The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?
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No, been a long time since quantum mechanics classes but pretty sure your ship experiences the mass increase. You would need infinite energy to accelerate to c. E=mc^2. m is actually M, the relativistic mass where the rest mass is multiplied by the Lorentz factor. Relativistic mass is defined as
If you are traveling at the speed of light you are dividing by 0, your mass becomes infinite and you have infinite energy. Not possible for anything with mass. As you approach c, your acceleration, even given the same thrust, has to slow down as your relativistic mass increases because you can never reach c.
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Ukerric
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Woops.
Bah, it's physics. My physic teacher stopped once in the middle of some demonstration, then said, "ok, 1/2 is totally negligible compared to 1, so..."
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Asshat wormie
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khorum
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The sci-fi pining for faster than light travel is just more ingrained anthropomorphism. It just seems TO US that interstellar travel must require warp drives because the timescales of the journey would otherwise be measured in the hundreds of generations
It does NOT. You don’t need to resolve the mass/energy ratio problem within Alcubierre’s metric tensor to contrive human expansion across the entire Milky Way... you just need to accept that it might take 50 million years to do it at .25c.
It does NOT. You don’t need to resolve the mass/energy ratio problem within Alcubierre’s metric tensor to contrive human expansion across the entire Milky Way... you just need to accept that it might take 50 million years to do it at .25c.
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Meh. Shorter is always better than longer unless there's some intrinsic value in the transit duration. That remains true even if you're talking about something that will live until protons evaporate. Time spent doing anything has an opportunity cost.
Post-salt edit: There's nothing wrong with taking into account humanity's current attributes when aspiring to interstellar travel, either. We are, after all, human ourselves.
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Cad
scientia potentia est
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What would really be the point though when speed of light communications plus intractable distance would basically ensure that all of those colonies and planets are completely independent? They wouldn't be politically unified, and they'd only be kinda ideologically unified.. they could share inventions, but why? Why send shit to them when you won't get anything back in your lifetime?
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khorum
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Yep, they'd almost certainly speciate into unrecognizable phenotypes. As mentioned before even if you added 2,000 years for each daughter civilization to rise, fall and re-discover the entire industrial age before sending out their own seedships, it would only expand the time it would take to colonize the entire galaxy to 25 millionish years. After a couple generations of these daughter civilizations there's virtually no chance any of them would even remember Earth at all.
In fact, even within the LOWEST BOUNDS of the time it would take a civilization to colonize the Milky Way---about 5 million years at the same 25% of lightspeed----that would be ten times the amount of time Humanity evolved from Homo Erectus.
But again, that's only distressing to __US__ because we evaluate our reward horizons entirely within the context of 83-year average lifespan. It doesn't mean any other sufficiently advanced civilization would be as short-sighted as we are. They don't even need to be intelligent or sapient, it could just be a sufficiently advanced biosphere that evolved space-faring spores as a survival strategy.
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Cad
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Anti-senescence could also make the trip not that bad in terms of an average lifespan.
With our current lifespans I don't think you could really convince people to set off to any particular star. You'd be guaranteeing a medieval life for the next 50 generations while the population grew and they built an economy. A colony ship couldn't carry more than, say, 1000 people? I mean who knows maybe its 5000 not 1000. I don't think it makes much difference. You'd need millions to actually build a home on a planet with a modern type economy.
If you started out with 1000 and you could double every generation it'd take 10 generations (250 years) just to hit 1 million people.
Assuming those 10 generations had access to real information even if they couldn't build modern economic works... they'd be arising from the dark ages again... every time.
Why would you want to take that trip? You'd die on the colony ship and your distant descendants would get to claw their way back out of feudalism. Meanwhile if you stay on earth you can work your office job and have a comfortable post-information age life.
