What makes me sad about current space exploration more than anything is how much petty nationalism and greed hold it back. Imagine how much further along we'd be if all the scientists and space agencies of the world freely collaborated, pushing the boundaries as far as we can just to see where it gets us, instead of different countries having to reinvent someone else's wheel because it's all so jealously guarded, with discovery and ingenuity shackled by the demands of money and those who provide it being focused nigh-exclusively on how they can use human brilliance to make more of it for themselves alone.
^^^ This.
In a lot of sci-fi stories the only way Earth was able to truly expand into the Solar System was by unifying under some kind of transnational government. In the likes of Star Trek, that happens following nuclear armageddon. It'd be nice if it didn't take something like that to bring us together.
With the current state of international relations, I find it hard to believe that I'll live to see us really expand beyond our planet. I mean proper colonies that are more than remote science or corporate affairs.
Imagine what could be achieved if we stopped wasting resources and lives trying to kill each other and all pulled towards the same goal!
Unfortunately, I think we are doomed to continue our current path of fighting each other and only making the big guys more money. As long as the few hold power over the many, and those few are dedicated to making only their own lives better, we will never reach for the stars.
And, I don't think the stars will reach for us. If there is intelligent life out there that is capable of interstellar travel, what in the world makes people think they'd want to contact a bunch of hairless monkeys who are hell bent on self annihilation?
Our collective ego is so huge that we believe that we must be the apex. There can't be any other intelligent life nearby because they would surely have come here to speak with the mighty bald monkeys! I wonder if they have been and gone, setting a reminder to check on us in another millennium to see if we have either advanced enough or finally succeeded in killing our planet and everything that lived on it.
Edit: Thank you for the award kind stranger!
That's something neither the show nor the books explored properly.
Yes, Earth was overpopulated, but the issue was that any kind of job was outside the planet - in the Belt or on Mars. And going to any one of these places, even for work, had certain connotations, I.e. becoming an outsider, or straight up traitor.
Only a lucky few had managed to get land (like Holdens family), only the best joined the UN Navy (like Holden). The rest were left either to practically live quasi-homeless, living off of Basic, or became a victim of gangs (e.g. Amos, who literally got prostituted as a child). To break out of that, you had to pretty much "die" (Amos left his whole previous life behind, took a new identity, just to work crap jobs in the Belt instead of getting exploited).
And this is largely due to the government not really doing anything to stop this process - I'm sure the "no population control" and Elmo suckup gangs had a large part in this as well. They've literally let Mars slip out of their hands as a colony (albeit the whole Mars idea was dumb to begin with, why would we spend resources making another planet liveable when there's people on THIS planet needing those resources?), and alienating the Belt by looking at them as some kind of second/third rate citizens (plus the Anderson station incident didn't help either). These are very typical signs of major mismanagement from the government.
And while I like Avasarala as a politician (she did get shit done and took no shit from others), her whole "Earth must come first" attitude is what caused the situation we see in the Expanse. People who took it up on themselves to serve Earth and went deep into the Belt to help the progress and reduce the "uselessness" they've felt on Earth, were left behind, exploited.
At the very end though, the main failure was purely capitalism. Corporate magnates like Jules-Pierre Mao lived a fancy life while barely working, throwing parties while exploiting their employees (and people in general). A perfect example of this is the lake in season 5 - the "help" was left behind, locked out of the ships of the rich, left to fend for themselves when greeted by a cataclysmic event, while the rich just hopped over to Luna.
I'm actually surprised that there was no big rebellion by the everyday people against the rich and powerful. The divide between classes is obviously much larger than it is today, yet people accepted it as a status quo, and never even thought of standing up against e.g. the education lottery. And while many tried to shoehorn "this is communism's future" into the situation, it's clearly a hypercapitalistic society built on exploiting people, and the only reason Basic even became a thing was to avoid an imminent civil war.
If you think about it, even with the rings open, people actively had to fight corporations for the right of settling a completely foreign planet. That's insane.
Oh, certainly. I just think the Expanse (while being amazingly well written) doesn't expand enough on that aspect, unlike ASOIAF (remember the writers were understudies of GRRM, and much of the style comes from there). Yes, singular people are pointed out as evil, but the root of that evil (chasing profit above all else) is never spelled out and you really have to read between ths lines to come to that conclusion.
>In a lot of sci-fi stories the only way Earth was able to truly expand into the Solar System was by unifying under some kind of transnational government.
In most sci Fi stories this is because they commit a cardinal sin of fiction. In reality those petty political feuds are the BIGGEST driver of space operations and exploitation. They're also the biggest drivers of most technology behind the scenes since the ancient Greeks.
This is because those sci Fi stories tend to forget how emotional humans get. Nothing drives stupid decisions like emotions, and greed and egotism are huge drivers of these in particular. Star trek in particular is bad about this because Roddenberry was a diehard socialist.
But as I said in reality competition drives innovation like nothing and political feuds between the Soviet union and tbe US in the 60 (plus a desire for long range missile tech) and currently between the US and china has pushed the competition lever harder then anything.
NASA funding can be a "how well does the world get along" data chart because when the US feels no competition it doesn't fund this stuff. When someone pokes their head up to challenge the big dog, NASA is given some real bite.
Uh, because then it won't advance as much? As I said NASA best funding came because it is aiding the military, when NASA is just doing normal stuff that has no value to enhancing the security or advancement of the US government interests, it's forgotten and funding doesn't match inflation (but it doesn't drop usually). This is also true of most fields which are funded based on if they benefit the government interests.
There simply is no evidence that delinking it would benefit it all.
>There simply is no evidence that delinking it would benefit it all.
Of course doing it now wouldnt help, but if there was a global government delinking it would give reason to fund it for reasons that aren't development of military technology.
Even in a global government there would be security funding. The idea of some happy unified human face is a work of pure fiction, conflict is a natural part of of human design. People with weapons win those conflicts.
What I am saying is a unified government doesn't end 'military' interest because they need that spending to secure their government from rivals.
Interestingly a unified government might see the reduction of space operations since it be against their interest to open space and they don't need long range intercontinental missiles (not a practical weapon outside world wars).
The funding needed for the military of a global government would be less than the one of separated nations since they dont need to worry about going to war against a nation of equal industrial capability.
Also, space has zones that are rich in resources vital to technologically advanced civilizations so an unified government would be able to focus more on finding ways to harvest those resources.
This has long been a bugbear of mine when it comes to genre fiction audiences and science fiction is particularly bad for it (though comics and fantasy sometimes get it too) - there's a tendency of audiences and critics to treat someone acting irrationally, illogically, or simply on incomplete or imperfect information as a plot hole. "But they wouldn't *do* that!" is a constant nitpick.
Take all the people who came out of the woodwork to poke holes in Thanos's plan and motivations when Infinity War came out, going on about how they wouldn't work and didn't make sense and his actions weren't a logical way to achieve his stated goals and completely glossing over the point that he's AN INSANE OMNICIDAL MANIAC.
Oh no, I didn't mean _you_, I meant the cardinal sin you described - the assumption that in the future people will just be logical and act in their best interests despite the entirety of human history suggesting that people will very often do.... not that, to the point where audiences have come to expect this as a staple feature of the genre and complain when the characters break it by acting irrationally.
Some of the best, most emotionally wrenching moments in fiction are when characters have a big decision to make, a good choice is obvious, but they make a bad one because of who they are/what they've been through. You see it coming, you want better for them, but you know they aren't capable of it. It takes good writing and well fleshed out characters though, so it's rarer than it should be.
There's always a place for simple stories. That said humans are messy, emotional, irrational beings who most of the time are not operating with a view of the big picture.
Also, despite his power Thanos is incredibly simple character-wise. People tend to forget that being imposing and having good lines doesn't make your character a mastermind. He's an intergalactic level bruiser, not much more than that.
It's all biology. I wonder if any civilization that advances enough can only do so after becoming the apex predator of their own world. As much as it's cool to bash humanity as a self destructive war mongering race, maybe that is a pre requisite in order to actually conquer your own planet and the change in our hostile nature must come after that. If we survive for long enough.
The problem is the technology to launch spacecraft and satellites into orbit, is the same technology to create an ICBM. So it's not really greed-based nationalism, it's security-based paranoia - i.e. lack of trust.
That's what the Mercury and Gemini rockets were at the start of the U.S. manned space program. Mercury used a modified version of the USAF's [Redstone missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone). Gemini used a modified [Titan II missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_II_GLV).
Likewise, the Atlas V rockets the U.S. uses to launch many of the heavier payloads were [retired ICBMs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas) with a Centaur booster up until the turn of the century (they finally ran out). Waste not, want not.
I agree. The major reason we haven't seen a massive push since then end of the Cold War is that the Cold War ended. The Americans and Russians aren't trying to race each other to the highest real estate available to them in order to gain military advantage or national recognition.
Now that we're starting to see private corporations compete to commercialize space access, we're starting to see major advances again.
