It's "stories" like these I would read as a kid very early 80's, probably in Popular Mechanics magazines or similar.
Depicted in these magazine articles and artist renditions: in the future (certainly by the 2020s!), we will have bases on the Moon, maybe even Mars, and rotating space stations... all the while wearing stylish futuristic fashions (yet still looking very much 70's), the women sipping from glasses of champagne and laughing to each other while in the background the men play some yet-to-be-invented handball game.
In 1990 when I was finishing school I bet with my classmate that there would be a permanent Moon base in 2010. As the result my much more practical buddy got 1500$ from his investment into sceptictical thinking.
I wouldn’t go that far, unless you and your buddy are both mice. Even if a cure for all cancers were discovered tomorrow, you’d have to progress from testing in Petri dishes (maybe), to mice, to safety trials in people, to double blind controlled studies in people, to regulatory approval, to clinical practice, all in under 4 years. If I were your buddy betting on the cure, I would offer to settle for $500 today.
Did the bet specify that it would be a human base? If not, and if $1500 is enough to be worth having your school buddy think you have become an idiot or dishonorable, maybe you could have tried to argue that the secret alien outpost [1] on the far side counts and demand that your buddy pay you.
I assume your friend would reject that, but unless the bet specified a procedure to use in the case that the participants could not agree on the outcome, it might have been enough to void the bet at least.
Also, was the bet in writing and signed? If not, and if you are in a jurisdiction that has something like the Statue of Frauds [2], you might try to argue the bet is invalid because the Statue requires contracts that cannot be performed within one year (other than indefinite contracts) be in writing and signed.
The 2010 end date on the contract arguably makes it not of indefinite duration. The "cannot be performed within one year" is harder. It doesn't mean that it has to be performed within a year--just that it is possible.
For example, if I make a contract with you that says I'll pay you $1000 if in the next three years your bicycle is stolen and not recovered within two weeks. Because it is possible that your bike could be stolen in the next year, this contract can be performed in one year. It doesn't matter that it might not be.
Would it be possible in 1990 for a permanent Moon base to be deployed within one year? It may have been physically possible, but it was certainly politically and economically impossible. For Statute of Fraud purposes, is it good enough that it could happen even if it would require worldwide cooperation on an unprecedented scale? Or does it have to have a non-negligible chance of actually happening?
I mean, the biggest failure of prediction is that women seem to laugh at salad rather than champagne.
It always seems as if we're just 50 - 100 years from "the future".
Lost in Space takes place in 1997 when we were about to colonize space. Or as we know it, 21 years ago.
The original Blade Runner takes place next year. When we'll have space colonies and humanoid androids to work them.
And according to Star Trek, we've weathered the Eugenics War and have 31 years before World War III and the post-atomic horror. But in just 45 years, Zefram Cochrane will invent the warp drive.
Not to mention the countless flying cars we'll have as we go eat all of our meals in pill form.
The Flight of the Conchords' song "The Humans are Dead" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1BdQcJ2ZYY starts with "It is the distant future, the year 2000". It was released in 2008. I mean, yeah it's a piss-take, but there was always this big thing about the year 2000 being the distant future when robots would be ruling the Earth.
2000 seemed sort of like an event horizon, back in the day, until we shot past it. "Strange Days" was a film made in 1994-95, set in 1999, and yet somehow 1999 was still the far future, full of cyberpunk stuff.
It may have been the comment about women laughing at salad instead of champagne, which sounds vaguely sexist....well, I do not comprehend its intent but I suspect it is some cultural reference of which I am not aware, and not actually sexist. The rest of the comment is interesting so I upvoted.
"Women laughing alone with salad" is a meme. If you look through magazines targeted at women, they're full of images of a woman holding a salad in one hand and a fork in the other and laughing at something the viewer has to guess at. There's an entire blog devoted to it[0].
GP:"the women sipping from glasses of champagne and laughing"
OP:"[instead] women seem to laugh at salad rather than champagne."
i.e. in actual modern life the ultimate debonaire lifestyle, as depicted by the likes of instagram, doesn't focus on smiling over exclusive alcohol as much as it does on smiling over exotic salads.
I don't know if they were unrealistic so much as they didn't anticipate the cataclysmic demotivation that we as a planet incurred with the end of the cold war.
Maybe they just vastly underestimated the cost of these things and overestimated the return on investment. We have the technology to build a lot of sci-fi. It’s an economic problem, not a technical one. Even if moon rocks were all made of solid gold it wouldn’t make economic sense to fly there and pick them up.
But it didn't make economic sense to go to the moon at all in the first place, either. That's what the parent is referring to, I think. We lost the motivation/incentives we had to get on with this exploration, with these ventures.
I don't know what fhe word for it is. Demotivation does not seem wrong, but incomplete. What I mean is Korolev would have rotted away in the gulags if not for the cold war. Von Braun would never have had a chance if not for it, and who knows what would have happened to him. It's not just a lack of motivation among people, but the incentives of authoritarians to remain in power.
It's also amusing how much humans are effected by century and millennial boundaries.
There was a show in the 80s, on I think Discovery, called Beyond the Year 2000.
As a kid it seemed like the simple fact that we were entering the next millennium MUST be meaningful. And popular media portrayed it that way.
But 15 years is 15 years. Doesn't matter what boundary is crossed. Hahaha.
I think that's part of what even got people worked up about Y2K. It's a new millennia! Did we plan for it?!?
Anyway, my point is, I think the millennial boundary may have influenced excitement about space progress as much as other forms of irrational optimism.
Reminds me of Syd Meads paintings, which are absolutely awesome, too. When I listen to music from Tycho, I often daydream about some alternate future in which this is all reality.
All the developments we've had since 1969 feel more like improvements of what was already invented.
Within living memory of an (old) person alive then would have been the birth of nuclear power, powered flight, the telephone, car phones, electronic computers, radiography radio, tv, the internal combustion engine, satellites and the first men on the moon.
This century, it will not. We are very far from a technology capable of achieving what Starshot proposes. Accelerating the spacecraft to a fraction of the speed of light using a laser would require power densities that would instantanously turn all known materials to plasma. The best mirrors and coatings are many orders of magnitude too dark. The required laser and energy bank would be, for all intents and purposes, a comics megaweapon capable of blowing spacecrafts from orbit, or, with proper space reflectors, incinerate enemy installations anywhere on the globe in seconds.
The craft would be completely unable to brake so it will pass past the target planets in a matter of minutes. It's unclear what kind of sensors could be employed to detect anything and we certainly lack the technology to beam and receive back signals sent by a postage stamp craft 5 light years away. Let me rephrase that: we haven't got even a theoretical model of a system that would allow communication at such vast distances with milliwatt power sources.
Needless to say, nobody is seriously working on this, nor will they for many decades at least.
