I think we will have deleted ourselves long before the term "space colony" and "stellar empire" could start to make sense for us. "Stellar sailors" we want to see ourselves as? Right now we are not more than a kid on the beach, throwing little stones at the waves, and running away when they roll up the beach, frightened.

And before entropy - if it turns out to bbe true - ever could make a difference for mankind's ongoing existence in this universe, many billion more years must go by. To make entropy an argument why we should embark on conquering space, is a bit far fetched, for my taste.

the truth is much more profane, I fear: we have depleted out ressources in reach of us long before we could even be dreaming of colonizing otger pkanets to a degree that it would a difference for the evolutionary path of mankind. Our technological and high civilisation will fall, leaving future generations to live on the level of small tribes living by the ways of hunters and gatherers again.

Actually, it might even be a good thing for life on Earth if we do not start to pump ressources from other stellar objects into the system of earth'S planetosphere. it would change balances between substances and chemical agtns to a degree beyond that level that would be possible if we only deal with what is available to us on this planet. And if we even cannot reach a consenus on how our current modern messing-ups of the biosphere and ecosphere is creating what effect for Earth, and if we even cannot reliably calculate the longterm consequences of our modern playing around with the elem,nts of the pplanetosphere we already hav ein reach right here on Earth - how much more unable must we be to reliably forsee how it could change Earth's fate if we start to bring even more for example carbon from extraterrestrial sources into the internal Earth-based cycle of chemical interaction. - Not that we are close to being able to industrially exploit ressources on the moon in large scale.

Optimism is one thing. Fantasizing is a different one. and this talking of space colonization and stellar empires and industrial exploitation of foreign stellar objects, to me is currently just - nothing. We even cannot reliably opertae a simple space sation without running into problems time and again, a space station that is not even a space staion becasue it is still embedde din the upper layers of earth's atmopshere.

That far out into space we reach with our "space travelling" ...! :DL

And it is very liekly, that even in a most optimal future setting, we wpuld not reach out into space purselves, but send robots and probe droids, or discover other forms of travelling, via mind and spirit and mental projection or whatever.

Many cosmologists, btw, expect that if there are any civilisations out there running space travel programs successfully, will be civilisation that have left any animalistic, biology-dependant staes of life behind, and will be - as we would see it - robot civilisations, by that defeating the monumental problems of time and ageing when travelling huge distances like between stars, and alos deleting the high vuolnerability of biologic life to chnages in the enviuronmentl variables. maybe higher biologic life forms simply are not robut eniough to enable them for long-lasting space travels that would be needed to run space travels and empires indeed.

I also want to remind you that plkanet Eaerth is located in those 10% of our galaxy that is the youngest 10% of this galaxy alltpgether - 90% of the space and in this galaxy is millions of years older than the 10% we are embedded in. That means that we must expect most intelligent life out there to be eons older than we are, and thus being of higher developement levels and knowldge and ability, than we are. the difference probably is such that not only "their" abilities wopuld appear like magic to us - mor elieklöy is that we would not even be capable to recignise these higher intellegnes as what they are: higher intelligent life forms (like the ant does not realise the intellkictual superiority of man).

If somebody thinks we men from planet Terra could storm into space and make our way into this galaxy's history with flying banners and sounding fanfares, then this is most probably not matching reality. we more likely compare to this galaxy's junior class in kindergarten, and maybe we have been put under quarantine because we promise to annoy the adults with our noise and trouble-making.

"Human thought is so primitive it's looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies. That kind of makes you proud, doesn't it? huh?"

:yeah:

People traveled the Pacific in canoes and colonized Australia and many islands. The primitive slow boat approach has the advantage of being less noticeable to other civilizations and that by the time it arives at its destination any civilization there has died out.

Millions of tons of extraterrestrial material fall on the Earth every day. Its believed that the early amino acids the joined together to form the first string of protein and then on to be the first life on Earth were brought here on comets.

What we got running and what we are capable of are two different things. If politics had not killed Project Orion the solar system would be ours.

I agree with using robot probes (especially Von Neumann Probes) to explore and colonize space. When we arrive at that level of technological advance (its really not that far away) there is nothing preventing the designers of such probes from using them to seed human life on the worlds they visit.

And its also possible that those civilization have long since died out. The lack of signals and visible signs of (highly advanced) life in the MW tend to support this.

Then again we could be like a virus, once we escape confinement we slowly consume the host and spread until all is consumed, then we go dormant- like Spanish Flu.

"The problem is, of course, the Humans, they have developed primitive intelligence, yet their society is structured around perpetual conquest and conflict..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMsJqYwvkY8

This is the kind of ocean our canoes deal with now:

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/9266/image1nu.jpg

If this is the new ocean you want to paddle on with new engines, than the Pacific witht hose canoes was a spoon with some drops of water. It doesn't compare in any way. All our thought-about future spacecraft engines trying to cover these distances make the canoes in the pacific look like Ferraris sprinting in 1 second to a finsihing line just 40m away.