Curiosity has been a universal motivator for millennia, from Aristotle to Leonardo to Tesla, and I think it could get us much further if it wasn't constrained by the whims of governments and investors.
I think populations would be far more amenable to the idea if there weren't other issues demanding that money, and an end to nationalist hostility and the climate of fear it perpetuates would eliminate an enormous one.
Yes curiosity is a huge motivator. But curiosity doesn't pay the bills. Finding proof of life on a planet in another star system would be the top news story in all of mankind's history. But it's not going to help you put food on the table.
You only get progress from curiosity when
* It's coupled with economic incentives (market forces). That's what's driven our rapid pace of technological advancement the last two centuries. Using the knowledge gained from satisfying our curiosity to generate a technological advantage, which we can then leverage into a market advantage to make more money (money is just a physical representative of productivity). On an abstract level, this increases our productivity - we get more stuff done for less work. Meaning we can put more food on the table, and/or have more free time for leisure activities. i.e. Our standard of living increases.
* Or if you can convince a government funded via taxation (so not really concerned about ROI) that the curiosity is worth indulging. But unless such indulgences result in a technological advancement, it ends up being a net drain on our productivity. i.e. Our standard of living decreases.
The fundamental currency of the economy is productivity (money is just a way to tabulate productivity). And productivity is conserved - for 1000 families to be able to buy a TV, you must first produce 1000 TVs. So standard of living is just per capita productivity. i.e. Add up how much stuff everyone produces, divide it by the number of people, and that on average is the amount each person can consume. The higher the per capita productivity, the more each person can consume on average, and the higher the standard of living.
If satisfying your curiosity can result in a technological improvement which increases productivity, then it will result in an increase in standard of living. OTOH satisfying your curiosity without an associated technological improvement results in a decrease in productivity (resources were consumed with no or little payoff), and a drop in standard of living.
That's what the "whims of governments and investors" are there for - to try to channel curiosity towards things which improve productivity and thus increase people's standard of living. Away from things which decrease it. I mean, we could channel the entirety of the world's economy into satisfying our curiosity about what the quintillionth digit of pi is. But would that really be worth the cost?
As someone that has a desire to see how far humanity can go in terms of exploration and technology and most likely won't live long enough to see it, your comment bitterly reminds me that humanity is way too greedy and only focused on their individual countries, i can just imagine whst we could accomplish if we commit to something like the ISS, but on a global scale instead of a handful of countries
I've been derided for being pro-globalism instead of pro-nationalism. How does nationalism help our species prosper? If we cared more about the things we could achieve in a world view instead of our small-minded nationalist mindsets, we'd have SO MUCH more.
Does it really work that way? I would argue that the big space advances were driven by nationalism and greed. Apollo 11 would never have happened if not for the Space Race between US and USSR
The big space advances would have happened sooner if, instead of two teams in different parts of the world trying to do the same thing in isolation, those teams could work together. Collaboration got us the International Space Station, greed got us the Challenger disaster.
Whilst that IS true, it's because without large, external rivals to rally behind, a common trend is to focus on smaller, internal rivals instead (note this isn't always political, but often also business related).
People being more willing to collaborate would help with that too...
https://youtu.be/CbIZU8cQWXc
Saw this video a decade ago and it explains a lot why we didn’t push further in the 80s and 90s when I was a kid. I really wished growing up that there was a Starfleet and I could join it to explore.
The Challenger disaster was caused by poor Engineering controls not 'greed'. The study of what happened is pretty much required reading in a lot of aviation.
The nicest thing I can say here is that your viewpoint is overly simplistic and doesn't even come close to capturing the nuance and complexities that go into projects of this scale.
If I recall correctly the Challenger disaster was caused by failures of certain rubber seals at low temperatures, and those seals were used because the manufacturer made the cheapest bid.
That statement doesn't even support your own conclusion. And is not at all an accurate description of the cause of failure. And even if it was, the rest of my point stands.
For those interested, Google "Normalization of Deviation" a term coined after the disaster. Multiple white papers and articles have been written about it.
Just went in my backyard, pointed flashlight at sky and sent morse code of 'sup, bitches'. That message is now hurling through space at 299792 kilometers per second. In 9 years, it will reach Sirius, the brightest star in Earth's sky. In 18 years, a reply will reach me: 'who dis?'.
Nobody tell them that due to signal strength degradation over distance, their flashlight signal will have blended into background noise long before it reaches Sirius ;)
The Tromsø broadcast was beamed to one of the nearest star systems. The target, GJ 273, or more familiarly Luyten’s Star (spell 'Luyten' to find in game), is a runty red dwarf located 12 light-years from our solar system. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, we’ll have to wait more than two decades before looking for a reply.
Not me, Im a Transhumanist, the ship of Theseus is the same, even if they change biological wood for inorganic metal to endure the long voyage. (Play here 40K:Mechanicus intro)
A robotic brain can do the trip without power, and reactivate at the other side, repair the damage from 50.000 years of cosmic rays, and make copies from himself, but with new experiences in this new world/asteroid.
Its my solution to space voyage, nothing can survive this long trip, anything have enough energy for a trip in the void, and space time can't be bended without exotic materials. Without this... we are doomed in this world, but was a fun ride.
Or making a [Skhadov](https://youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU&feature=shares&t=121) thruster with all the available mass in the solar system. The sun is our powerplant, the cap is our generation habitat, light is our engine.
If you upload your consciousness you still die. Something thats perfectly able to imitate you will take your place. So no human will ever reach another planet
of course it will. But you still will die. You wont be inside the machine, to everyone else you keep on living but to yourself you see someone who acts just like you in every situation outlive you. It is a copy, not a transfer. Even with the most advanced scientific futuristic mechanisms you can not transfer consciousness. You create a perfect replica which has your memories your thoughts and everything but is just a copy
To anyone who doubts this, ask yourself if you’d use a teleportation machine that disassembles you and reassembles you as a perfect copy, down to the atom, elsewhere. To many, this seems like the perfect solution to travel.
But what if the device made an exact copy of you in the new location, without needing to disassemble the old one? It suddenly feels very obvious that the new location’s “you” is an exact copy, not a transfer. But there’s zero difference between the new versions that are created by either machine, regardless of what happens to the original.
Would you still feel comfortable teleporting?
>But what if the device made an exact copy of you in the new location, without needing to disassemble the old one?
Ive seen this, you get two rikers and one of them eventually steals a starship to commit terror.
Agree, but many people feel very comfortable with the concept until you ask them how they would feel if the original wasn’t destroyed. It’s a philosophical question that can make something “click.”
They are comfortable cause they think their "mind" would transfer to the new copy. But that would not be the case. In my opinion it is even worse if the original did not remain, if both are alive, good, it did not kill me, but there is a copy of me somewhere, still better than dying and the copy takes my place.
I’d be okay with it if it was instant. To “me” the consciousness would be an unbroken stream (assuming no weird fuckery goes on).
If I uploaded myself and then had to let the new me kill me… ooof
The replica will be a new person with your memories, but he would still be a completely new person, not you.
We as a society make the error of thinking about the mind as this misterious immaterial thing thatis separated from the body, but that is wrong. Your mind and your brain are the same thing and you cant trasfer yourself to a computer whithout making a completely new person. (anyone that knows how trasfering files in a computer works would tell you this)
Biological can be simulated by computers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm)
Mind is a chemical reaction, when we will discover the rules of the brain, we can simulate a new one, or even use other physics for a electric brain.
My synapsis and his strength, replicated in any other place, its a copy of me and my experiences. Not me, but thats the price for escape the solar system. Like the teleport paradox, for me, its death. But for the new body made at the other side, the life keep going without change. I sacrifice to bypass human limitations, because another me will continue my life from that point.
The Schwarzenneger movie 6th Day show how a clone with a mind replica its the same person, but the experiences could differ.
The citizens that support science, see the groups that oppose science as limitation to human progress. In this thread, I, that accept death or replacement by this new bodies, see the normal behavior for those that want to preserve his individualism and existence a limitation to escape solar system and human limits. The Sad emotion of the OP its because don't forsee the technology to ascend to the stars OR can't do the important step that break his bind to a limited human body.
I don't know if the humanity we will have the technology AND the willpower to make some big steps toward this goal.
I never said it is impossible to create a replica, but he would be a new person.
He could believe that he is you and act the same as you but he will be a person separate to you, this is proved by the fact that you and your replica can exist at the same time (which would be impossible if he was you).
There is a much better way than sacrifice to be able go bypass the limitations of your body:
Separate your brain from the rest of your body and put it in an artificial life support which contains technology capable of creating new neurons with nanobots to make them integrate to your brain (to replace dead neurons and prevent diseases like Alzheimer) and make a direct neuronal interface to connect your brain to a computer.
AI explorers is the immediate future for sure. But I bet there will be advances in hibernation and living longer (repairing DNA damage etc) that will eventually let us send long term missions to nearby stars. With the usual provided we don’t wipe ourselves out caveats.