If the craft is packed with instructions on how to get back to us, maybe we could get some sort of exchange going over multiple centuries.
On the other hand, if someone were to sent similar craft to us, would we even have a reasonable chance of detecting something that small without knowing exactly where, when and what to look for?
ʻOumuamua may have been a probe, yet even with our suspicions about it being something out of the ordinary, we more-or-less collectively yawned and went about our daily strife without making any effort to collect it.
On your other point - would we have a chance to detect something that small? No, absolutely no way, even considering that there would be a continuous 'stream' of these things spread out like beads on a string.
Say each one weighs a gram, and is 1m across - that's just impossibly small. The Hubble ST's resolving power means that it can resolve a 1m object (ie, make one pixel = 1m²) at something like 4000km away. In space terms, that is practically touching. In interstellar terms, that might as well be inside the planet!
Any transmitting that it might be doing would necessarily be very low power, which means it would need to be highly directional and pointed back the way it had come, behind what must be a reflector more reflective by far than anything we know how to build. Unless you managed to get its transmission pointed directly at you by being behind it, there'd be no way to see it.
After decades or more in the interstellar void, it would be about as equal to the ambient temperature as it's possible to be, and in any case, it's not made of very much 'stuff', so it would have no heat signature to detect.
Lastly, at 20% light speed, they would cover the average distance from Pluto to Earth in something like 36 hours. That's not a lot of time to search!
The only possible method I can think of would be to detect the results of these things crashing into dust within the solar system. How much of a 'puff' a gram of diffuse something travelling at 0.2c hitting a speck of rock makes I don't know. Still way too small to spot, I'm sure.
ʻOumuamua is fascinating, I agree - but the most remarkable thing about it is that it's the first object like it we've seen, followed closely by the fact that it's taken us so long to see one. Most models predict these are pretty common - it's just our lack of spotting capacity that's stopping us seeing more.
As far as collecting, I remember reading a back-of-the-envelope analysis that suggested that we might be able to catch it if we made a really concerted effort. We might then be able to hit it with an impactor (or just smack the probe into it) and do some spectroscopy on the resulting dust cloud, but it's going way too fast in an inconvenient direction for us to be able to collect anything, slow down and return it.
I have been obsessing over Oumuamua as well, but there's just not that much information, and we won't be getting more. Then there was the fact that it was tumbling and wasn't emitting anything - one would expect radar scans or radio transmissions, or at least something.
> Then there was the fact that it was tumbling and wasn't emitting anything
There is a range of the radio spectrum we can't really practically measure: the very, very low frequencies. Consider a nanohertz signal. Period of each sine wave: 31 years. You might also need an antenna the size of the solar system to grab anything.
Project starshot does have a history, beyond this press release. And they have thought through the issues. There's a great youtube video here that goes into the details:
They talk about using a 1km^2 earth based laser array to accelerate the craft. They also discuss using a 1W laser on the craft, and using that to transmit data back to earth (with a similar 1km^2 array to receive the signals).
They really seem to have thought through all the issues and come up with difficult, but plausible solutions.
I was wondering how much of that 100gW is lost in Earth's atmosphere - my naive assumption would be quite a bit, but maybe not so much that it would make sense to try and get the laser into orbit (also orbiting gigawatt laser would make everyone nervous, I imagine...)
yup. its an awesome idea and the most credible possibility for an interstellar probe but im so sick of reading these pop science articles that make it sound like it's about to launch. we still need to do science on these problems, we aren't at the engineering phase. that said, people are working on it:
Thank you - this article is interesting meat wrapped in lie-pastry.
The "will" in the title is just flat wrong. "Might possibly" is a stretch, even. People are sketching out the idea, enough that there are known but currently insurmountable problems in doing it. It's an interesting and promising approach in general though.
Some additional highlights:
> accelerate the nanocraft with a 60,000-G force
We're going to make a package of sensors, transmitters, power source and sail that weighs one gram and can also survive 60,000g's of acceleration for multiple minutes? For comparison, the US Navy's ship mounted railguns accelerate projectiles at something like 15,000-20,000g, and those are 10kg of high-precision tungsten, and need to do nothing except not disintegrate.
> The combined laser power needs to be something close to 100 gigawatts
If my maths are right, that's nearly the generation capacity of Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...). Granted, it wouldn't be required for long, but recruiting (or alternatively, storing) a whole-extra-Japan's worth of energy for even a few seconds is just completely ridiculous. We would need large-scale orbiting solar or commodity fusion power before we could even dream of anything like that.
Is that right? I assumed a railgun's acceleration would be about as high as we can go. Huh! In any case, anything that we accelerate like that is highly durable and rigid - you can imagine what happens if you accelerate one part of a 'soft projectile' at 60,000g and another part at 59995g.
For sure. Something like this might be useful to explore the Oort Cloud / Kuiper Belt, but I don’t expect to see anything like a star probe built in my lifetime.
Might be interesting to couple laser powered “solar” panels with an ion drive, though :-)
I'm not sure that's an advantage. It adds a strong political component to something that's unlikely to be a cost effective weapon. So foreign powers will contest it and domestic powers will be unlikely to put their weight behind it. Kind of like nuclear rockets - in theory a workable technology, yet so controversial nobody will touch it.
There is no way that we are "alone" in a universe estimated to have practically infinite planets.
However, the distances between stars and the very short windows of time in which life may thrive (remember that we may have never known about the dinosaurs on our very own planet if we didn't discover their bones, and we will never see them again) means that we may never meet any other life.
This is a very optimistic view, but there are plenty of theories claiming otherwise. Check out the Fermi Paradox [1], or the Rare Earth Hypothesis [2] for a more detailed view on the problem.
To be honest the easiest explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that we are indeed alone as an inteligent civilization. If we were just an average civilization there should be plenty of evidence of more advanced civilizations across the galaxy, because probabilistically they would be millions of years more advanced than us.
I've never liked the Fermi paradox. It seems terribly contrived. It assumes way too much. That space colonization is inevitable and/or that strong AI is also inevitable.
What if it's not? What if it's an intractable problem?
What if technological advancement isn't exponential? What if it's more of an inverse tangent? A slow start, an explosive middle, then a long finish with an upper bound.
We have absolutely no other examples to base any assumptions of technological societies on, so why do we get "space colonization" and "independently thinking machines" for free?
To the single cell organism; the worm looks to be advanced and complex. To the worm; the human looks to be advanced and complex. Its possible we are still way down on the intelligence chain and too dumb to realize that we are in fact the worm in the scope of the universe
A cell has no way to conceive of a worm, and worms probably can't conceive of humans. But they probably have some conception of birds, and birds can perceive humans. Where are our birds? As you go up the intelligence chain the ability to see beyond seems to increase, but we don't see anything beyond us.
