing offer to teach anyone how to use a dictionary and search engine. Any number of these links will confirm what I've said. People are arguing over exactly how the thing works and there hasn't been any peer reviewed papers on the thing, but its been tested by even NASA in a vacuum chamber and it produces thrust. A tiny, tiny, tiny amount of thrust, but its definitely there and enough to make chemical rockets obsolete for anything but going into orbit.
What's even more interesting to me is that, because they aren't sure how it works, they might be able to improve upon it a great deal. That the engineers couldn't care less about peer reviewed papers or the lack of explanations and are too excited about exploring the possibilities doesn't surprise me in the least.
Personally, I think the Unruh Effect is pretty close to the correct answer. That's quantum field theory that is the basis of modern Standard Theory which is accurate to about 14 decimal places and reconciles quantum mechanics and relativity to roughly 80%. What I think is happening is simply that they are turning the vacuum into virtual particles, but it could be a bit more complicated and they could also be messing with space-time itself and doing some kind of weirdness. There's a lot of that happening in physics right now with one researcher recently increasing the mass of electrons in a superconducting circuit merely by using a really powerful magnetic field.
I remember 'cold fusion' very well.
//edit// This seems like an authoritative article on the Em Drive. But until further developments, I think it is entirely speculative technology.
No doubt.
How would you mess with space-time itself, tweak the mathematics a little bit?
The NASA tests have not been submitted for peer review because nobody at NASA is confident that the results are directly attributable to the 'drive' and are repeatable. In any case the effect, if real, is so tiny as to cast considerable doubt as to whether it could ever be useful as an alternative to standard fuel systems for manned missions or interplanetary. Its one advantage, if it does work, is that it provides constant acceleration so that over time it builds up to previously unheard of speeds but all that advantage is lost if you have to decelerate for any reason. It would be ideal for missions such as intergalactic probes like Voyager but totally unsuited to shuttling people around the solar system.
Yes you raise a good point about Aliens interfering with us is some way. But we would only be likely to trip them up if they are very prolific throughout the universe. We are not likely to visit more than a few local star systems any time soon.
My point is that our first priority should be to establish a base of some sort in orbit so that if a catastrophic event happened on the surface of the planet, there would be a few people able to recolonise and more importantly retain the technological and scientific knowledge for the survivors. Thus enabling a fairly rapid recovery of civilisation. Currently all it would require to wipe us out to the extent that the few lucky survivors are thrown back to the Stone Age, is a fairly large asteroid impact in one of the deeper oceans. Perhaps an asteroid about 500metres in diameter would have that result and there are plenty of those wandering about in our vicinity.
My own suspicion is that space and time can exchange identities in extreme contexts and its possible to produce nonlinear temporal effects or "ripples" in time itself and the thrust they are developing is actually time being converted into space behind the device or space in front of the device being warped and compacted, but that's all speculation at this point. The recent discovery of gravity has already established that space-time itself can be warped and we'll just have to see what the experimenters can find out.
When the space shuttle first went into orbit its belly was lit up with a brilliant blue glow of Cherenkov radiation caused by radical oxygen atoms nobody knew where there and their discovery explained why for fifty years satellites that were designed to last a hundred years fried within five. Similarly, a stupid experiment thought up by high school students was to simply put a Geiger counter in orbit and, when they did, they discovered an inexplicable radiation anomaly over Brazil that has nothing to do with anything on the ground and had to reroute all of the manned flights and satellites around the thing. The list of unknowns and known hazards goes on and on, but astronauts are the new explorers and live to take those risks.
I find this to be a particularly meaningless statement. How would a large solid mass, the size of a wood stove achieve a velocity of close to the speed of light, without disintegrating in the first place? And that velocity would be relative to what? Suppose there is a tiny particle passing the wood stove, at close to the speed of light, wouldn't the wood stove be close to the speed of light relative to this particle? What would cause the wood stove to glow red, unless some of those particles were colliding with it?