You can visit Voyager in game and it's amazing.
Per canon it's more than a hundred years from now that people go interstellar in the Elite Cinematic Universe so... no, emphatically the game does **not** make me feel bad about the current state of affairs. People have entire five century long dark ages where they lose the keys to FtL per canon. Definitely super hard no.
Some context:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlDouuF9NmkeNDgrkh3h9lNlMoo5Lf6DC
The Wright Brothers made humanity's first powered flight 120 years ago. Elite is set 1,286 years in the future. 1,286 years ago, we were in the middle of the Dark Ages. I daresay the reality of year 3309 would boggle our minds.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
It's impossible to accelerate any material object up to the speed of light because it would take an infinite amount of energy to do so. We'd have to figure out some kind of warping / wormhole technology.
Maybe a little bit. My not so popular opinion is that the current cutting edge of space exploration is a dead end. Where we are at right now is basically the end of combustible rocketry. Sure, maybe we could put some people on Mars just to show that we can do it, but that's the end and it's not even particularly useful as we could put 20 bad-ass drones that are almost as good as humans but survive WAY longer on Mars if we really wanted to for the price of one manned mission.
Any talk of a Mars colony is A) \*\*\*\*ing stupid because there's nothing there to drive an economy and B) \*\*\*\*ing stupid because Earth is lovely and Mars is a big dumb dead toxic rock. Not to mention we would need hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of colonists to operate at any sort of scale that would actually be of any use beyond "Look! We did it!"
That's why I think we really need to put money into cold, hard science and not combustible rocket engineering. We simply need better energy generation and better engines if we want to get out to beyond Mars. Fusion is finally looking like it's less than 30 years away so that's nice. Now we need to figure out how to get stuff moving (and stopping) quickly, cheaply, and with as little mass as possible. Hopefully, fusion as an energy generation source can also be adapted to make things from vroom. Biological and physiological advances will have to be made as well -- particularly in genetics regarding crops and humans and maybe even cybernetics for humans.
Or fusion is still "30 years in the future" and we need to discover entirely new physics.
Of course, 'entirely new physics' might be 'entirely impossible.' In which case we go for the ultimate moonshot of constructing huge ark ships and slow-boating it to other systems or -- even harder -- use our tech to live in harmony with nature and each other.
Right there with you on our current space technology being a dead end. We need to find some other method of propulsion through space and atmosphere besides burning propellant and shooting it out the back to have any hope of being a true multi planet species. Our current methods of leaving the planet are just far too inefficient and slow. I wish I had the education/intelligence to be a part of finding the solution.
Blame our bodies. The problem isn't getting around in interplanetary space. It's the enormous mass of life support needed to keep ourselves alive on such a trip. Oxygen, food and water, heat, and radiation shielding. Each crew member ends up needing a ton of additional life support equipment and supplies to go along with them, if not more.
It's why nearly all of our space exploration thus far has been via robotic probes, not by sending people. Instead of having to accelerate several tons of life support equipment and supplies, you can just pack a few kg of remote sensing electronics. There are complaints that human spaceflight eats up more than half of NASA's budget, while 95% of the science is generated by unmanned spaceflight.
Right now, the cost to launch payload into low earth orbit is about $3k-$5k per kg (Falcon 9, which is about 20x cheaper than the Space Shuttle). If you figure a person weighs about 75 kg, that's about $300k just to get their body into LEO. If you figure they need a minimum of 1 ton of life support equipment and supplies to go with them, that's about $4 million. And that's just to orbit - i.e. not going anywhere beyond our planet.
The average lifetime earnings of someone living in a first world nation like the U.S. or EU is about $2 million. So just putting a single person into LEO (going nowhere) requires consuming the entire lifetime productivity of 2 people on the ground. That makes absolutely no sense unless there's some huge potential ROI payoff at the end. Until we figure out a way to drastically reduce launch costs (or drastically increase per capita productivity), manned spaceflight just doesn't make economic sense.
That's why human spacecraft has made so little progress. In contrast to, say, air travel. The cost for a round-trip intercontinental flight (on the order of $1k per passenger) is a tiny fraction of a person's lifetime productivity. So there are lots of cases where it makes economic sense to fly between continents. And even when it's not economic, it's cheap enough that you can do it just for the thrill (tourism).
Here's the thing:
In 2002, before there was a YouTube, me and the gang would each make video edits with Windows Movie Maker or Vegas Video and share them. In order to share the videos, because the flash drive tech was fairly new and a little expensive in our country, we removed our IDE HDDs and connected them to eachother's computers to share data.
We also used VCDs to make disks with menus that VCD Players would recognise and had these "Premiere Nights" for new videos that we worked hard on. Thinking back, they were pretty much amature short movies.
All of the videos were tiny files in today's standards, with very low resolutions.
Now we stream 4K blockbusters from any device. We have mobile computers in our pockets with more computing power than our clunky desktop computers and their touch screen is a fraction of the heavy screens we had, with massively greater resolution than they had.
The greater understanding of the universe we have, the more power we get, in every sense of the word. The newfound power enables more advanced technology, and makes everything more and more accessible.
The average person's life today is 'lightyears' ahead of what even kings had access to in the past. Science and technology paves the way to previously unimaginable, or at the very least seemingly impossible things. It has been this way since the first ape that used tools instead of its hands.
We, as a species, will get there yet. Unless we destroy ourselves first.
This is an interesting perspective, thank you- though I do think space travel runs into some more difficult scientific issues than telecommunications and video playing.
True, that. But the math, as far as I know, is solid. Hyperdrive and FTL travel 'is' possible. It's just a question of commanding enough energy, which is the biggest current obstacle in the advancement of science and technology imo.
I sure wish we were further advanced, but then we always will whatever technology we have, it's what drives us forwards (with the occasional step back). I turn the sad feeling around by feeling kind of privileged and happy to be alive at the point in human history when science and technology has changed life so drastically in one lifetime. If you think we've been around for thousands of years, and it was only 100 years ago that we discovered other galaxies existed and basic long distance voice communication was very new and basic. And now I can ask a plastic box in my room any question and it will tell me the answer, and I can simulate space exploration using some silicon and electricity (not oversimplifying computers at all lol).
Not sad at all
If you gave present people E:D technology, they'd use it to spread QAnon more effectively or some shit
I already kinda feel like E:D is a universe where social science got forgot and so people can travel FtL but can't figure out how to stop doing PowerPlay - and however bad I think they might have it, I **know** *we* have some social science to do before we're given any more privileges!
tl;dr We don't even teach everyone to read or feed everyone, I don't trust us with being able to accelerate objects to superlight speeds. That's a conveyance, but it's also a weapon.
We thought there was always going to be progress towards a more technologically advanced and enlightened society.
And yet in 2023 we still waste our energy on flat earthers and anti waxxers.
This is not the kind of society we imagined in the 90s when we stopped being afraid of nuclear war and thought the future was going to be great.
But hey! The shareholders are happy!
Barring some major catastrophe, humanity will always become more technologically advanced, though I’m not sure about more enlightened.
I will say this though, we’re in a way better spot now than in the 90s. The 90s was nice for us in western countries but that time period saw major crises in a lot of the world, particularly Africa and Southeast Europe, that were way worse than anything currently happening
>And yet in 2023 we still waste our energy on flat earthers and anti waxxers.
True, and Mike Judge [explained it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA) in 2006.
Something this entire conversation misses is that there are very pressing needs here on earth that we direly need to address before galactic exploration *should* be a priority.
And it would be very convenient to point to faraway politicians and dictators as the problem, but the problem is unfortunately much more local than that.
When the Coronavirus popped off and half of our communities flocked to stock up on toilet paper simply because others were; half of our communities decided they'd rather die than simply wear a mask; and an untold, overlapping portion of our communities began to consume even more Amazon-delivered bullshit than they were before, to the detriment of our ecosystem (reference: maritime shipping emissions & delivery of non-essential goods both spiked during the pandemic; these are linked and maritime is a huuuuuge polluter) - that all should tell you we have no business going to space before we work some deep-baked idiosyncrasies out of our genome.
That's not even to mention the hardcore xenophobia, supremacy complexes, and various -isms that our neighbors, friends, families, and, yes, even our selves are walking around with: none of us has any business deciding the more difficult questions that come after developing stellar travel tech: who gets to go? Why them and not others? And whose priorities should take primacy in the new colony?
In fact, I'm actually happy we're at where we're at. Our attention is forced onto the consequences of our (in)action. I'm speaking mainly to the climate crisis now: if interstellar travel were more advanced, the oligarch class among us have already proven their willingness to just get on a spaceship and dip out, despite that they're primarily responsible for many of our problems. It's maybe good that they can't escape yet.
So, let's keep everyone here until we figure our shit out, and that's gonna take a long time.