But that's the difference right there. Us speculating and imaging that there may be something beyond this plateau of intelligence is the difference separates us from worms and birds.
As well, metaphors for intelligence really falls apart when you are talking about very different scales, in the same way that some explanations for physical phenomena fall apart depending on the scale with which you are describing it.
Perhaps because what we are looking for doesn't want to be found.
For us, finding intelligent life would be a massive change in our reality and understanding of life because right now, the current state of affair is that we're alone.
But what if these other beings are used to a universe with billions of civilizations competing for resources of various kind (including biological, innovation, etc). Why draw attention to yourself?
We already have the concept of the eschaton, or the singularity. Is this a realistic concept? I don't know! But if you accept it, then the inability to see people at or beyond is is simple -- there is a large gap because progress past the point we are at is geometric up to physical limits that we are nowhere near today.
> To the single cell organism; the worm looks to be advanced and complex. To the worm; the human looks to be advanced and complex.
I don't think either of those is advanced enough to have a concept of anything "looking complex" to them. A cat or a dog would be a much better for comparison.
But we arent fundimentally more complex than the cat or dog. The only real difference is the relative size of various structures. We are both as complex as creatures come on this planet.
Probably there is some limiting factor to complexity, such as either the naivety to advertise existence, or the inevitably to halt creative destruction once we figure out how to not die.
Paraphrased: "Everything that we have achieved which the chimpanzees can't, is in the 1% of the difference between our DNA and theirs. Imagine another species that is 1% different from us, in the same direction that we are different from the chimps."
You don't think that the capacity for rational thought makes a difference?
It seems to me that even with our limited intellects, we have already figured out an awful lot of what there actually is to figure out. We know all of the stable elements that make up atomic matter. We have identified and measured a huge range of the fundamental universal constants and it seems unlikely there are many more left undiscovered. So we can make reasonably good guesses about what the upper bounds of possible technology in our physical universe are. No FTL for example.
Of course you can refute that by appealing to ignorance - maybe there are technologies we can't conceive of and modes of existence beyond our comprehension. Well ok, but maybe there are fairies at the end of the garden path. That's not an argument that's tractable to rational analysis, no matter how rational you are. It can make no predictions and can never be tested so it's not much actual use.
> It seems to me that even with our limited intellects, we have already figured out an awful lot of what there actually is to figure out.
Really? It seems just as likely that our brains are fooling us into believing that they are universal knowing machines.
We understand that there are real things that we cannot see. Microscopes and telescopes and other sorts of detectors outside the visual spectrum allow us to "see" them. That is we have technology which present reality as a simulacrum our eyes can see. Similarly with sound, we know that there are sounds which we cannot hear, but through technology we can represent them in a form which we can consume. But to be clear, we are still not seeing or hearing these things, we are seeing and hearing artifacts of our technology which we accept as corresponding with reality.
Is it that hard to imagine that there are true thoughts that we literally cannot think? And any sort of technology which would help us, would really just be showing us a pale representation of the reality?
> we have already figured out an awful lot of what there actually is to figure out
that's very presumptuous. As we learn more, every time, more phenomenon shows up that's even more intriguing. We can't explain many quantum effects (tho there's a good theory on how to do some predictions), we can barely manipulate 2 of the 4 fundamental forces, etc.
theoretical knowledge frequently fails to capture the engineering possibilities of exploiting a phenomenon.
example: we understand all of the relevant theories to explain how an ant can carry something that is many times heavier than itself.
but would we have thought to use those theories in the way that the ant's body does if we had never seen it nor had a concrete need to produce a similar result for ourselves using technology? clearly not. even after the fact, knowledge of the way the ant performs its feats does not let us replicate it easily. engineering is not something to dismiss with a hand wave, it's the meat.
put differently: our imagination for the upper bounds of technology is with certainty nowhere near the actual upper boundary because we are always thinking too narrowly when we consider the application of the laws of the universe, even when we know the laws deeply.
that doesn't mean FTL is possible. it means we might might create a way to make the problem of a speed limit irrelevant using what we already know.
That theory doesn't account for the fact that the laws of physics prevent anything from traveling faster than the speed of light. because our galaxy is 100000 lightyears long by itself, it would take 100000 years for an advanced civilization just to get to us let alone cross their own galaxies. It's highly possible other life doesn't exist but the reason we can't see them is because space is way larger than you think it is and takes a long time to travel across.
Which is a very short amount of time for a species to be in existence. Alligators have been around for 2000x that amount of time. If you take a max speed of 0.01c which is possible with technology that we will probably have in the next 100 years (fusion power) that means the galaxy could be colonized in 10 million years. If 200 million years ago humans had evolved instead of alligators (can’t see any reason this is not possible on some alternate earth) then we could have colonized the galaxy 20 times over by now.
My point was in response to WilliamEdward above so really only dealing with showing that travel time is not a constraint. That said, your points are good, but knowing humans I think "Unrestrained colonization just because we can" is probable if not certain, for anywhere that a self sustaining society can exist. It certainly holds for Earth. The moon is not a great example because it isn't habitable. Same as Antarctica. We have sent a few expeditions and have a few bases but have not colonized it. If the moon was earthlike then I would bet that colonization would have started shortly after the Apollo program. Right now there are no habitable planets we can get to. If we ever develop interstellar travel, finding habitable planets we can reach is a near certainty. More likely we first develop technology that allows terraforming and a self sustaining colony on Mars. And at that time I would bet that it happens.
> The moon is not a great example because it isn't habitable.
It could actually serve well as a strategic and logistic launchpad for subsequent missions.
But still, you highlighted a key point yourself: That it's not always going to be possible (or desirable) to continue expanding through the galaxy because we may run into a "dead end" with no stepping stones (i.e. habitable planets) within our range of travel.
Another related example: We don't have the abundance of resources to do so. Whether or not the universe is infinite, while it does mean there can be infinite resources, our direct radius of galaxies is finite and it gets harder to travel as the distance gets further so the infinite planets are not all the same distance from earth.
The other way of looking at that is that it would only take a few hundred thousand years for a technologically advanced civilization to permeate the galaxy. But the galaxy is billions of years old and that has not happened.
The other thing is that the paradox isn't just that they aren't physically here with us. It's that there's no evidence of intelligent life whatsoever. We're at the point where we can take direct optical images of exoplanets. At some point we have to conclude that if they are out there, we would have seen some indication of it.
> it would only take a few hundred thousand years for a technologically advanced civilization to permeate the galaxy.
Why? How? How soon would they be able to start? Why haven't we begun doing so ourselves? Why haven't we even established a presence on our neighboring moons and planets, even though we are technically capable of already doing so?
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the "we should have met someone by now" argument relies upon a bunch of thin assumptions that have been brought up elsewhere in response to other instances of it:
It's easy to speculate when there are infinite "what-ifs". If AGI (artificial general intelligence) development is technically possible and if they're really able to recursively self-improve themselves to become semi-gods and if there are really N number of civilizations out there, then there should be N number of AGIs too, it would make sense that we should be able to see their traces of existence across the universe.
