Let me remind you guys that "just 20 light years" = roughly 200 trillion kms. At the speed of voyager 1, it takes roughly 1600 yrs to travel 1 trillion kms. 200 trillion kms would take 320,000 years to reach there. Even if you increased the speed of voyager 1 by 10 times, it would still take 32000 years to reach. We really need to up the speed by a factor of 10000 before we can get anywhere close to human lifetime achievable travel times.
Accounting for acceleration and deceleration seems like an unspoken obstacle in your timeline. How can a human comfortably accelerate or decelerate at a rate greater than 9.8m/s^2 for long periods of time? “Hey guys, we will need you to pull 9Gs for the next seventy years as your ship slows down to enter a stable orbit”
Accelerating consistently at 1G (and then -1G for the second half), should take 6 years of proper time (from the perspective of the traveller) to get there.
Yea, actually the problem is not at all that we’d need too much acceleration for the human body. Accelerating at 1g for a couple years gets you to preposterous speeds (and we don’t even need any artificial gravity nonsense!). The problem is that accelerating at 1g for years would require a ridiculous amount of energy.
In his 1958 juvenile novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel (I read it years later as a tween), Robert A. Heinlein described this as a "skew-flip maneuver" that would get someone from Earth to Pluto in five days at 8G (!). And apparently E.E. "Doc" Smith described it even earlier.
I don't think we'll be sending humans on these kinds of missions. We'll be sending AI systems (ship, bots, etc.) and then waiting millennia for them to report back.
It's conceivable that we could send the seeds of humanity and other terrestrial life — along with AI systems capable of raising it, terraforming the planet as necessary, and building a society.
We might not ever travel there or receive guests from New Earth any time in the foreseeable future, but it's fun to imagine that one day we could have a colony of distant pen pals separated by only 20 years of latency.
I’ve never understood the idea that humans should be doing space exploration. Especially given the proof that robots and machines are demonstrably better and more suitable for these kind of tasks by such a degree that they dominate off-planet sensors-effector combinations.
Making space exploration comfortable for humans instead of creating TARS like intelligent machines (possible in our lifetimes imo) foundationally limits and constrains the ability and scale of exploration.
Seems entirely egoistic and anthropocentric. Is there any alternative reason - other than stated - as to why humans should be considered the best candidates for these tasks?
I wonder if space exploration will turn out to be no different than mountain climbing. There's nothing useful on the mountain, we can't live there, it's purely exploration, sport, and a feeling of achievement.
By far the most motivating part of high dangerous mountains is the internal journey of climbers to have confidence in your own skills and training to overcome any obstacle that can happen. Then facing an unpredictable challenges, trusting your teammates if you are not solo, overcome them or knowing when to retreat to safety.
Facing semi-continuous fear of death, not getting hampered it but calmly assessing it and acting accordingly is a great skill for any aspect of life. Overcoming oneself mentally, pushing and redefining our own limits (normal folks have them mentally set very low compared to actual threshold) is the gist of it.
All this and much more while being mentally degraded to 10-20% of capacity at sea level. in environment where 1 mistake can be easily the last one. Physical capacity is also greatly reduced, and you climb very steeply or almost vertically, with 10-20kg backpack, sometimes more. Doing this even for weeks without break. Summit push can be easily 48-72h 100% effort without a sip of water, any food nor sleep, after all I've written. I wouldn't even call this 'sport', you don't call early Antarctic expeditions a sport, do you.
I don't see why almost all of this and much more shouldn't be present in space exploration, just environment will be a bit different (but views on myriads of stars remain).
Humans generally do things out of their own self interest (which for a lot of people includes improving the living conditions of their descendants). So, if humans aren’t going to colonize space, we’ll either need somebody who… just sort of likes colonizing space with robots? Like as a hobby I guess?
Or maybe we’ll have robots at some point capable of working in their own self-interest.
If these robots find a good target and make it habitable, then you would still need to send humans at some point, right? But then you sort of wasted all these thousands of years by doing robots first, you might as well send humans too.
> before we can get anywhere close to human lifetime achievable travel times.
Humans are an intermediate step. We are not the final shape of earth-origin intelligence.
Why would we continue to fill these bodies when we develop the tech to no longer be so limited? Constrained to the parameters of our gravity well and to short lifespans without backup?
Or maybe we just get replaced outright.
Or, the worst outcome, everything from this planet dies without ever having left.
You can’t develop tech to move intoto a computer. Although it’s a good book idea.
A kool-aid style cult where they convince their followers they will be “uploaded” once they hand over all their possessions. Then they just get shot in the head.
AI might do it, but I wouldn’t count that as us going there.
In Cyberpunk 2077, you can stumble across a scene of people "jacked in" to a server in the desert. They have died, and reading notes around the area, they were part of a cult that believed they were going to be uploaded to and live in the Net forever.
Somewhat related is the story of SOMA, which, spoilers ahead, involves you realising the earth on the surface has been wiped out, and putting faith in a person who's brain scan currently lives in a robot, to get you both into a simulated paradise that will be shot into space.
Realistically if we perish and there is no comparable conscious life then no one can even care whether a bunch of machines we spawned to assist us continues to exist.
Thinking 'it is good' is a product of your consciousness. When there is no one to judge then there is no 'good'.
It's murky concept though, so I wouldn't bet on mind uploading in our lifetime.
Some fairly fundamental things need to be answered first. Things like how does consciousness and the sense of self arise.
Naively, if you think that you are just a program that runs on a bunch of neurons in your brains, and that this program can be uploaded to a computer, you are still left with a very annoying problem: you upload a copy, and leave the original running in your squishy brain. So what then? Do you kill the original? But that involves killing a living and breathing human being. Do you wait until it dies naturally? That's still not a good answer, because you have to die so that a copy of you can continue existing.
So until we figure how to actually "teleport" our consciousness to some other host, we are in a pickle. And there's absolutely no evidence that we'll ever be able to do this teleportation. What if we never figure out the physics to do this?
Edit: I suppose you could sidestep this by generating fully digital consciousnesses that mimic what a human brain does. So a fully digital human. Assuming we can brute-force simulate a real human brain, this should be at least physically possible (as opposed to teleportation), but this still raises philosophical questions. What you are generating then aren't human beings, but conscious AI. You could argue that the human race would eventually be supplanted by immortal AI that are no longer bound by biology, but I'd argue that this isn't an evolution of the human race, rather a completely new life form (if you can call it that), which has nothing to do with humans except that we created it.
You're imagining a future that is a continuation of our lives here and that is kind to currently living humans. But this is just inventing requirements.
Imagine none of what you've presumed is necessary is even a design objective. Maybe it is, but probably it's too difficult and uneconomical. These capabilities could be built without ever enabling any of us to live or achieve immortality.
Those hypothetical digital beings could be human-like, maybe exact simulations, or perhaps totally different. They could be benevolent, or perhaps not. We might come to a conclusion that it's no longer ethical to have biological humans. Or maybe we're forced into that outcome.
Who knows. This is all wild postulation. But one thing that might happen is runaway growth and a deviation from a world we're familiar with.
How fast could a ship get going with a RTG powered ion engine like AEPS? Rough back of the envelope figures come out to 100 years to cover 1 light year, or a few thousand to reach 20 ly out, which is... nothing like science fiction books but not impossible either.