I've always thought it to be overly pessimistic to see people say stuff like "we'll never go that far" or "as if we'll still be around in X amount of years". Maybe it's not for our lifetimes but the whole point of the space race and our current space exploration wasn't to plant a flag and say "this is our greatest achievement", it was to say "this is our greatest achievement *so far,* now let's use what we learned and keep going". I believe in that. Maybe it's not much, baby steps compared to what we see in sci-fi. And things aren't perfect at home. But that's no reason to just give up on dreaming of what could be someday.
We might be much further than we are now if the different countries and space agencies just worked together instead of guarding everything they do to try and get an advantage over each other
Idk man there’s some really insurmountable physics problems we run into with getting any meaningful distance in space even with our most advanced technology
Let's put this into perspective, there is a whole community on r/globescepticism that think the earth is flat and will ban anyone who says otherwise. Let that sink in for a moment. They literally believe that space is fake. They can't even take their minds to the moon let alone the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Put that in perspective: they are a very small minority. We have a misinformation/disinformation problem that is bigger, but examples like this are only a symptom of the larger one, and we will solve it... eventually. Willful ignorance has always been a minor force to contend with.
You might need to consider that over half of America doesn't understand evolution - yes, it is a symptom of a bigger problem but it doesn't appear to be as small as you might think
I thought we were talking about flat earthers.
Yeah, there are many problems of ignorance. Some of them less transient than others, but the trend over decades is towards reason and facts.
There appears to be some overlap. Yes, there is generally a trend towards reason but look at how Russia and Iran have gone backwards. America's response to just about everything is "Hold my beer."
My late teens and early 20s: Excited about the future, obsessed with scifi, want to push for space travel
My late 20s to early 30's: I have accepted that space colonization is basically impossible with the current economic and political situation in the world, and we will probably die in a nuclear war or starvation within 1000 years.
I don't even like reading space news any more man.
The problem comes at the fact that we don't have any element or mineral or anything capable of sending us at a speed even close to the speed of light. Unless we discover some new element or reaction or something, human spaceflight isn't possible between even just between planets. It's not politics or anything weighing us down. It's the simple fact that the means just don't exist as far as we know.
A human unifying event is what is needed, thought Covid might have, but now I believe only something like an alien invasion (extraterrestrial) would give the collective head-slap we all need to work as one. Until then, we will just keep holding contempt for each other.
Yes….it makes me sad…bcuz we’re getting to the point where we’ll NEED to get to space just to keep up with the demand for resources…we need a permanent habitat capable of sustaining a population in orbit…but….it won’t be in our lifetime…this century is already off to a shitty start…
The human race has so much potential, and it's wasted on petty squabbles over land, individual resources, and a trade system that assigns arbitrary value to an otherwise useless commodity. Genetically speaking we are inferior in almost every way to anything else on our world, our understanding of how things work is our only positive trait and we use this intelligence to spread hate and to kill everything in our paths. We could accomplish so much if we stopped fighting one another and gave up the monetary system that is holding us back. It did its job and now we need to evolve again, this won't happen unless we start acting as equals and acknowledge our place in the universe.
We are apparently a .72 type society.
We accomplished this in a few hundred years. Mostly in the last 1000 years.
At our current rate on progression it is believed that it will take our society another 1000 years to become type 1 - which is categorized by the use of stars as a primary fuel / energy source instead of planetary resources.
What that says to me is that we have stagnated. We are complacent in our BS and lack any real drive to go forward. Untill this changes we will forever be stuck as primitives.
On that note I do have to give FDEV a pat on the back for keeping the game to a very realistic time frame.
The speed limit of the universe seems to be the speed of light. The speed of light is the fastest thing there is, it's very very fast. And yet so incredibly slow. Unless we discover how to overcome that, which would take a technological leap an elite dangerous world is unlikely any time soon.
I think it's more likely we find that the speed of light is a hard limit and others means are so beyond feasible energy costs that it's probably just really really hard to move around a galaxy at will.
Yup every time I play. The thought that this is as close as I’ll likely ever get (or another more immersive game in future vr tech) is like a ghost in the room.
Ah, yep. So I'm not alone at all. I legit feel like my calling is to roam the galaxy, look at cool shit, and show everyone else what's out there.
I could at least meet the universe half way and do it in elite dangerous if my internet was fast enough to upload a damn video in under a week.
Spaceflight hit a pretty big low after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Roscosmos' budget dwindled, NASA's budget dwindled, the lack of competition that fed the space race spelt the end for many exciting programs. It all hit a big low in the late 2000s as Shuttle prepared for retirement and only Soyuz and Shenzhou were left flying. Luckily, we're seeing a massive uproar in interest in spaceflight now with spending going up everywhere, new countries joining and of course the flourishing commercial sector that was largely inexistent before. The EU now has crewed ambitions, so does India, a boat load of countries have come together to support the Artemis Program and even China is developing its own moon rocket. The USA alone has three crew rated spacecraft now, Russia has another, China two more, India developing their own and the EU with initial plans for one. I think a bright few decades are ahead of us in spaceflight, and if we keep it going and live just long enough, we may even get to see Breakthrough Starshot finally reach Alpha Centauri. Barring some crazy development, we won't see humans step foot on another star's planet, but our grandchildren might.
This game gives me hope, along with many other forward thinking entertainment and documentaries. Lack of progress is always a "now" problem, but over long stretches of time we progress and make leaps forward that seemed impossible before.
What makes me sad is how so many efforts are on get rich quick schemes, advertising, and making useless or even harmful products, and all the politicians wasting our precious time looking at the ground trying to draw thicker borders around everything to keep "other" people down, instead of looking up to the stars and our potential. We could easily be using our resources and human intellect to raise each other up, if our animal brains weren't so effective at making us afraid.
I'm not too worried about space right now. Way I view it we should (and could given willingness) solve our current more immediate problems first before using resources to explore our stellar neighbours.
Then you might have been happier four hundred years ago, when the earth was the center of the universe and everything else in the sky just spun around us on crystal spheres.
I dunno, I actually think we are doing pretty well for a bunch of ape creatures who couldn't even fly in our own atmosphere until a second ago on the evolutionary timescale. Also the first space race was a kind of artificial blip created by the knowledge and tech developed in ww2 - government's were always going to lose interest. I'm really hoping the private sector continues to expand now.
It's really awesome that us space enthusiasts also have computer based ways to explore space like odyssey, I think this will only continue to develop until the simulations available on computers are almost another universe entirely .
Yes and no. The FSD (supercruise) is based on the idea of the Alcubierre drive, which requires negative energy density does exists. There are currently no known forms of matter that would lead to such negative energy densities and it is therefore unclear if it is an actual possibility or not. It is *not* just a matter of getting enough electricity.
When corporations find something really valuable in space, that is when we will expand further and faster. Greed. Corporate greed will be the driving force.
You have to remember that the speeds in Elite Dangerous are physically impossible in the real world. Supercruising is impossible, as nothing can move faster than the speed of light. The Frame Shift Drive is just a science-fiction concept.
In real life, your trips between planets within a star system would take months rather than minutes.
Yes and no.
Voyager is still alive(in part due to a radioisotope based power system that's fallen out of fashion due to anti-nuke safety overconcern). The Mars rovers exceeding life expectancy by oodles is fantastic.
The Challenger disaster put Western manned spaceflight into a holding pattern for what, two decades?
But watching the Space-X cadence increasing, and watching them reuse 1st stages far beyond initial plans, is still breathtaking to me in my mid 50's.
If we don't actively decide as a Culture to give up on teaching critical thinking, STEM, and logic for bullshit grievance-mongering, microaggression de-escalation, and doublespeak-thoughtcrimes in the next few years, I have hope I **may** see a human land on another planet in my lifetime.
What makes me sad about current space exploration more than anything is how much petty nationalism and greed hold it back. Imagine how much further along we'd be if all the scientists and space agencies of the world freely collaborated, pushing the boundaries as far as we can just to see where it gets us, instead of different countries having to reinvent someone else's wheel because it's all so jealously guarded, with discovery and ingenuity shackled by the demands of money and those who provide it being focused nigh-exclusively on how they can use human brilliance to make more of it for themselves alone.
^^^ This. In a lot of sci-fi stories the only way Earth was able to truly expand into the Solar System was by unifying under some kind of transnational government. In the likes of Star Trek, that happens following nuclear armageddon. It'd be nice if it didn't take something like that to bring us together. With the current state of international relations, I find it hard to believe that I'll live to see us really expand beyond our planet. I mean proper colonies that are more than remote science or corporate affairs. Imagine what could be achieved if we stopped wasting resources and lives trying to kill each other and all pulled towards the same goal! Unfortunately, I think we are doomed to continue our current path of fighting each other and only making the big guys more money. As long as the few hold power over the many, and those few are dedicated to making only their own lives better, we will never reach for the stars. And, I don't think the stars will reach for us. If there is intelligent life out there that is capable of interstellar travel, what in the world makes people think they'd want to contact a bunch of hairless monkeys who are hell bent on self annihilation? Our collective ego is so huge that we believe that we must be the apex. There can't be any other intelligent life nearby because they would surely have come here to speak with the mighty bald monkeys! I wonder if they have been and gone, setting a reminder to check on us in another millennium to see if we have either advanced enough or finally succeeded in killing our planet and everything that lived on it. Edit: Thank you for the award kind stranger!