Honest question: Do we have the means to detect conclusive evidence of life on Earth itself from even "only" as far as, say, Pluto, without knowing exactly what to look for?
You'd be able to detect radio waves from Earth. We can still communicate with the Voyager probes that are further out. We probably can't detect life on Earth from Alpha Centauri with our current technology.
> We can still communicate with the Voyager probes that are further out.
This is what I mean by "knowing exactly what to look for."
Can we place something at Pluto and have it listen to radio waves from the direction of Earth, and compare it to the background "noise" at that location? How different is it? How much of that perceived difference would be our own bias?
That's a cosmically trivial distance. Yes we could absolutely detect vast amounts of transmissions at that range, and even figure out how to decode a lot of them. For example video transmissions clearly have a tabular data structure, pixel data structure, timing encoding, serial frames, etc. Theres no way they could be natural. You could even see differences over time as video standards evolve and update. That's just one example. Bear in mind in wartime we manage to extract useful meaningful data from deliberately obscured and encrypted data, so determining useful data from vast ranges and quantities of non-encrypted transmissions would be comparatively easy.
> Bear in mind in wartime we manage to extract useful meaningful data from deliberately obscured and encrypted data
Yes, but data created and encoded by other humans. We would likely not even know where to begin when encountering data (assuming we even recognized it as such) from beings who may perceive reality completely differently.
99.9999999999999999% of radio waves we get from the rest of the universe is absolute garbage. There would be some kind of pattern with purposeful radio communications. Recognizing purposeful radio communication is a much easier task than interpreting the data. But we don't need to interpret the data to know it came from someone/something we should go and check out, because it could be intelligent life.
Planets are not normally radio sources. You can detect Earth as a planet from Pluto, and you can say that this planet is a strong radio source in various bands. As a radio source it has changed over time in interesting ways that are very unlikely to be natural.
Planets can be very strong radio sources; there are astronomers who spend their entire careers recording and studying Jupiter in the 21 MHz band, for example.
The Voyager probes emit less radiation than your typical cell phone, so the Megawatts of emissions we produce would be very bright on typical radio telescopes on Pluto, I presume.
We can detect atmospheric water and oxygen[1] on planets round other stars, so yes. Although your last qualifier is flexible enough to kill almost any possible answer.
Neither is the detection of those elements requirements for life. We know for a fact that for 2 billion years our earth had very very low levels of oxygen, but was in-fact full of life.
If you have a species of intelligent squids then there will not be much of a radiation background - radio waves are no good in water. That would be a false negative.
Maybe the oldest and most advanced civilizations decided to go tribal.
Maybe they are so advanced that they can hide their trail so belligerent civilizations like ours do not encounter them.
I don't think the easiest explanation is to assume that there is any sort of naturally occurring event in the universe that is one of a kind, save maybe for the big bang.
There are civilisations on earth (uncontacted tribes) who are completely unaware of the existence of modern society. With this in mind your view seems incredibly naive.
True, but all these assumptions are probabilistic. What are the chances of us being one of those uncontacted tribes. We have found thousands of other tribes, leaving only a handful hidden. The probability of a tribe to remain hidden is almost 0. And this probability decreases more and more with time.
The Fermi paradox assumes that there is infinite progress, what if going interstellar is just too hard? (Warp drive too hard and going such distances directly just impossible) What are the incentives to go interstellar once a species has colonised it's solar system?
The incentive would be to escape the eventual heat death of their sun or insure their race against any other solar system wide extinction event, I guess
The universe is 13.8 Billion years old, so we can only observe the universe 13 Billion light years away. However the universe is practically infinite and much larger than the observable universe. It's not possible for us to detect a galaxy and a civilization (if it exists) in the said galaxy outside the observable range. Similarly, for the said civilization we lie outside that observable range and they can't detect us because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
Now imagine, how huge the unobservable universe is. Probabilistically, it is quite possible for a civilization (or multiple) more or less advanced than us to exist far, far away, or may have existed some point in time. But none can detect each other. Its even possible for a civilization to exist in the spheres of observation of other civilizations but so far away that its almost impossible to make contact. 13.8 Billion years is not a long time on the scale of the universe, but it is also a long time on evolutionary scale for a civilization to have existed and have been extinct.
There might simply be no way to travel at, or even near, and much less faster than, the speed of light, in which case the universe could be full of life that we will never contact or meet. Life might be rare enough that it's unlikely in any single galaxy.
Even at very low speeds, a civilization with a 10 million year "head start" (which is nothing on the timescale of the universe) would be able to send autonomous robots across the galaxy. At least that what we would do if we had sufficient enough technology. This is essentially the paradox.
> Even at very low speeds, a civilization with a 10 million year "head start" (which is nothing on the timescale of the universe) would be able to send autonomous robots across the galaxy.
I see this sort of statement all the time, and we have no empirical evidence it is true.
As this article says, even this simple "Starshot" concept is "a monumental engineering challenge that will require huge leaps in technology for spacecraft design, propulsion and communication."
And all the challenges are fundamentally physical, involving issues of weight, strength, density, power density, thermodynamics, etc. Unless they make some near-magical breakthrough in physics, a civilization one million years older than our own would find it just as difficult as we will!
And what if some galactic civilization has already done this? Are we likely to detect a spacecraft "just 3 to 12 feet across and weigh as little as a thimbleful of water" passing somewhere through our solar system at 20% C?
It's usually the explorers who do the detection and contact, while the lesser civilization simply acknowledges their presence.
I don't think physics is a roadblock for space exploration at this point. We just need to figure out asteroid mining and building in space, after that we can send robots driven by AI to other systems, at low speeds. Once they reach other systems they would refuel, build more robots and carry on.
It's a massive engineering challange, but it's quite predictable within a few thousand years (if we don't destroy ourselves by then).
That so-called paradox takes the following assumptions:
• That it is possible for a region as large as even a single galaxy to ever be "full" of one species or their creations.
• That anything can keep spreading indefinitely, and remain intact, not only across the gargantuan distances involved but also over potentially millions of years for other species to encounter them.
• That intelligent life wants to keep spreading or exploring indefinitely. As opposed to, say, creating VR universes of its own and attaining contentment within them.
• That there are only a few "directions" into which species or machines can spread across the universe, for them to run into each other.
• That there are no "stabilizing" forces – natural or adversarial – which counter rampant expansion.
As others have pointed out there are 50 thousand assumptions being made here, but one of the biggest is why you assume technology can ever be efficient enough for this?
The entire universe is limited to the periodic table. You would need to have a device made entirely out of material that has a half life greater than millions of years, and a battery that can last that long without sunlight. I'm not saying it's impossible because technology is often surprising, but that's a fundamental limitation that so far we know cannot be overcome.