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khorum
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Yep, it's a cognitive bias thing and it's basically WHY everyone who pines for space travel tries to imagine a way to break the lightspeed barrier: it's because our risk horizon is constrained by our lifespans. If we had the same average lifespans as we had in the early 1700s, we wouldn't even be concerned about this stuff AT ALL because we would've died around the age of 40. The average American would've been preoccupied with maximising the harvest and producing enough children to overcome the ~40% infant mortality rate. At that time, sailing technology had become sufficiently reliable that MAYBE we could contemplate taking the entire family on an 8-month sea voyage to move to Australia where the crown is offering free land vs. the significant likelihood that we'd all disappear in a wreck and noone would ever hear from us again.
Our whole Choice Architecture is constrained by contemporary lifespans. Its influence is so profound it even affects how we evaluate ABSTRACT ideas, which is reflected in our IQ. Once people started living longer lives under more prosperous conditions, our risk horizon expanded alongside. But while we had to deal with polio and smallpox and risking dysentery every time we took a dump, abstract theoretical ideas would be dismissed as fancy.
Here's James Flynn of the famous Flynn Effect in IQ explaining how gains in abstract hypothetical thinking grew over generations and effected a massive rise in average IQ,
Basically for us, ALL of our choices are shaped by the limitations of our circumstances. We work towards stabilizing our income. We plan for the kids' college. We invest towards a comfortable retirement because we want to spend the money we all slaved for before we die around 83----so the proposition of interstellar travel isn't worth entertaining if it would take us 78,000 years to arrive at Proxima Centauri.
Our whole Choice Architecture is constrained by contemporary lifespans. Its influence is so profound it even affects how we evaluate ABSTRACT ideas, which is reflected in our IQ. Once people started living longer lives under more prosperous conditions, our risk horizon expanded alongside. But while we had to deal with polio and smallpox and risking dysentery every time we took a dump, abstract theoretical ideas would be dismissed as fancy.
Here's James Flynn of the famous Flynn Effect in IQ explaining how gains in abstract hypothetical thinking grew over generations and effected a massive rise in average IQ,
Basically for us, ALL of our choices are shaped by the limitations of our circumstances. We work towards stabilizing our income. We plan for the kids' college. We invest towards a comfortable retirement because we want to spend the money we all slaved for before we die around 83----so the proposition of interstellar travel isn't worth entertaining if it would take us 78,000 years to arrive at Proxima Centauri.
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Average lifespan is only that low because of the inclusion of infant mortality. Once you survive early childhood your odds of living to age 50-70 were pretty good no matter when you were born. Expectancy excluding infant mortality was in the low 60's in the 1700's.
Changing life expectancy throughout history
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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Thanks, will check that one out.
For anyone that hasn't read it, a classic in the same vein is The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. It tracks the experience of soldiers traveling at relativistic speeds to and from a distant galactic battle front, and their experience of months of subjective time compared to society undergoing thousands of years of change during their transit and their enemies experiencing technical revolutions in weaponry between their deployment and arrival.
Intrinsic
Person of Whiteness
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I did read that book, the first of the series, but could be remembering the wrong theme. After posting that I tried looking up a few summaries and it didn’t align with what I was looking for.
Was almost positive the catalyst for events in my book involved some kind of monetary theft. Ancillary has to do with something else. Maybe the theft stuff was a subplot. Either way , enjoyed the book but looking at Kindle can’t find anything else that it might be...
Cad
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Why? Why would you even want to do this? They can't send you anything back, they'll never turn into an income or information producing colony in anything resembling a reasonable time frame, they will be politically independent of you (and may hate you) and you spend what fraction of your resources to send them on their way for ... what?
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khorum
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Survival.
Right now everything our biosphere has ever achieved is at risk because cow farts might thaw the Siberian taiga and induce a runaway greenhouse effect that would dwarf the Permian die-off.
We can either leave a space monument that says “oops” or insure the continuity of the human genome across the whole galaxy.
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Cad
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While I agree with you big picture, people probably won't do anything about this until they can personally go. The biological determinism isn't going to let people do that. It's too far off in the future and people won't care.
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