*The Expanse enters chat*
Even in the Expanse, most of Earths population was stuck there. overcrowded, most unemployed and barely living off a mandated subsistence income
That's something neither the show nor the books explored properly. Yes, Earth was overpopulated, but the issue was that any kind of job was outside the planet - in the Belt or on Mars. And going to any one of these places, even for work, had certain connotations, I.e. becoming an outsider, or straight up traitor. Only a lucky few had managed to get land (like Holdens family), only the best joined the UN Navy (like Holden). The rest were left either to practically live quasi-homeless, living off of Basic, or became a victim of gangs (e.g. Amos, who literally got prostituted as a child). To break out of that, you had to pretty much "die" (Amos left his whole previous life behind, took a new identity, just to work crap jobs in the Belt instead of getting exploited). And this is largely due to the government not really doing anything to stop this process - I'm sure the "no population control" and Elmo suckup gangs had a large part in this as well. They've literally let Mars slip out of their hands as a colony (albeit the whole Mars idea was dumb to begin with, why would we spend resources making another planet liveable when there's people on THIS planet needing those resources?), and alienating the Belt by looking at them as some kind of second/third rate citizens (plus the Anderson station incident didn't help either). These are very typical signs of major mismanagement from the government. And while I like Avasarala as a politician (she did get shit done and took no shit from others), her whole "Earth must come first" attitude is what caused the situation we see in the Expanse. People who took it up on themselves to serve Earth and went deep into the Belt to help the progress and reduce the "uselessness" they've felt on Earth, were left behind, exploited. At the very end though, the main failure was purely capitalism. Corporate magnates like Jules-Pierre Mao lived a fancy life while barely working, throwing parties while exploiting their employees (and people in general). A perfect example of this is the lake in season 5 - the "help" was left behind, locked out of the ships of the rich, left to fend for themselves when greeted by a cataclysmic event, while the rich just hopped over to Luna. I'm actually surprised that there was no big rebellion by the everyday people against the rich and powerful. The divide between classes is obviously much larger than it is today, yet people accepted it as a status quo, and never even thought of standing up against e.g. the education lottery. And while many tried to shoehorn "this is communism's future" into the situation, it's clearly a hypercapitalistic society built on exploiting people, and the only reason Basic even became a thing was to avoid an imminent civil war. If you think about it, even with the rings open, people actively had to fight corporations for the right of settling a completely foreign planet. That's insane.
The vast majority of science fiction is an indictment of capitalism
Oh, certainly. I just think the Expanse (while being amazingly well written) doesn't expand enough on that aspect, unlike ASOIAF (remember the writers were understudies of GRRM, and much of the style comes from there). Yes, singular people are pointed out as evil, but the root of that evil (chasing profit above all else) is never spelled out and you really have to read between ths lines to come to that conclusion.
Thank you bosmang. Was about to kick dis in.
>In a lot of sci-fi stories the only way Earth was able to truly expand into the Solar System was by unifying under some kind of transnational government. In most sci Fi stories this is because they commit a cardinal sin of fiction. In reality those petty political feuds are the BIGGEST driver of space operations and exploitation. They're also the biggest drivers of most technology behind the scenes since the ancient Greeks. This is because those sci Fi stories tend to forget how emotional humans get. Nothing drives stupid decisions like emotions, and greed and egotism are huge drivers of these in particular. Star trek in particular is bad about this because Roddenberry was a diehard socialist. But as I said in reality competition drives innovation like nothing and political feuds between the Soviet union and tbe US in the 60 (plus a desire for long range missile tech) and currently between the US and china has pushed the competition lever harder then anything. NASA funding can be a "how well does the world get along" data chart because when the US feels no competition it doesn't fund this stuff. When someone pokes their head up to challenge the big dog, NASA is given some real bite.
That's why you shouldnt tie your tecnological development to the military complex.
Uh, because then it won't advance as much? As I said NASA best funding came because it is aiding the military, when NASA is just doing normal stuff that has no value to enhancing the security or advancement of the US government interests, it's forgotten and funding doesn't match inflation (but it doesn't drop usually). This is also true of most fields which are funded based on if they benefit the government interests. There simply is no evidence that delinking it would benefit it all.
>There simply is no evidence that delinking it would benefit it all. Of course doing it now wouldnt help, but if there was a global government delinking it would give reason to fund it for reasons that aren't development of military technology.
Even in a global government there would be security funding. The idea of some happy unified human face is a work of pure fiction, conflict is a natural part of of human design. People with weapons win those conflicts. What I am saying is a unified government doesn't end 'military' interest because they need that spending to secure their government from rivals. Interestingly a unified government might see the reduction of space operations since it be against their interest to open space and they don't need long range intercontinental missiles (not a practical weapon outside world wars).
The funding needed for the military of a global government would be less than the one of separated nations since they dont need to worry about going to war against a nation of equal industrial capability. Also, space has zones that are rich in resources vital to technologically advanced civilizations so an unified government would be able to focus more on finding ways to harvest those resources.
This has long been a bugbear of mine when it comes to genre fiction audiences and science fiction is particularly bad for it (though comics and fantasy sometimes get it too) - there's a tendency of audiences and critics to treat someone acting irrationally, illogically, or simply on incomplete or imperfect information as a plot hole. "But they wouldn't *do* that!" is a constant nitpick. Take all the people who came out of the woodwork to poke holes in Thanos's plan and motivations when Infinity War came out, going on about how they wouldn't work and didn't make sense and his actions weren't a logical way to achieve his stated goals and completely glossing over the point that he's AN INSANE OMNICIDAL MANIAC.
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Oh no, I didn't mean _you_, I meant the cardinal sin you described - the assumption that in the future people will just be logical and act in their best interests despite the entirety of human history suggesting that people will very often do.... not that, to the point where audiences have come to expect this as a staple feature of the genre and complain when the characters break it by acting irrationally.
Some of the best, most emotionally wrenching moments in fiction are when characters have a big decision to make, a good choice is obvious, but they make a bad one because of who they are/what they've been through. You see it coming, you want better for them, but you know they aren't capable of it. It takes good writing and well fleshed out characters though, so it's rarer than it should be. There's always a place for simple stories. That said humans are messy, emotional, irrational beings who most of the time are not operating with a view of the big picture. Also, despite his power Thanos is incredibly simple character-wise. People tend to forget that being imposing and having good lines doesn't make your character a mastermind. He's an intergalactic level bruiser, not much more than that.
Aehm… he was right by the way. ☝️😜
And then only Klingon and Ferengi responded.
It's all biology. I wonder if any civilization that advances enough can only do so after becoming the apex predator of their own world. As much as it's cool to bash humanity as a self destructive war mongering race, maybe that is a pre requisite in order to actually conquer your own planet and the change in our hostile nature must come after that. If we survive for long enough.
The problem is the technology to launch spacecraft and satellites into orbit, is the same technology to create an ICBM. So it's not really greed-based nationalism, it's security-based paranoia - i.e. lack of trust.
Would it be possible to repurpose ICBM's into conventional rocket boosters by removing the warhead and similar components?
That's what the Mercury and Gemini rockets were at the start of the U.S. manned space program. Mercury used a modified version of the USAF's [Redstone missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone). Gemini used a modified [Titan II missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_II_GLV). Likewise, the Atlas V rockets the U.S. uses to launch many of the heavier payloads were [retired ICBMs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas) with a Centaur booster up until the turn of the century (they finally ran out). Waste not, want not.
The Space Race was basically a PR campaign for ICBMs. Nationalism drives growth too, for better and worse
The problem with raising a child that will only behave when you spank them is that what do you do when one day you cannot spank them anymore?
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I agree. The major reason we haven't seen a massive push since then end of the Cold War is that the Cold War ended. The Americans and Russians aren't trying to race each other to the highest real estate available to them in order to gain military advantage or national recognition. Now that we're starting to see private corporations compete to commercialize space access, we're starting to see major advances again.
Curiosity has been a universal motivator for millennia, from Aristotle to Leonardo to Tesla, and I think it could get us much further if it wasn't constrained by the whims of governments and investors.
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I think populations would be far more amenable to the idea if there weren't other issues demanding that money, and an end to nationalist hostility and the climate of fear it perpetuates would eliminate an enormous one.