Edit: Even if the robot behaved in a self-sustaining manner, this further assumes a perfect, unobstructed trajectory and asteroids full of essential materials are on the route to earth.
So many assumptions here. Maybe they’d be able to, but why would they want to? What’s the point of probing a galaxy that you can only ever explore below the speed of light, at the cost of ungodly amounts of energy and eons of time? Why wouldn’t that same civilization stick within 1-100 light years instead? There is only a paradox if an advanced civilization with high tech is so irrational that they can’t control their breeding and doesn’t care about time dilation and efficient use of resources.
It also assumes that it’s safe to broadcast your presence to the whole galaxy that way. It assumes a lot of unproven ideas and then hand waves at a “sufficiently advanced” species that has only apparently enjoyed technological advancement rather than personal or social advancement. Maybe humans as we know them would spread unmanned probes across the galaxy for the sake of doing it, but I have doubts that humans capable of th feat would do it. I suspect we’d be wiser, or we’d be dead.
The problem is that humans, you and me included, are very bad at extremely large and extremely small numbers.
We don't have infinite planets. We have 10^21 stars, roughly, and some constant P average planets per star.
If the odds of life are 10^-14 per planet, and the odds of intelligent life are 10^-7 per life hosting planet, and we presume every star has one planet that might support life, then in the 10^21 stars in the universe, we'd expect only one intelligent life. That is one possibility!
But we simply don't know what the odds of life and the odds of intelligent life are in the slightest. We don't even know what range of possible values are reasonable. And humans are so bad at contemplating numbers like 10^21 and 10^-14. They're too extreme for one to think of them rationally.
And saying "well, it happened here, be it must be common" is selection bias- we can only contemplate the problem because it happened here.
The right answer is to get more information to improve our estimates of the probabilities. If we can find life at Alpha Centauri, that would either be a hell of a coincidence, or a very good indicator that the probability of life given a planet is high.
> If we can find life at Alpha Centauri, that would either be a hell of a coincidence, or a very good indicator that the probability of life given a planet is high.
Why would finding life on just one more planet – out of the 195 or so "worlds" that we know about, including moons – suddenly make "the probability of life given a planet" high?
By your own reasoning, whether we find life at Alpha Centauri, or do not find any life there, will not really change the probability of discovering future life or intelligence among the rest of all the 10^21 * P planets.
We could always just keep saying that "There are only 2 planets in the universe with life. No more." "There are only 5 planets in the universe with life." and so on and on.
> Why would finding life on just one more planet – out of the 195 or so "worlds" that we know about, including moons – suddenly make "the probability of life given a planet" high?
Because sampling. It's like election polling. If you ask one person who they're going to vote for and they say "Candidate A", you really have no idea how likely it is that candidate A has massive support. Perhaps you just happened to find the only person voting for that candidate! But if you ask the next random person and they say the same thing, well, the odds that you found the only two people voting for candidate A in your first two random asks is very low. On the other hand, if the second person is not supporting candidate A, that also helps you get a better guess at support levels.
You can never know the true level without asking every single person, but with every additional piece of data you can better estimate just what the truth is.
Just the same, as soon as we find another star with life, the number of stars we had to search to find that second one gives us a fantastic start to coming up with an estimate on how common life is. We presume that our corner of the universe is a good sampling of the rest, and extrapolate based on what we know here.
The key point is that extrapolation from a single data point is wildly innacurate.
> As soon as we find another star with life, the number of stars we had to search to find that second one gives us a fantastic start to coming up with an estimate on how common life is.
We presume that our corner of the universe is a good sampling of the rest, and extrapolate based on what we know here.
We currently know of at least 8 or 9 planets in our system + at least 185 moons (new ones were discovered around Jupiter last month.)
So, finding life on 2 out of 194~ places will take us from "There is only 1 planet in the entire universe with life!" to "how common life is"?
> The key point is that extrapolation from a single data point is wildly innacurate.
But extrapolating from 2 points out of (100 billion x 200 billion) is not?
–
Why wouldn't people continue to use the same arguments they do now to say Earth is the only planet with life, to say there are only 2 planets in the universe with life?
We don't know all the forms that "life" or "intelligence" can take.
We certainly do not have any proof that it's impossible for life to be different from us, and we're already in the process of creating intelligence that's different from ours.
Our understanding of where life can thrive still gets challenged by discoveries on our own planet, or the experiments in our own labs, like the one on metal-based "cells" [0] that I read about recently.
Your basic argument is just not solid, sorry. You're pointing out that one variable in the Drake equation is large and admitting that we literally have __no clue__ about several others. No clue means no clue, we don't know the mechanism by which they happened. They could under present knowledge turn out to be precisely as small as space is big, or even smaller.
The "space is big argument" is not good but hopefully it leads you down the rabbit hole of more interesting arguments.
Terms like "practically infinite" are meaningless (my finger is practically infinite from an atomic perspective). We don't strictly "know" hardly anything about our universe, rather we have certain models which make predictions which have so-far not been falsified. Drake equation, Fermi paradox, etc., fall under the umbrella of philosophical speculation. They aren't proper science until they make concrete predictions that we can test experimentally.
If only one in a thousand stars have planets that can support life, only a thousandth of them develop complex life, only a thousandth of them avoid extinction events, only a thousandth of them develop technology, only a thousandth of them avoid destroying themselves somehow.
That would give us about one civilisation in every 10,000 galaxies. There are actually a lot more possible stages than that too, I've seen estimates that reasonably put our existence in the observable universe at all as a low probability event and maybe they're right. I've swung either way over the decades. There is a reasonable case that long term technological civilizations might be extremely rare. It's not a foregone conclusion that we are one of many.
Personally, I have no idea. It could go either way, but the Fermi Paradox does tend to indicate in the pessimistic direction at least with regard to our own galaxy. The problem is once you say technological life is rare at the one galaxy level, it only takes a few extra stages and a few extra low probability multipliers to make any life anywhere pretty unlikely.
You leave out the time dimension. The universe is what, just under 14 billion years old, and intelligent life on earth that can meaningfully seek out such things is what, 100 years?
That's another remarkably small window in time for us to discover anything - what if a civilization died out a million years ago?
> You leave out the time dimension. What if a civilization died out a million years ago?
This is what I keep bringing up when referring to dinosaurs, and I'm surprised that this point doesn't get presented more often when considering the chances of encountering life on other planets:
We have proof right here that life on the same planet can be separated by time and never contact each other, without even bringing cosmic distances into the equation.
