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The Myth of the Starship
As starships do not in fact exist, no starships were harmed in the production of this essay. Also, this is just words. If they upset you, go lie down in a dark room for half an hour then drink a glass of water; you’ll feel better.
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COMMENTS
Posted by Joe Strout on 11/30 at 12:17 AM
Interesting essay. However, the whole discussion seems based on the assumption that humanity (or its descendants) will travel from one star to the next via a large concerted effort. I think that’s unlikely; rather, we will expand further and further out in our own star system, until we eventually are populating the Oort cloud, which extends nearly 2 LY away from the Sun : that is, nearly halfway to Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri almost certainly has an Oort cloud of its own. So at some point, those Oort dwellers, who have already been expanding from chunk to chunk for centuries, will expand onto a chunk which happens to be in Centauri orbit rather than Sol, and presto, we become an interstellar civilization, without any great fuss and possibly without anyone quite noticing the moment.
Posted by brobof on 11/30 at 02:37 AM
Further the comment by Joe Strout; with access to fusion and a well founded Space Arcology industry we don’t even need a Sun! However a starship is not a Starship unless it has a Stardrive. When we have access to astonishingly enormous amounts of energy I am sure something will turn up along the lines of Alcubierre or Crane.
Posted by Dave on 11/30 at 03:18 AM
Nice essay, and great rejoinder by Joe Strout. At least we can get to Alpha Centauri.
Posted by adam on 11/30 at 05:38 AM
I think you are over egging the storage/transmission capacity somewhat. We know the brain has quite a bit of capacity to ‘reboot’ from little in the way of valid connection state data, plus data compression etc. Closer to 10^13 is my guess.
Posted by Max on 12/01 at 12:04 AM
I agree with brobof. Discussions such as this completely ignore the possibility of superluminal travel, which I believe is a mistake. There are plenty of papers on perfectly stable traversable wormhole metrics and they are perfectly allowed by GR. Though they may violate the energy conditions, it can be shown that most matter violates the energy conditions, so this is not a reasonable objection to their feasibility. I imagine with enough time a civilization ought to be able to construct one, if they are possible.
Posted by Psytek on 12/01 at 04:46 AM
Space and Time are meant to be folded
Posted by Alexander Conorto on 12/03 at 06:33 PM
I thought we were just gonna expand (both inwards and outwards) as one huge blob of self-upgrading Computronium, running progressively more sublime Orgasmium software. Wait, this is actually what is already happening according to the Bhagavad-Gita.
There is nothing ‘out there’ which can’t be discovered or made ‘over here’ (since we are already and always have been at the center of the singularity). I guess one good argument for expanding across the galaxy would be to eradicate all suffering from it, assuming that the Godlike AGI we are turning into will consider negative utilitarianism the best moral approach. Or we might do it just for the lols.
Posted by Ben on 12/04 at 10:18 AM
Replication of life-forms was an evolutionary necessity for ensuring survival of DNA.
DNA is merely a form of environmental intelligence.
When machine intelligence corrects the inefficiencies of evolution, there will be no need for redundancy on present scales.
World population of humans will be drastically reduced when the insight that individual personality is inefficient is realized and all matter folds into a single, universal mind, then the quaint concept of interstellar travel of glorified monkeys will be comically moot.
Posted by sara on 12/07 at 01:37 AM
Personally I like the “myth” of the starship, and the paradigm it represents. Let’s leave the argument of starships versus robotic probes for another day: both will have their day, I’m sure. But regarding the starship, I have to agree that the Enterprise-like starship is likely to be far off the mark, but then again a dark, dirty, wet and empty Nostromo-like behemoth with a crew of 5-6 is also unlikely to be the first starship that gets built.
Posted by Brenda on 12/07 at 08:54 AM
Posted by Ben: “Replication of life-forms was an evolutionary necessity for ensuring survival of DNA.”
What kind of sloppy teleological thinking is this?
Posted by Dwight on 12/11 at 07:21 PM
A superb overview, Charlie, of the parameters attending space travel, to which I would add this wrapper - it is completely open-ended and needs an exoskeleton based on Humanism.
And ironically, a whole bunch of very big, floating ships. Built by competing countries and cities on earth.
In my book ‘The Humanist’ I feature the idea of Geoffrey A. Landis of NASA re: the colonization of Venus. http://tinyurl.com/ycgcfwa
Landis points out that at altitude 50Km the Venusian atmosphere sits at 1 atmosphere, has a comfortable earth-like temperature, 0.9 gravity and an area about 3 times that of the earth. Ideal for floating huge cities, provided you can progressively mine the surface, condense the atmosphere, eventually capture the entire planet as a tropical paradise.
What’s notable here is that compared to your summary above, this is all low-tech stuff, something we could beaver away at over the next 1000 years, credibly, while sorting out the singularity issue.
In ‘The Humanist’ (smashwords.com, use the free coupon YG88H) this project is a joint venture between the Humanist Union and the Jesuits, who needed a new drug (and soon).
The Jesuits would know how to keep our genomes in repositories, safe from the Luddites, and develop a catechism for our species, with which to study and democratically manage our governance; which is pretty raggedy-assed right now. This could all be funded with a fraction of our useless military spending.
Our ship is now ready, and we sail for Venus first.
You get the idea - I just see this social engineering over the next millennium as being the stabilizing substrate, the human resource that enables all the rest.
Posted by Bill Simmon on 05/02 at 07:36 PM
Joe Strout, your rejoinder assumes that Oort cloud objects are minimally habitable, which is a pretty big assumption (not to mention the further assumption of Alpha Centuri’s minimally habitable Oort cloud—quoting wikipedia’s Alpha Centuri article: “As yet, there is no direct evidence of the existence of such an Oort Cloud around Alpha Centauri AB, and theoretically this may have been totally destroyed during the system’s formation”). Charlie has written before on the relative habitability of outer space locales (the Moon, asteroids, Mars, etc.) and at best, it’s a hard existence more akin to life on a mid-ocean oil rig than, say, Deep Space Nine. One can only imagine how much more difficult an existence we humans would face so far from the energy of the Sun.
Posted by darue on 05/07 at 04:10 AM
well, we might as well just learn to steer the solar system, or at least a brown dwarf or gas giant and it’s moons. a giant electromagnetic field can push atmosphere from one of the poles for thrust. The enormous fusion generators will need to orbit within the atmosphere of the gas giant. We would then live in a Europa like moon, which would also need enormous thrusters for occasional orbit correction.
Another point - forget about “getting somewhere” the purpose of making such a system is the journey, not the arriving. Long term survival. The biggest problem will be keeping a coherent culture alive that remembers what’s even going on.
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