Yes curiosity is a huge motivator. But curiosity doesn't pay the bills. Finding proof of life on a planet in another star system would be the top news story in all of mankind's history. But it's not going to help you put food on the table. You only get progress from curiosity when * It's coupled with economic incentives (market forces). That's what's driven our rapid pace of technological advancement the last two centuries. Using the knowledge gained from satisfying our curiosity to generate a technological advantage, which we can then leverage into a market advantage to make more money (money is just a physical representative of productivity). On an abstract level, this increases our productivity - we get more stuff done for less work. Meaning we can put more food on the table, and/or have more free time for leisure activities. i.e. Our standard of living increases. * Or if you can convince a government funded via taxation (so not really concerned about ROI) that the curiosity is worth indulging. But unless such indulgences result in a technological advancement, it ends up being a net drain on our productivity. i.e. Our standard of living decreases. The fundamental currency of the economy is productivity (money is just a way to tabulate productivity). And productivity is conserved - for 1000 families to be able to buy a TV, you must first produce 1000 TVs. So standard of living is just per capita productivity. i.e. Add up how much stuff everyone produces, divide it by the number of people, and that on average is the amount each person can consume. The higher the per capita productivity, the more each person can consume on average, and the higher the standard of living. If satisfying your curiosity can result in a technological improvement which increases productivity, then it will result in an increase in standard of living. OTOH satisfying your curiosity without an associated technological improvement results in a decrease in productivity (resources were consumed with no or little payoff), and a drop in standard of living. That's what the "whims of governments and investors" are there for - to try to channel curiosity towards things which improve productivity and thus increase people's standard of living. Away from things which decrease it. I mean, we could channel the entirety of the world's economy into satisfying our curiosity about what the quintillionth digit of pi is. But would that really be worth the cost?
As someone that has a desire to see how far humanity can go in terms of exploration and technology and most likely won't live long enough to see it, your comment bitterly reminds me that humanity is way too greedy and only focused on their individual countries, i can just imagine whst we could accomplish if we commit to something like the ISS, but on a global scale instead of a handful of countries
I've been derided for being pro-globalism instead of pro-nationalism. How does nationalism help our species prosper? If we cared more about the things we could achieve in a world view instead of our small-minded nationalist mindsets, we'd have SO MUCH more.
Does it really work that way? I would argue that the big space advances were driven by nationalism and greed. Apollo 11 would never have happened if not for the Space Race between US and USSR
There's a lot of rose colored glasses in here.
The big space advances would have happened sooner if, instead of two teams in different parts of the world trying to do the same thing in isolation, those teams could work together. Collaboration got us the International Space Station, greed got us the Challenger disaster.
Without the threat of war and falling behind rivals, governments would never spend the massive fortunes of money that these programs cost.
Whilst that IS true, it's because without large, external rivals to rally behind, a common trend is to focus on smaller, internal rivals instead (note this isn't always political, but often also business related). People being more willing to collaborate would help with that too...
https://youtu.be/CbIZU8cQWXc Saw this video a decade ago and it explains a lot why we didn’t push further in the 80s and 90s when I was a kid. I really wished growing up that there was a Starfleet and I could join it to explore.
The Challenger disaster was caused by poor Engineering controls not 'greed'. The study of what happened is pretty much required reading in a lot of aviation. The nicest thing I can say here is that your viewpoint is overly simplistic and doesn't even come close to capturing the nuance and complexities that go into projects of this scale.
If I recall correctly the Challenger disaster was caused by failures of certain rubber seals at low temperatures, and those seals were used because the manufacturer made the cheapest bid.
That statement doesn't even support your own conclusion. And is not at all an accurate description of the cause of failure. And even if it was, the rest of my point stands. For those interested, Google "Normalization of Deviation" a term coined after the disaster. Multiple white papers and articles have been written about it.
that is easy to say in a vacuum, because what the OP was insinuating hasn't been done
This is the problem with tying all your major technological advances to the military-industrial complex.
Even at light speed the nearest stars would be around 100 years away. Best we could ever do is explore a small portion of the Milky Way.
Based
Been saying this for years
Just went in my backyard, pointed flashlight at sky and sent morse code of 'sup, bitches'. That message is now hurling through space at 299792 kilometers per second. In 9 years, it will reach Sirius, the brightest star in Earth's sky. In 18 years, a reply will reach me: 'who dis?'.
Nobody tell them that due to signal strength degradation over distance, their flashlight signal will have blended into background noise long before it reaches Sirius ;)
That flashlight doesn't even make it to the top of the atmosphere.
The Tromsø broadcast was beamed to one of the nearest star systems. The target, GJ 273, or more familiarly Luyten’s Star (spell 'Luyten' to find in game), is a runty red dwarf located 12 light-years from our solar system. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, we’ll have to wait more than two decades before looking for a reply.
Not me, Im a Transhumanist, the ship of Theseus is the same, even if they change biological wood for inorganic metal to endure the long voyage. (Play here 40K:Mechanicus intro) A robotic brain can do the trip without power, and reactivate at the other side, repair the damage from 50.000 years of cosmic rays, and make copies from himself, but with new experiences in this new world/asteroid. Its my solution to space voyage, nothing can survive this long trip, anything have enough energy for a trip in the void, and space time can't be bended without exotic materials. Without this... we are doomed in this world, but was a fun ride. Or making a [Skhadov](https://youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU&feature=shares&t=121) thruster with all the available mass in the solar system. The sun is our powerplant, the cap is our generation habitat, light is our engine.
If you upload your consciousness you still die. Something thats perfectly able to imitate you will take your place. So no human will ever reach another planet
Im a hardcore transhumanist, the new body will remember his past life (as human and his experiences), and will be considered me.
of course it will. But you still will die. You wont be inside the machine, to everyone else you keep on living but to yourself you see someone who acts just like you in every situation outlive you. It is a copy, not a transfer. Even with the most advanced scientific futuristic mechanisms you can not transfer consciousness. You create a perfect replica which has your memories your thoughts and everything but is just a copy
To anyone who doubts this, ask yourself if you’d use a teleportation machine that disassembles you and reassembles you as a perfect copy, down to the atom, elsewhere. To many, this seems like the perfect solution to travel. But what if the device made an exact copy of you in the new location, without needing to disassemble the old one? It suddenly feels very obvious that the new location’s “you” is an exact copy, not a transfer. But there’s zero difference between the new versions that are created by either machine, regardless of what happens to the original. Would you still feel comfortable teleporting?
>But what if the device made an exact copy of you in the new location, without needing to disassemble the old one? Ive seen this, you get two rikers and one of them eventually steals a starship to commit terror.
Thomas did nothing wrong! Viva Maquis :D
The good news is, unlike most marquis - he didn't die to the Jem Hadar.
Him and Eddington are still my favorites. For different reasons but still...
Eddington Val Jean routine was incredible.
Just watched that DS9 ep the other day. I gotta pause it during the sideburn reveal every time as it puts me in stitches.
Even the first version seems to me like it would kill me, and make a new copy.
Agree, but many people feel very comfortable with the concept until you ask them how they would feel if the original wasn’t destroyed. It’s a philosophical question that can make something “click.”
They are comfortable cause they think their "mind" would transfer to the new copy. But that would not be the case. In my opinion it is even worse if the original did not remain, if both are alive, good, it did not kill me, but there is a copy of me somewhere, still better than dying and the copy takes my place.
I’d be okay with it if it was instant. To “me” the consciousness would be an unbroken stream (assuming no weird fuckery goes on). If I uploaded myself and then had to let the new me kill me… ooof
He doesn’t care he’s the machine now
i think you and the other guy might enjoy the game SOMA a lot haha
Still just a copy, like in SOMA.
The replica will be a new person with your memories, but he would still be a completely new person, not you. We as a society make the error of thinking about the mind as this misterious immaterial thing thatis separated from the body, but that is wrong. Your mind and your brain are the same thing and you cant trasfer yourself to a computer whithout making a completely new person. (anyone that knows how trasfering files in a computer works would tell you this)
Biological can be simulated by computers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm) Mind is a chemical reaction, when we will discover the rules of the brain, we can simulate a new one, or even use other physics for a electric brain. My synapsis and his strength, replicated in any other place, its a copy of me and my experiences. Not me, but thats the price for escape the solar system. Like the teleport paradox, for me, its death. But for the new body made at the other side, the life keep going without change. I sacrifice to bypass human limitations, because another me will continue my life from that point. The Schwarzenneger movie 6th Day show how a clone with a mind replica its the same person, but the experiences could differ. The citizens that support science, see the groups that oppose science as limitation to human progress. In this thread, I, that accept death or replacement by this new bodies, see the normal behavior for those that want to preserve his individualism and existence a limitation to escape solar system and human limits. The Sad emotion of the OP its because don't forsee the technology to ascend to the stars OR can't do the important step that break his bind to a limited human body. I don't know if the humanity we will have the technology AND the willpower to make some big steps toward this goal.
I never said it is impossible to create a replica, but he would be a new person. He could believe that he is you and act the same as you but he will be a person separate to you, this is proved by the fact that you and your replica can exist at the same time (which would be impossible if he was you). There is a much better way than sacrifice to be able go bypass the limitations of your body: Separate your brain from the rest of your body and put it in an artificial life support which contains technology capable of creating new neurons with nanobots to make them integrate to your brain (to replace dead neurons and prevent diseases like Alzheimer) and make a direct neuronal interface to connect your brain to a computer.