Fair point, the odds I gave are for these things to happen in the lifetime of a star. It seems likely though that Stars of previous generations than ours are unlikely to have had enough heavy elements to have a rich enough material environment to develop life. An abundant supply of heavier elements such as iron, potassium, calcium, etc is a relatively recent development in the universe. Planets lacking plentiful supplies of mid-weight elements seem like they would be dramatically less likely to develop life.
> There is no way that we are "alone" in a universe estimated to have practically infinite planets.
Maybe there is a lot of space out there, but not enough time? Maybe the universe is still pretty young and it takes a lot of time to go from zero to intelligent life that knows how to contact each other over great distances.
Or too much time, between different epochs even on the same planet.
We are intelligent. We know dinosaurs existed. They stood where we stand. We cannot contact them, we will never touch them, and we will never fully learn about them, nor they us.
Maybe each galaxial species is given the perfect planet for them. Distance to other life is so great to avoid one planet species from destroying another.
Which considering the appalling job we are doing of caring for our home planet is a good thing. Because if humanity ever finds another species, our track record is pretty abysmal. God only help them if their planet contains a resource we covet
> There is no way that we are "alone" in a universe estimated to have practically infinite planets.
What if we are a random sample of conscious life in the space of all possible universes in a multiverse? Many of them will have intelligent life in many places, but the majority have the parameters just tweaked enough to touch the edge and only produce one. Couldn't we live in one of those?
(And there is near certainty a given tuning of the parameters produces none but obviously we can't be in one of those.)
> There is no way that we are "alone" in a universe estimated to have practically infinite planets.
That's very frightening on its own. Assuming the universe is practically infinite, there is another identically similar earth in this universe where another guy that has the same microscopic details as me writing this comment.
My problem with the series is the premise that invasion of another star system is worth it.
With all the resources Trisolarians put into colonization of Earth, and all their superior technology - they could've made space habitats that had perfectly safe orbits around whichever star they prefer, and put all of their citizens on them.
What's the point of risking mutual destruction by hunter in the dark forest (and we know they were afraid of it since the start), if you can create habitats in your own star system, or choose any nearby uninhabited star system if the 3-body-problem is really making it impossible to put these in your own system (and realistically - it wouldn't be so bad, just make a dyson swarm around the whole system.
Invading our Solar System was worth the risk for Tri-Solaris. Because of the Dark Forest nature of the universe they could not just pick a star where they thought there was no life, as life there could just be especially good at hiding. When they found earth they found a luxurious planet containing a race which was ignorant of the true state of the universe and technologically incapable of doing anything about it anyway. On top of all of this, our solar system was very close by :). Their own star system was hellish compared to ours, they needed to leave.
The final book in the series does a good job showing why Earth was a good option for them. Tri-Solarians knew far more about Earth than they could reliably determine about most nearby star systems.
If you're afraid that a planet will have life, then why choose a planet where you are sure there is life?
They were betting their existence on a species they knew already uses MAD as a basis for its' survival not figuring out that it could use MAD to defend themselves.
Their system was interesting, but ultimately not much worse than ours, once you leave the planet. And they have to leave the planet anyway.
Once you have nanomaterials allowing cheap access to space - putting your population in space habitats is cheap and easy. We could do it now, if we had space elevator. The cost of materials and energy is negligible compared to invasion of another star system. Especially with such conveniently storeable population :)
> Tri-Solarians knew far more about Earth than they could reliably determine about most nearby star systems.
There's nothing stopping them from figuring it out. You don't have to invade a system, you can send a stealthy probe. I would assume in their circumstances it would be a wise thing to do if they really don't want to live in space further away from the center of gravity of their star system.
Besides, if the dark forest is so important - why invade Earth at all and play with fire? You can kill everybody on Earth without bothering to show up or sending any warnings. Send a big meteor their way or make a deadly disease that looks like flu, infect everybody, and on set date kill all hosts. Much cheaper, and no risk of ceasing to exist.
What they did in the books was very risky and wasteful for no good reason.
> betting their existence on a species they knew already uses MAD
If ant colonies depend on MAD for continued existence, it means nothing to us. This example was used multiple times throughout the series. They didn't even make a singular bet on Earth. The invasion was just one avenue they chose for survival.
> You don't have to invade a system, you can send a stealthy probe.
In the dark forest of the three body universe you could send a probe, but you learn nothing if it finds no life in a system. The only reliable, actionable information a probe can provide you is if life is found. Finding an absence of life just as easily means that the life in the system is so far advanced beyond you that you cannot detect it. It would be far riskier to bet your future on a system in which you found no life. Not to mention that you are making a huge gamble on the stealthiness of said probe. The probe could be the very thing that makes you the target of a dark forest strike. Earth already appeared safe, so why take further action that carries real risk of notifying some other civilization that you exist? You can't be reliably stealthy because some other race can be technically beyond you.
> Send a big meteor
Earth was an un-imaginable eden to Tri-Solaris, it's made clear that they wanted the planet intact.
> or make a deadly disease that looks like flu
This requires a much longer timeline as multiple trips are required to carry out the plan. The Tri-Solarans were facing a very real threat of extinction that made a shorter plan worth the risk. It's made very clear that they did not wish to exterminate humanity.
Earth was valuable because in all probability the rest of the universe did not know it existed. Given that you are saying they were stupid for not building space habitats, you must not be aware of what actually happened to the Tri-Solarans :). Besides, those space habitats present their own form of danger to their inhabitants. Actually, the danger they pose is worse than existing on a planet.
> If ant colonies depend on MAD for continued existence, it means nothing to us.
But we're not an ant colony to them, we're already using technology that can be used for MAD (sending signals through the sun), and they know it from the start.
> Earth was an un-imaginable eden to Tri-Solaris, it's made clear that they wanted the planet intact.
As far as I understand every planet in the system was heaven for them, the orbit was important. Which is stupid, because you can make anything follow a circular orbit around some star.
> This [flu] requires a much longer timeline as multiple trips are required to carry out the plan.
Why? They have their stealth probe (don't remember how it was called), they can take a look at a spanish influenza or something and pimp it up a little. At worst they then need to send like 1 gram at almost light speed the conventional way - still much easier and faster than sending the armada.
> Given that you are saying they were stupid for not building space habitats, you must not be aware of what actually happened to the Tri-Solarans :).
They were destroyed because their coordinates were broadcasted. As they should expect from the start messing with civilization that broadcasted "hello".
> those space habitats present their own form of danger to their inhabitants. Actually, the danger they pose is worse than existing on a planet.
How? They aren't any less stealthy than sattelites, tv, or radio.
Tri-Solaris technologically stomps humanity throughout the series. Humanity was ignorant of the dark forest, and Tri-Solaris knew that. Further, they're able to suppress the Sun's broadcast capability. From their vantage point there was no feasible way for humanity to become aware of the dark forest. Their misunderstanding of humans is a central plot point. By every single measure Tri-Solaris had the advantage in a massive way.
