What will we discover, where we boldly go ?

[mapuc]

These weeks I'm all trekkies watching between 6 to 12 episode of some Star Trek series. Right now I'm on Star Trek Enterprise.

This has given me a thought.

What will we discover where we boldly go, if we one day in the future invent the Warp engine and build a starship big as NX-01. ?

Other alien races ?
Nothing but dead planets ?

Markus

[ET2SN]

Hydrogen.

[Buddahaid]

New ways to get killed....

[AVGWarhawk]

[mapuc]

Will we discover things that make it necessary to rewrite our knowledge about the space ?

Will we armed our spaceship...Just in case if...?

Markus

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by mapuc

Will we discover things that make it necessary to rewrite our knowledge about the space ?

Will we armed our spaceship...Just in case if...?

Markus

We always come armed.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by ET2SN

Hydrogen.

Good one!

On topic, I at least know what we better should discover: and that is a way to ourselves. Assuming we could move out there, really far out there, we would only carry our problems and neuroses with us and project them onto the cosmos, and that would be like a boomerang that when it returns to us hits us on the back of our head, but squared in size and bump-effect.

Solaris. Stanislaw Lem's classic novel and the great movie made of it by Andrej Tarkowski (and that Lem did not like...) add's the twist to it I am after. In one passagem that I have already quoted once many years ago, Lem wrote this:

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here [on Solaris, Skybird] as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.

And:

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

The space out there, the space inside ourselves that is our mind - maybe the meaning of space exploration necessarily must embrace both in one and the same endavour. Because in the end we do not directly perceive and realise the nature of things and what our senses signal us they detect, our senses only show us by that that they work as they were intended. But its all a reality that we create inside our head, inside our brain, in our mind. We deal not with the universe per se, we deal with only our model and interpretation of it. And what we imagine, does not even really exist in the way we imagine it to be. Our brain's ways is the veil of Maya, and we cannot look beyond by just looking. First we must overlook something - ourselves, that is. That is what I understand to be at the heart and centre of every real spirituality. Trancendence can only be had at the price of leaving ourselves - read: our selves - behind. Forget about ourselves.

And maybe we then learn, like the protagonist Kelvin in Solaris, that the cosmos stares back into us.

Fantastic, great novel, btw. Who has not red it: read it!

(Different to Tarkowski, the movie by Soderberg with George Clooney unforgivingly cripples the ending by cutting off the merciless consequence and turning it into a stupid hollywood-kind of fell-well happy ending, sort of. Not a bad movie all along - until the end. Stupid: ruining the film on the last meters. )

[Catfish]

Originally Posted by ET2SN

Hydrogen.

And Helium.

Extraterrestrial life [sic!] (how arrogant to suppose your Terra is the only one, and extra terrestrial lol as if this was special), and interstellar travel was possible (don't think of "space ships", wrong direction), mankind should think about contact, and how to establish it. It is mankind to find out, all else are watching.

[Moonlight]

I hate to rain on your parade mapuc but the human race won't make it to that level of technology, in fact they won't even make it to the next century.

Get down to the doctors, take some chill pills and thank your lucky stars that you won't ever see the coming apocalypse.

I was always open minded on this subject but not any more, if anyone on here can say different then speak up and explain to every one how this apocalypse can be avoided and how we are going to navigate the stars.

[mapuc]

Isn't there a proverb saying something with

War and Disaster is mother of all inventions or something like that.

So maybe after this apocalypse we will make huge progress in technologies like in Star Trek (First Contact)

Since no one exactly know what we will find except lots of Hydrogen, Helium Suns and planet,
This thread is free to speculate and to derail-As long it stay within the subject Space the univers

Markus

[u crank]

In order for us to go boldly as the saying goes, three problems have to be addressed. Time, distance and the laws of Physics. Our alien neighbors will have to solve those problems as well if they wish to visit us.

[Sean C]

Originally Posted by Moonlight

I was always open minded on this subject but not any more, if anyone on here can say different then speak up and explain to every one how this apocalypse can be avoided and how we are going to navigate the stars.

I'm not sure about avoiding the apocalypse, but I do know something about how we would navigate. It's not too dissimilar to navigating by the stars on Earth. That's why they put a sextant on the Apollo spacecraft.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by mapuc

What will we discover?

It is pretty obvious imho...the whereabouts of Lord Lucan

[Platapus]

We will discover that space is really big and that takes a real long time to get to places.

[Skybird]

So throw in a pill and have them places coming to you.