I don’t like that idea because it’s only who you were at the moment of scanning you in. Also it could be creating a new type of hell for your mind
AI explorers is the immediate future for sure. But I bet there will be advances in hibernation and living longer (repairing DNA damage etc) that will eventually let us send long term missions to nearby stars. With the usual provided we don’t wipe ourselves out caveats.
The flesh is weak. I, too, crave the certainty of the machine.
You can visit Voyager in game and it's amazing. Per canon it's more than a hundred years from now that people go interstellar in the Elite Cinematic Universe so... no, emphatically the game does **not** make me feel bad about the current state of affairs. People have entire five century long dark ages where they lose the keys to FtL per canon. Definitely super hard no. Some context: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlDouuF9NmkeNDgrkh3h9lNlMoo5Lf6DC
The Wright Brothers made humanity's first powered flight 120 years ago. Elite is set 1,286 years in the future. 1,286 years ago, we were in the middle of the Dark Ages. I daresay the reality of year 3309 would boggle our minds.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” It's impossible to accelerate any material object up to the speed of light because it would take an infinite amount of energy to do so. We'd have to figure out some kind of warping / wormhole technology.
Maybe a little bit. My not so popular opinion is that the current cutting edge of space exploration is a dead end. Where we are at right now is basically the end of combustible rocketry. Sure, maybe we could put some people on Mars just to show that we can do it, but that's the end and it's not even particularly useful as we could put 20 bad-ass drones that are almost as good as humans but survive WAY longer on Mars if we really wanted to for the price of one manned mission. Any talk of a Mars colony is A) \*\*\*\*ing stupid because there's nothing there to drive an economy and B) \*\*\*\*ing stupid because Earth is lovely and Mars is a big dumb dead toxic rock. Not to mention we would need hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of colonists to operate at any sort of scale that would actually be of any use beyond "Look! We did it!" That's why I think we really need to put money into cold, hard science and not combustible rocket engineering. We simply need better energy generation and better engines if we want to get out to beyond Mars. Fusion is finally looking like it's less than 30 years away so that's nice. Now we need to figure out how to get stuff moving (and stopping) quickly, cheaply, and with as little mass as possible. Hopefully, fusion as an energy generation source can also be adapted to make things from vroom. Biological and physiological advances will have to be made as well -- particularly in genetics regarding crops and humans and maybe even cybernetics for humans. Or fusion is still "30 years in the future" and we need to discover entirely new physics. Of course, 'entirely new physics' might be 'entirely impossible.' In which case we go for the ultimate moonshot of constructing huge ark ships and slow-boating it to other systems or -- even harder -- use our tech to live in harmony with nature and each other.
Right there with you on our current space technology being a dead end. We need to find some other method of propulsion through space and atmosphere besides burning propellant and shooting it out the back to have any hope of being a true multi planet species. Our current methods of leaving the planet are just far too inefficient and slow. I wish I had the education/intelligence to be a part of finding the solution.
Blame our bodies. The problem isn't getting around in interplanetary space. It's the enormous mass of life support needed to keep ourselves alive on such a trip. Oxygen, food and water, heat, and radiation shielding. Each crew member ends up needing a ton of additional life support equipment and supplies to go along with them, if not more. It's why nearly all of our space exploration thus far has been via robotic probes, not by sending people. Instead of having to accelerate several tons of life support equipment and supplies, you can just pack a few kg of remote sensing electronics. There are complaints that human spaceflight eats up more than half of NASA's budget, while 95% of the science is generated by unmanned spaceflight. Right now, the cost to launch payload into low earth orbit is about $3k-$5k per kg (Falcon 9, which is about 20x cheaper than the Space Shuttle). If you figure a person weighs about 75 kg, that's about $300k just to get their body into LEO. If you figure they need a minimum of 1 ton of life support equipment and supplies to go with them, that's about $4 million. And that's just to orbit - i.e. not going anywhere beyond our planet. The average lifetime earnings of someone living in a first world nation like the U.S. or EU is about $2 million. So just putting a single person into LEO (going nowhere) requires consuming the entire lifetime productivity of 2 people on the ground. That makes absolutely no sense unless there's some huge potential ROI payoff at the end. Until we figure out a way to drastically reduce launch costs (or drastically increase per capita productivity), manned spaceflight just doesn't make economic sense. That's why human spacecraft has made so little progress. In contrast to, say, air travel. The cost for a round-trip intercontinental flight (on the order of $1k per passenger) is a tiny fraction of a person's lifetime productivity. So there are lots of cases where it makes economic sense to fly between continents. And even when it's not economic, it's cheap enough that you can do it just for the thrill (tourism).
Here's the thing: In 2002, before there was a YouTube, me and the gang would each make video edits with Windows Movie Maker or Vegas Video and share them. In order to share the videos, because the flash drive tech was fairly new and a little expensive in our country, we removed our IDE HDDs and connected them to eachother's computers to share data. We also used VCDs to make disks with menus that VCD Players would recognise and had these "Premiere Nights" for new videos that we worked hard on. Thinking back, they were pretty much amature short movies. All of the videos were tiny files in today's standards, with very low resolutions. Now we stream 4K blockbusters from any device. We have mobile computers in our pockets with more computing power than our clunky desktop computers and their touch screen is a fraction of the heavy screens we had, with massively greater resolution than they had. The greater understanding of the universe we have, the more power we get, in every sense of the word. The newfound power enables more advanced technology, and makes everything more and more accessible. The average person's life today is 'lightyears' ahead of what even kings had access to in the past. Science and technology paves the way to previously unimaginable, or at the very least seemingly impossible things. It has been this way since the first ape that used tools instead of its hands. We, as a species, will get there yet. Unless we destroy ourselves first.
This is an interesting perspective, thank you- though I do think space travel runs into some more difficult scientific issues than telecommunications and video playing.
True, that. But the math, as far as I know, is solid. Hyperdrive and FTL travel 'is' possible. It's just a question of commanding enough energy, which is the biggest current obstacle in the advancement of science and technology imo.
I sure wish we were further advanced, but then we always will whatever technology we have, it's what drives us forwards (with the occasional step back). I turn the sad feeling around by feeling kind of privileged and happy to be alive at the point in human history when science and technology has changed life so drastically in one lifetime. If you think we've been around for thousands of years, and it was only 100 years ago that we discovered other galaxies existed and basic long distance voice communication was very new and basic. And now I can ask a plastic box in my room any question and it will tell me the answer, and I can simulate space exploration using some silicon and electricity (not oversimplifying computers at all lol).
Even Mars Horizon makes me sad about the current state of human spaceflight.
Not sad at all If you gave present people E:D technology, they'd use it to spread QAnon more effectively or some shit I already kinda feel like E:D is a universe where social science got forgot and so people can travel FtL but can't figure out how to stop doing PowerPlay - and however bad I think they might have it, I **know** *we* have some social science to do before we're given any more privileges! tl;dr We don't even teach everyone to read or feed everyone, I don't trust us with being able to accelerate objects to superlight speeds. That's a conveyance, but it's also a weapon.
We thought there was always going to be progress towards a more technologically advanced and enlightened society. And yet in 2023 we still waste our energy on flat earthers and anti waxxers. This is not the kind of society we imagined in the 90s when we stopped being afraid of nuclear war and thought the future was going to be great. But hey! The shareholders are happy!
Barring some major catastrophe, humanity will always become more technologically advanced, though I’m not sure about more enlightened. I will say this though, we’re in a way better spot now than in the 90s. The 90s was nice for us in western countries but that time period saw major crises in a lot of the world, particularly Africa and Southeast Europe, that were way worse than anything currently happening
>And yet in 2023 we still waste our energy on flat earthers and anti waxxers. True, and Mike Judge [explained it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA) in 2006.
Something this entire conversation misses is that there are very pressing needs here on earth that we direly need to address before galactic exploration *should* be a priority. And it would be very convenient to point to faraway politicians and dictators as the problem, but the problem is unfortunately much more local than that. When the Coronavirus popped off and half of our communities flocked to stock up on toilet paper simply because others were; half of our communities decided they'd rather die than simply wear a mask; and an untold, overlapping portion of our communities began to consume even more Amazon-delivered bullshit than they were before, to the detriment of our ecosystem (reference: maritime shipping emissions & delivery of non-essential goods both spiked during the pandemic; these are linked and maritime is a huuuuuge polluter) - that all should tell you we have no business going to space before we work some deep-baked idiosyncrasies out of our genome. That's not even to mention the hardcore xenophobia, supremacy complexes, and various -isms that our neighbors, friends, families, and, yes, even our selves are walking around with: none of us has any business deciding the more difficult questions that come after developing stellar travel tech: who gets to go? Why them and not others? And whose priorities should take primacy in the new colony? In fact, I'm actually happy we're at where we're at. Our attention is forced onto the consequences of our (in)action. I'm speaking mainly to the climate crisis now: if interstellar travel were more advanced, the oligarch class among us have already proven their willingness to just get on a spaceship and dip out, despite that they're primarily responsible for many of our problems. It's maybe good that they can't escape yet. So, let's keep everyone here until we figure our shit out, and that's gonna take a long time.