> Why? They have their stealth probe
It was not stealthy. Humanity literally saw the probe pull ahead of the fleet and knew the probe was coming 50+ years before it arrived. Sometimes hiding behind an asteroid or planet is not stealth.
> They were destroyed because their coordinates were broadcasted.
No, the Tri-Solaris civilization still existed near the end of the universe. Their planet was destroyed, but they lived on as a space faring species.
> How? They aren't any less stealthy than sattelites, tv, or radio.
Do you recall what light-speed capable ships do to the fabric of the universe?
> Humanity was ignorant of the dark forest, and Tri-Solaris knew that
Tri-Solaris knew only what their sect was aware of, not what everyone on Earth thought. Also - they were somehow aware of the dark forest, would be very naive to think others can't discover it on their own. They were clearly considering it a real threat, because they tried to stop him and reacted so quickly when the guy staring at the wall did the experimental star demolition.
> Humanity literally saw the probe pull ahead of the fleet and knew the probe was coming 50+ years before it arrived.
Wasn't it only seen because they were already looking there? I might misremember something.
> Further, they're able to suppress the Sun's broadcast capability.
Only after the girl is chosen as the person to hold MAD button, IIRC. At that point the decisions on invasion were made centuries ago. Counting on that happening would be crazy.
> Do you recall what light-speed capable ships do to the fabric of the universe?
Not really, I ignored most of that 3rd book technobabble because it was unphysical. They were destroying universe and making it 2d or something?
Anyway, why should it matter? Habitats are supposed to orbit somewhere pleasant, like any dumb rock would do, not move at light speed.
> No, the Tri-Solaris civilization still existed near the end of the universe. Their planet was destroyed, but they lived on as a space faring species.
My bad, don't remember everything from the book. Still - this only proves my point - it's possible, so they should have done that from the start. They were never in "existential danger", just lazy (but still somehow happy to spend lots of resources, effort, and risk to live on Earth).
> Not really, I ignored most of that 3rd book technobabble because it was unphysical
I think this is the basis of our debate. I can totally understand why many people did not like the series. The author at times drags the reader through multiple chapters of details that feel as though they have nothing to do with the story. They don't even feel like world building. Honestly, I had a really hard time with some of those myself. Especially the first few chapters of books 2 and 3. However, in the end all those asides really matter to wrapping up the story. Is that good storytelling? I don't know. I rather enjoyed it though :)
But yeah, the last 25% of the final book is full of technobabble, but that babble is pretty important to wrapping up the story and understanding the motivation of each civilization.
Which Sci-Fi book or series of books would you say are the best?
From serious ones I liked "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. It was also very abstract at times, but it focused on one kind of abstraction, and one that I liked.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson was nice, too, I loved the worldbuilding with construction of whole independent history of science and philosophy on a fantasy world, and how people used it in their lives.
Algebraist by Ian Banks is interesting (not in the Culture series, Culture books are ok too, but there's no tension in these books whatsoever).
I love Lem, especially the robot stories, but also Futorological Congress, Solaris, His Masters' Voice. IMHO Lem has the best aliens in all sci-fi. Maybe Blindsight by Peter Watts comes close.
I also like Jacek Dukaj who I belive wasn't translated to English. But now that I think he tends to do the same thing as in 3rd book of 3 body problem - a book starts with regular people and easily relatable stuff, and by the end it's all so abstract and weird you don't know what's going on. It kinda puts me off, I prefer constant level of abstraction all the way through.
This is exactly my problem with the whole idea of alien invasion. The technological resources needed to traverse star systems are so huge, and even then it's very unlikely any life-bearing planet will be all that habitable for your particular biology (the life there will have evolved for the conditions on that planet, which might very well be toxic for you). If you have such resources, it should be much easier to just build yourself some O'neal cylinders, or even terraform some more conveniently-located planets.
This is the one book I have seen praised here endlessly. I am sincerely hoping it can stand with Neal Stephenson's work. I don't think there is any other author I can recommend unequivocally.
If you like Neal Stephenson, you'll like Cixin Liu (especially when translated by Ken Liu), but you'll have to give Liu a fresh chance and let his work be its own thing. I love NS's work, and I've really enjoyed Cixin Liu's trilogy.
Three Body Problem is very thrilling to read; fast paced with a lot of cliff hangers, and excellent world building. The sci-fi/speculative bits are extrodinary, and although the characters can sometimes feel like their only role is to give a 'first person perspective' of the science, Liu can surprise you with the emotional depth that his characters exude.
The Dark Forest is in my opinion harder to get through than Three Body Problem, but the payoff is extraordinary. The pacing is slower with more world-building, and the perspective bounces around between a lot of characters without much forward movement. I had to put it down for a while and read some other books before I built up the motivation to finish it (it helped that I already bought the next book, so I felt guilty not finishing).
Deaths End, the third book, is unbelievably amazing. The pacing is more similar to Three Body Problem, and the science is astounding. All of the patience necessary for Dark Forest pays off because Liu is able to bring his world-elements into a mesmerizing display of action and conflict. I'm only half-way through and I've lost count of the number of times I've had to take pause and simply exclaim "Wow!".
Thanks, always looking for new stuff to read. (edit: not really new, but new to me :)
Concerning The Three-Body Problem, I found it a bit disappointing. Great build up with a rather traditional solution making some things of the build up looking a little bit silly.
I can understand why you say Three-Body has a rather traditional solution, but I would argue said solution is misdirection. The first book is really just setting up the real meat of the story, in the 2nd and 3rd books.
Start with Snow Crash or Diamond Age - some of Neal Stephen's later work is too focused on the science/history, while neglecting the characters and the story, which is fine for most people here, but it might give the wrong impression of him as an author.
I found the ideas were interesting, but the writing (plotting/characters) to be ho-hum. It’s a translation, of course - but I’m not sure I would rate it quite as highly others here.
Yes, if there's other life in the universe, then we absolutely don't want to announce our presence to it. Due to exponential growth in technology and the old age of the universe, we are the plankton of the universe and they are likely the fish.
I used to worry about that a bit when we discussed this a year or two ago, but then I realized that Earth has been broadcasting the fact that it is inhabited to any civilization only slightly more sophisticated than ours (like, literally only by a couple of years) who can see spectroscopy of our atmosphere when we transit in front of the Sun. Earth has been broadcasting that it has free oxygen for nearly two and a half billion years and we have no evidence of any attack.
I run on the theory that if an alien civilization intended to destroy Earth, they would have succeeded. An alien civilization that reaches out once every few dozen million years years to sorta kinda whack the Earth seems about as likely as aliens hopping in their FTL spaceships and traveling the vast distances across the cosmos to our primitive little dirt ball, only to constantly crash into mountains located near secret military bases.
Or put more generally, "Why would they care?" We'd have nothing a vastly more advanced civilization would particularly want from us, and we'd pose absolutely no threat to them.