Stellar matter reaches earth in form of dust particles caught by Earth'S gravitation, and some meteorites that reaches deep enough i nto the atmosphere that afetr their burning to gas this gas cannot escape again the atmosphere/gravitation field of the planet. But that does not make "millions of tons per day".

How damaging a coincentraded massing of any agent or substance can be, you see in the disucssion about the dangers of methan-hydrate now thawing. All that stuff once was dissolved in the Earth's ocean and atmosphere - and has almost killed all life there was.

Our cultural thinking focusses around a money-driven system, and currently I do not see us abandoning that. So, money is a reality-defininf varoiable for us. So is our political system. But even if these things would be oragnised most optimally,I absolutely doubt that ther solar system then would be ours.Not with a technolcogy that is not intellogent in itself, is as vulnerable as it currently is, and has no ability to maintain and repair itself, autonomously (?), reacting to unforseen events with creative decision-making, etc. there is not one day without malfunctions in the ISS, and each time you take a flight over the atlantic remind yourself of that the many hundred processors they have in the cockpit produce between 60 and 400 malfunctions in those eight hours - fortunately most of them are so harmless that they do not even get nocitced by the pilots.

Wanna ride to Saturn with such a technology? I wouldn'T. Even Mars already is a high risk mission.

And why should people on Earth need to want that? also, to support a colony of modern people that you somehow manage to get there, you would need a tremendous ammount of material, goods and tziems transported there. Or you are about transporting just the genetical blueprint, or frozen eggs and sperm cells at best, and release them into a foreign environment. Then you would need a tehcnology being intelligent and creative and autonomous to support these germs once you released them.

If it is an alien environment already carrying some kind of life, think about the invasion of foreign spoecies do in the shifting living habitats right here on earth. It often leads to pushing back and extinction of the once regional species by the new arriving ones. But in our case discussed here, it is most likely that those germs you are about to send there, simply would not survive.

Not to mention the eons the trip itself would take, and the many accidents and collisions that necessarily would mean.

that is just antropomorphic self-reference - we would do something like we do, so we expect others to act in the same way. This ignored the meaning of this word in our language: alien. however, on the civilisations extincted, that is the full argument behind cosmologists arguing that most civilisation out there would be robot civilisations: they either have taken over from their biologic creators by killing them, or, and that is the real argument, these creators have designed their teczhnology to take over and transport theirn own intelligence, and who knows: maybe even their mind, deleting the need for vulnerable biological carriers of their "life".

The absence of signlas is somethign we cannot even speculate about. We hagve in no way any information that would enable us to make conclusions, to assume for inentional silence, or absence of any sender. We know nothing, and our behavior and desire and our technology hardly is the standard to which the rest of the universe must compare.

Maybe there is lots of communication going on - and we just do not have the means to perceive it or to recognise it as such.The biggest, most convincing argument against us contacting superior civilisations ist this: that every intelligence is capable only to perceive another intelligence that is relatively close to it's own intelligence level. We cannot reocgnise an intelloigence as such if it is too primitive - or too superior. It simply is beyond our perception range, appears to us as just nothing, or a chaos of signals whose order and nature we cannot recognize due to their superior structure, or as coincidences, or magic events which due to their magical nature we consider to be hallucinations. That ant under your show does not know about you thinking to step on it or not, for this ant it you do not even exist, and the signs of your intelligent life and culture and civilisation and examination of ants is beyiond it's recognition level. Some superintelligence out there could as well have not recongised our presence, or it has decided that we are too uninzeresting and unimportant in this huge universe as if it would see a need to deal with us. Becasue this also is problem for us: we cannot make the smallest of staements regarding a foreign intelligence'S motivations and goals. maybe it even considers our destruction right now - not because it is hostile to us, but because it cares as much for us as we care for that heap of dirt on the shovel that we push aside in order to flatten the ground for that new gardenway of ours - or that new radiotelescope we are about to construct.

This is right the reason why many prominent scientists, including stephen Hawking, have started to recommend that maybe we should not be so arrogant and eager to always send signlas into space in an attempt to make others aware of that we are here. We do not know about their nature and intentions, and cannot know it. Maybe it would be more clever to stay in hiding and observe with passive means what is - or is not - going on. Our own history tells us that almost every time when a superior civilisation meets an inferior, the first have crushed and destroyed the latter one. If others are like we are in this regard, our own nature and history should be a warning to us. Thewir morals may be different, if they even have any, and those robot civilisdations maybe are creative and clever and superintelloigent - but who said that they have emotions and sentiments at all, like we define them?