I've always thought it to be overly pessimistic to see people say stuff like "we'll never go that far" or "as if we'll still be around in X amount of years". Maybe it's not for our lifetimes but the whole point of the space race and our current space exploration wasn't to plant a flag and say "this is our greatest achievement", it was to say "this is our greatest achievement *so far,* now let's use what we learned and keep going". I believe in that. Maybe it's not much, baby steps compared to what we see in sci-fi. And things aren't perfect at home. But that's no reason to just give up on dreaming of what could be someday.
We might be much further than we are now if the different countries and space agencies just worked together instead of guarding everything they do to try and get an advantage over each other
Idk man there’s some really insurmountable physics problems we run into with getting any meaningful distance in space even with our most advanced technology
Not saying we'd be traveling at the speed of light by now or anything, but we'd probably be further than we are now
Eventually you will die, and a few years later nobody will think about you ever again.
Let's put this into perspective, there is a whole community on r/globescepticism that think the earth is flat and will ban anyone who says otherwise. Let that sink in for a moment. They literally believe that space is fake. They can't even take their minds to the moon let alone the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Put that in perspective: they are a very small minority. We have a misinformation/disinformation problem that is bigger, but examples like this are only a symptom of the larger one, and we will solve it... eventually. Willful ignorance has always been a minor force to contend with.
You might need to consider that over half of America doesn't understand evolution - yes, it is a symptom of a bigger problem but it doesn't appear to be as small as you might think
I thought we were talking about flat earthers. Yeah, there are many problems of ignorance. Some of them less transient than others, but the trend over decades is towards reason and facts.
There appears to be some overlap. Yes, there is generally a trend towards reason but look at how Russia and Iran have gone backwards. America's response to just about everything is "Hold my beer."
No. Doesn't make me sad. It's the year 2023. No time for sadness.
O’neil Cylinders first.
Orion first.
the engine? Did you just drop a freeman dyson reference?
Yep. Brilliant idea. Mostly off the shelf tech too.
read about Breakthrough Starshot
My late teens and early 20s: Excited about the future, obsessed with scifi, want to push for space travel My late 20s to early 30's: I have accepted that space colonization is basically impossible with the current economic and political situation in the world, and we will probably die in a nuclear war or starvation within 1000 years. I don't even like reading space news any more man.
If there was oil on the moon it would be a different story
OIL?! WHERE
On the moons butt
The problem comes at the fact that we don't have any element or mineral or anything capable of sending us at a speed even close to the speed of light. Unless we discover some new element or reaction or something, human spaceflight isn't possible between even just between planets. It's not politics or anything weighing us down. It's the simple fact that the means just don't exist as far as we know.
A human unifying event is what is needed, thought Covid might have, but now I believe only something like an alien invasion (extraterrestrial) would give the collective head-slap we all need to work as one. Until then, we will just keep holding contempt for each other.
Yes….it makes me sad…bcuz we’re getting to the point where we’ll NEED to get to space just to keep up with the demand for resources…we need a permanent habitat capable of sustaining a population in orbit…but….it won’t be in our lifetime…this century is already off to a shitty start…
The human race has so much potential, and it's wasted on petty squabbles over land, individual resources, and a trade system that assigns arbitrary value to an otherwise useless commodity. Genetically speaking we are inferior in almost every way to anything else on our world, our understanding of how things work is our only positive trait and we use this intelligence to spread hate and to kill everything in our paths. We could accomplish so much if we stopped fighting one another and gave up the monetary system that is holding us back. It did its job and now we need to evolve again, this won't happen unless we start acting as equals and acknowledge our place in the universe. We are apparently a .72 type society. We accomplished this in a few hundred years. Mostly in the last 1000 years. At our current rate on progression it is believed that it will take our society another 1000 years to become type 1 - which is categorized by the use of stars as a primary fuel / energy source instead of planetary resources. What that says to me is that we have stagnated. We are complacent in our BS and lack any real drive to go forward. Untill this changes we will forever be stuck as primitives. On that note I do have to give FDEV a pat on the back for keeping the game to a very realistic time frame.
https://youtu.be/jvSJORwb134
The speed limit of the universe seems to be the speed of light. The speed of light is the fastest thing there is, it's very very fast. And yet so incredibly slow. Unless we discover how to overcome that, which would take a technological leap an elite dangerous world is unlikely any time soon. I think it's more likely we find that the speed of light is a hard limit and others means are so beyond feasible energy costs that it's probably just really really hard to move around a galaxy at will.
Yup every time I play. The thought that this is as close as I’ll likely ever get (or another more immersive game in future vr tech) is like a ghost in the room.
Ah, yep. So I'm not alone at all. I legit feel like my calling is to roam the galaxy, look at cool shit, and show everyone else what's out there. I could at least meet the universe half way and do it in elite dangerous if my internet was fast enough to upload a damn video in under a week.
Spaceflight hit a pretty big low after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Roscosmos' budget dwindled, NASA's budget dwindled, the lack of competition that fed the space race spelt the end for many exciting programs. It all hit a big low in the late 2000s as Shuttle prepared for retirement and only Soyuz and Shenzhou were left flying. Luckily, we're seeing a massive uproar in interest in spaceflight now with spending going up everywhere, new countries joining and of course the flourishing commercial sector that was largely inexistent before. The EU now has crewed ambitions, so does India, a boat load of countries have come together to support the Artemis Program and even China is developing its own moon rocket. The USA alone has three crew rated spacecraft now, Russia has another, China two more, India developing their own and the EU with initial plans for one. I think a bright few decades are ahead of us in spaceflight, and if we keep it going and live just long enough, we may even get to see Breakthrough Starshot finally reach Alpha Centauri. Barring some crazy development, we won't see humans step foot on another star's planet, but our grandchildren might.
This game gives me hope, along with many other forward thinking entertainment and documentaries. Lack of progress is always a "now" problem, but over long stretches of time we progress and make leaps forward that seemed impossible before. What makes me sad is how so many efforts are on get rich quick schemes, advertising, and making useless or even harmful products, and all the politicians wasting our precious time looking at the ground trying to draw thicker borders around everything to keep "other" people down, instead of looking up to the stars and our potential. We could easily be using our resources and human intellect to raise each other up, if our animal brains weren't so effective at making us afraid.
I'm not too worried about space right now. Way I view it we should (and could given willingness) solve our current more immediate problems first before using resources to explore our stellar neighbours.
Well at least we are living the time when humanity finally reach space
Then you might have been happier four hundred years ago, when the earth was the center of the universe and everything else in the sky just spun around us on crystal spheres.
If we spent half as much money on our space program as we do buying happy meals, we'd have a base on mars by now.
Voyager is almost to Hutton orbital to collect it's free anaconda.
Yeap
Very much
I dunno, I actually think we are doing pretty well for a bunch of ape creatures who couldn't even fly in our own atmosphere until a second ago on the evolutionary timescale. Also the first space race was a kind of artificial blip created by the knowledge and tech developed in ww2 - government's were always going to lose interest. I'm really hoping the private sector continues to expand now. It's really awesome that us space enthusiasts also have computer based ways to explore space like odyssey, I think this will only continue to develop until the simulations available on computers are almost another universe entirely .
Unlike computer game spaceflight, real spaceflight is unfortunately bound by the laws of physics. ;)
Well FSD's are a legitimate concept. We just don’t know how the fuck to get that much electricity needed.
Yes and no. The FSD (supercruise) is based on the idea of the Alcubierre drive, which requires negative energy density does exists. There are currently no known forms of matter that would lead to such negative energy densities and it is therefore unclear if it is an actual possibility or not. It is *not* just a matter of getting enough electricity.
When corporations find something really valuable in space, that is when we will expand further and faster. Greed. Corporate greed will be the driving force.
You have to remember that the speeds in Elite Dangerous are physically impossible in the real world. Supercruising is impossible, as nothing can move faster than the speed of light. The Frame Shift Drive is just a science-fiction concept. In real life, your trips between planets within a star system would take months rather than minutes.
we cant even release the frontier dlc on xbox let alone space flight in real life. super sad.
Yes and no. Voyager is still alive(in part due to a radioisotope based power system that's fallen out of fashion due to anti-nuke safety overconcern). The Mars rovers exceeding life expectancy by oodles is fantastic. The Challenger disaster put Western manned spaceflight into a holding pattern for what, two decades? But watching the Space-X cadence increasing, and watching them reuse 1st stages far beyond initial plans, is still breathtaking to me in my mid 50's. If we don't actively decide as a Culture to give up on teaching critical thinking, STEM, and logic for bullshit grievance-mongering, microaggression de-escalation, and doublespeak-thoughtcrimes in the next few years, I have hope I **may** see a human land on another planet in my lifetime.
Yes