Quoting wuliheron
Doesn't relativity theory allow that there is an inverse relationship between space and time? So space and time can change identities under relativity theory, but only through an inversion.
Relativity suggests space and time are constantly exchanging identities, but in a causal fashion, and implies that time is possibly an illusion and we inhabit a fated mono-block universe. My own view is that the passage of time is merely the greater context of the void exchanging identities with its contents similar to the Unruh Effect. We perceive time passing simply because a context without any content, and vice versa, is a contradiction and a metaphysical extreme excluded by intrinsic yin-yang dynamics. Everything being paradoxical means we can never determine with certainty if our universe is fated or changing so we perceive it as usually changing by exchanging geometry or space for time and vice versa. Even whether time is flowing forwards or backwards would ultimately remain a mystery and the arrow of time can be viewed as merely due to the fact the human mind doesn't work backwards.
Note that the idea that a context without any content and vice versa can explain why its impossible to achieve a perfect vacuum, absolute zero, or the speed of light.
Quoting wuliheronHow could a void have contents, isn't this an explicit contradiction? I don't understand this concept of "void" which you seem to have. It appears like a reification of nothing. The problem I see with this metaphysical perspective, is that if you make nothing into something, it can be whatever you want it to be, because it's pure fantasy, really nothing. So whatever you make it into is just whatever you want it to be.
Half the world recognizes what is commonly called "The mother of all" or the void that gives rise to the infinite things that exist. One without the other is a contradiction in terms because like up and down, back and front, the two define one another. Everything being context dependent or paradoxical might sound like its impossible to ever prove such a thing, however, quantum mechanics is a good example that the relationship can be inferred and established statistically. What I'm attempting to do with my writing is extrapolate a systems logic that describes how the two appear to exchange identities in every way imaginable that is self-consistent.
This is related to the contextual assertion that words only have demonstrable meaning in specific contexts. By expressing words as variables I can allow them to collectively express the systems logic. You could think of it as staring off into infinity and seeing the same symmetry fading into the distance. A four fold supersymmetry would then express the recursion in the law of identity as infinity vanishes into indeterminacy.
I don't understand what you are talking about. It may be imminently sensible or it may be pure nonsense (as opposed to adulterated nonsense). I can't tell -- I don't know enough to know or not know about voids and contexts and identities bouncing around the mulberry bush. There may be a weasel about to pop.
Exactly how the passage of time changes according to the content and context in every situation is something I have yet to work out, but it means time can be expressed as either static juxtapositions as in a fated Relativitistic mono-block universe or as flow dynamics or bandwidth issues.
I could go on and on attempting to explain the details, but it well accepted philosophy that is now becoming accepted physics. You don't need to identify exactly what kind of rocks they are or whatever in order to observe their flow dynamics and how it changes their role within the environment.
I think you have things backward wuliheron. There is nothing in existence prior to the present, in the future, this is the "void". The void is that wall of emptiness which is right in front of you all the time, the future. There is nothing there which can be remembered, sensed, or experienced in any way. Objects are not "moving into the future" because this would be a process of annihilation at each moment of the present, as the object enters the void of the future.
Instead, objects come into existence at each moment of the present. We have tracked the relative positioning of objects, through the past, and this is what we know as the motion of objects. So the objects have been moving through the past, but they are not moving into the future, their motion always stays in the past. We can project to a future point in time, and claim that an object will move to a particular place when that point in time becomes a past point, but this is not a case of moving into the future. All movement of objects is always in the past, that is a brute fact.
When Max Planck first discovered quantum mechanics he begged his colleges to explain the joke complaining that a sense of humor was never on his list of job requirements. The ripples from his discovery are still being felt today and, for example, Donald Hoffman is a Game theorist who spent ten years studying all the neurological evidence and running one computer simulation after another only to conclude that if the human mind and brain had ever resembled anything like reality we would have long ago become extinct as a species. Likewise, when mathematicians examined classical mathematics and causal physics they discovered that any number of simple metaphors can describe the universe causally and, for example, you can describe everything causally as merely consisting of bouncing springs, whirling vortexes, or vibrating rubber sheets if you prefer because all of them provide equally good analogies.