And must we even want to be like that - a plague for the rest of this galaxy? maybe others are very well aware of our presence - and thus have decided to isolate us and not to answer to our signals - right because the reason you mentioned? And "ecaping confinement", you said, implying an idea of conflict, violently breaking through a barrier, hostility, invasion. That is typical for human civilisations. And maybe that is why we are not wanted out there.

And where we are not wanted, we can be stopped and crushed, if needed. Of this we better should be sure. Because we belong to the babyclass of civilisations in this galaxy, and we are babies playing with daddy's explosives and mines in the armoury.

We can consider ourselves lkucky if we manage to survive the coming one hundred years wiothout having blown ourselves up and without having ruined the ecosphere beyond a level where it can maintain higher life (in an understanding of lifeforms as to be met on earth).

I like the way you think TLAM! It's always good to have a positive attitude. :D

http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/3322/map6.gif

I got a map too! ;)

In a 300 ly area around Sol we have over 20 G type stars (Yellow main sequence starts like our own friendly neighborhood yellow dwarf).

With Orion (See Below) traveling at .1c This puts Alpha Centaruri with in reach (a 44 yr trip). However the theoritical maximum speed of an Orion could be up to .3c to .8c using 1g acceleration and sufficient bombs... err "units" (as NASA etc likes to call them now) to ride on. The most optimistic speed of .8c puts most of the galaxy in reach (perhaps most of the universe) although it would require the development of Anti-mater enhanced nuclear bombs. Even without; 44 years isn't that long.



Per day was a typo. Its about 1,000 tons per year.

Simple solution: with an adequate space infrastructure in LEO we can decrease the amount of raw material we bring Earth side if there are factories and refineries up there. All that needs to be send down in manufactured goods and energy.

Sufficient space launch capabilities also brings solar shades in to the realm of possibility. Making planetary temperature control within our ability.



Monetary systems? Not my point at all. I'm a pure scientist at heart, I don't care how its funded or what political system (within reason) I'm working for.

My point was since the 1960's nuclear pulse propulsion (Orion) has been feasible as a method of sending massive (1,000s of tons) in to orbit and on to its destination cheaply. An Orion equipped spacecraft would be capable of acceleration of up to (and possibly over) 4g in a 10,000 ton spacecraft with about 1,300 tons of payload. 4g accelration over a spacecraft's flight equals about Saturn in 3 months, Mars in about a week, and Luna in about the time it takes you to finish reading this post.

Yea malfunctions happens but as you said most are minor. Difference between an Orion and a 747 is that if its engines stop running it keeps moving and it has the payload to bring massive redundancies (Say an additional engine system and lifeboats the size of the ISS).




Any early interstellar colony would need to be self sustaining.

I see a verity of techniques (why stop at one? One may not be suitable for all situations).

(Obviously this ISN'T something we can do now- it would take 100s of years)

The 1st stage would be probes to locate suitable worlds for colonization.
The 2nd stage would be seed probes to introduce Earth microorganisms etc to the environment. (What environments they would be introduced in, I leave that up to the people of this time period, and their moral judgments.)
The 3rd stage would be the settlers, either on a generational ship (depending on distance) or artificially gestated.

Then again our germs maybe so virulent that they overwhelm the native life which has no defense against it. Or they are biologically incomparable and unable to consume the nutrients each other feeds off of.

Eons? Depends on distance. See above about Orion.


I shamelessly direct you to Projectrho's page on Alien life for a discussion on the possibility of encountering alien life on a planet.

ProjectRho is a great source for anything related to future space exploration.

^^ I wish someone would get Orion working for Orbiter again. :)

I'll be long dead before our species reaches the point where it can colonize other worlds, but for the record:

Nothing beats setting foot on unexplored terrain. :up:

Part of the human spirit is exploration; to see new lands with our own eyes and feel the soil under our boots. This is where I start having issues with space exploration today and the drive toward using autonomous landers -- I fear that it will become habitual and completely eliminate the need or desire to explore firsthand. That leads me to wonder, would the human spirit indeed be crushed by total dependence on machines?

I try to balance that with the notion that we must use landers to further our understanding before committing any jellyware (people) to the destination. It would be foolish and irresponsible to drop people off somewhere without first assessing what risks are present and whether the region can shelter life. I just don't want our future generations to rely solely upon machinery to do what a human can and should do. ;)

In the mean time you can build your own with some fire crackers and an aluminum can.

Its awesome seeing it fly above your house.


Hay it worked for James T. Kirk...
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/9...lpostersre.jpg

:O:

Ah, the ol' firecracker inna can trick. :D Provided hours of fun when I was a twig. My youngest cousin (genius kid he is) has trumped me; he uses aluminum foil and [MAJIC EYES ONLY].


True, true. :yep:

:D

Guessing a compound based on Ammonia or Potassium? ;)

I'll have to ask the cousin next time I see him. :DL