My own description of time is merely a model for that which ultimately makes no sense and the only issue is how useful are such models. When you can no longer identify that you have identified nothing you have personal issues to deal with.
Unless it collided with Russell's Teapot, in which case both would be blown to smithereens.
The latter, I suspect.
However, I would point out that the first quantifiable theory of humor has already established that humor is about perceiving anything low in entropy and this year the US federal government finally admitted that they have classified a few jokes as vital to the national defense. When is a joke no longer a joke? When it makes more sense than using classic logic.
Russel was a great admirer of his student Wittgenstein and the story goes when someone asked Witt what was the meaning of meaning itself he quipped, "What do you mean by what is the meaning of meaning?" It is now possible to earn your doctorate in comedy and the sciences will never be the same again. Ideas such as fasifiability are rapidly going down the toilet of your personal preference which is why I am writing "The Book That Can Never Be Written". If you have no personal truth there's simply no point in discussing the truth.
Quoting Wikipedia
By "identified nothing' do you mean identified nothing as if it were something? Is this like seeing something which is not there? So when you no longer know that you are hallucinating, then you have personal problems? Is this "nothing" time? We identify it, and name it as "time", when it is really nothing?
Heavy cream, man.
One of my all time favourites! I still spin the vinyl, it's pretty scratchy though
Socrates became famous for endlessly repeating a barroom joke he told for drinks, "The only thing I know is that I know nothing!" This is known as the Law of Identity which Aristotle later used as the foundation of formal logic, meaning, all of logic is based on a joke. Hence, the reason quantum mechanics can casually turn both Zeno's paradoxes and calculus into indeterminate mush.
I take it that your argument is that we cannot proceed toward the law of non-contradiction, or any other logic until we identify that we have identified nothing, i.e., we must validate that the thing which we have identified as nothing is truly nothing. And if we have identified nothing, and haven't identified that we have identified nothing, we have problems. So how would we identify that we have identified nothing? How would we know that the nothing we have identified is truly nothing, rather than not nothing.
Furthermore, if we identify that we have identified nothing, i.e., validate that the thing identified as nothing is truly nothing, then doesn't this necessitate that nothing is something? In order to identify that the thing identified is truly the thing identified, isn't it necessary that there is such a thing as the thing identified? Then how could this be nothing? Therefore it is clearly the case that any attempt to identify nothing is self-defeating.
This is analog logic with an abacus being an excellent example. When Hewlett Packard attempted to film a commercial racing one of their calculators against an abacus they discovered the meaning of analog logic the hard way. Despite their input method requiring fewer key strokes than any other calculator the abacus beat them every time because its input is simultaneously its output and there is no equivalent function to = or enter. Analog logic produces analogs of what it is used to model and can also be described as pattern matching with the brain generating enormous patterns it then compares against one another, thus, allowing dumb neurons to organize and shift their focus without a clue as to what they are actually doing merely searching for what's missing from this picture or anything low in entropy. It also becomes the only viable way to organize when you start organizing neurons in enormous numbers.
Knowing that great behinds always stink alike anonymously.
Do you stand behind your own great stinking behind?
Yes, among them the olfactory, but unfortunately not all stenches are of an olfactory nature, and those ones seem to be able to slip through the net.
I imagine it being the kind of thing they will eat on spacecraft
Well, it sounds kinda boring, but at least it'd have to be better for you than factory-raised chicken! :B
But the idea of a fundamental 'unity of consciousness' is doubtless a very ancient intuition and allusions to it can be found in all kinds of sources, albeit mainly underground and 'mystical-occult'. It the basic idea behind the New Age.
I do consider our being of one consciousness as you say, but I am of the opinion that we are here to save ourselves and in doing so, both showing that it can be done and moving on to the next stage in our development. Rather than wasting this opportunity.