If they are crazy genocidal monsters wiping out all intelligent life besides their own, then they're probably systematically looking for targets, sending out their own probes to check out any planet that could sustain life. If they have any kind of presence in Alpha Centauri that could detect these probes, then they'd be here soon enough even if we didn't send out a probe.
The part where the Trisolarians try to make the Special Thing was hands down one of the dumbest things I've ever read in science fiction.
The first 3rd of the book that dealt with cultural revolution fallout was awesome, though. But yeah---back half was bad enough to ruin the whole thing for me.
I liked the novel, but the whole setup is written under an inaccurate understanding of how the Centauri system is arranged. Proxima is a long way out from Alpha Centauri A and B (0.21 light years), orbiting their mutual center of mass, and A and B themselves are a fair distance apart (from 11.2 to 35.6 AU). Any of the three stars could have planets in close stable orbits; we already know Proxima has one.
I always wonder about programs that require building a 100GW laser that can target any point in the sky above it. While I"m sure there are many uses for such a device, clearly one of them is disabling satellites. Which makes the creation and operation of such a device destabilizing at a minimum and more likely fairly provocative.
Seems like overkill for shooting down satellites. IIRC the US and China have already demonstrated this ability so I don't think it would add that much as a weapon.
Don't under estimate the value of being able to shoot down a satellite with no advance warning. Existing anti-sat weapons are typically launched from a platform that is visible/trackable long before it can actually kill a satellite.
ICBM time to target is around 15 minutes. I assume that satellite shoot down time is similar with a rocket. Does going from 15 minutes of warning to instant give much of a tactical advantage?
Its the prep time. ICBM's have to be fueled or their silos opened or the launchers positioned, etc. That can take hours. The F-15 antisat missile[1] is pretty quick but the plane still has to get up to altitude and do a tricky maneuver to launch it.
I am not a policy expert by any means, I just remember all the consternation over systems which shorten the time between being ready and killing some strategic asset.
This article introduces more questions than it answers to me.
How do you travel that fast & not disintegrate or crash into something?
Was Mr Manchester's experiment done using a laser to launch?
Has this been done before at any scale? Even pushing an item a few hundred feet up?
Is there a timeline for this to even get attempted?
I think it sounds really awesome but that makes me wonder if any of this is feasible soon. Sending tiny Raspberry Pi like devices into space at fast speeds that could do cheap experiments more quickly, that would be nice.
Not to mention, where are all the other Bracewell probes from all the other interstellar civilizations? If there's life shouldn't the local area be teeming with them, since they're cheap and easy for any culture that can do spaceflight?
(also, for fans of The Expanse, something something protomolecule)
How the heck would we detect a 3 foot spacecraft that weighs a few grams, passing anywhere through the Solar System at speeds over 10% of light?
We might be getting them once a week and we would have no idea. We can't even find or track most of our own asteroids, and they're already in solar orbit.
The KickSat was deployed as a 3U cubesat into orbit. The point was just to launch a ton of satellites at once, not to test some kind of propulsion tech.
What I want to know is how they plan on steering these things. How do you get a multi-gigawatt laser on Earth to not only hit a ping-pong ball sized thing in space, but propel it in a particular direction, precisely enough that it will pass through the inner solar system of a star system 4 light-years away? Wouldn't an encounter with a tiny bit of gas or something near our solar system cause it to be like a few billion miles off target?
>Think of it as a large pingpong ball with computers and cameras pointing in different directions. The big advantage? The spherical shape, coupled with a "hollow" laser beam that's stronger toward its outside edge, could be naturally centered on the beam throughout the acceleration.
>"Imagine blowing a piece of paper straight up. It's going to fly off the beam unless it's perfectly aligned," says Zac Manchester, a Stanford professor and Starshot engineer who's researched the subject and already launched a 1.4-inch square spacecraft into Earth's orbit.
But also from TFA, the lasers will stop after the spacecraft travels about ten times the distance between the Earth and moon. I think the question still stands, is it possible to expect anywhere near the needed precision without some kind of active steering over the four light years (minus ten moons) of space that must be traversed? It certainly must be a limiting factor in the utility of this scheme. I can't imagine using this tech to execute a planned fly-by of an extra-solar moon, for example.
10 times the distance to the Moon at an average speed of 0.1c takes about two minutes. So you would launch thousands of these crafts in the general direction of the target system and hope that at least one survives the micrometeorite onslaught and passes close enough to the target planet to snatch a few pictures. Or maybe even aero brake in the very thin heliosphere or gas giant upper atmosphere and enter a highly elliptical Centauri-centric orbit.
I did read it. That's why I asked the question. That all sounds rather vague and hand-wavey compared to what I expect it to take to come near the inner planets of a solar system 4 light-years away.
hope the space dust does not wipe off the writing on the front: "this is not a laser powered bullet to destroy your planet, should totally just fly past, we did the math"
Haha, any atmosphere at all would disintegrate those things. Earth sees that calibre every minute. We'll totally aim right at the planets and won't hit them anyway.
Edit: Well, I forgot the relativistic speed that ball would be traveling at. So if the planet's inhabitants actually lived in the upper atmosphere some might actually get burned.
Given that an approach like this could be implemented even on a lower power basis, wouldn't we use it first for super fast, super frequent investigation of planets and their moons within the solar system? Isn't that the low hanging fruit here?
Finding and tracking very small/fast debris is a different matter, but if you can find the debris and keep a laser aimed at it you can alter its orbit.
If it's going to fly at such a large speed, what is the proposed mechanism to stop it? This thing would instantly burn as soon as it reaches any planet's atmosphere. Could Alpha Centauri's gravity field capture this spacecraft somehow? Doesn't seem likely.
TLDR for those who are already familiar with the idea and just want to know the details: it'll travel at .2C, taking 20 years (4ly*.2), and there is no launch date. It seems all still theoretical at this stage, though they're pushing some serious funding. To report back they "hope" the spacecraft can use lasers and we will "probably" hear a few when a bunch of them report their measurements back.
I am curious as to how the radio tech will work for these things. Im skeptical that something super low power will be able to send us back some pictures from that distance? Is our current tech that good?
If there is intelligent life on the star next door, the Fermi Paradox would bite extremely hard. So, no, we're not going to find intelligent life there.
Are they planning on sending signals back? Also how much observation can you do with a little spacecraft that moves through a solar system at that speed?
Sounds interesting but way out there. I wonder if they will prototype the system with a flyby of an asteroid or similar to see if it even works shorter distances.
i wonder how they deal with the possibility of collision - at this speed and distance you will have a significant chance of bumping into something in interstellar space. Also you will have to slow down the spacecraft somehow, how would they go about it?
"aiming to the level-of-precision needed to pass close to (but not collide with) a target planet is virtually impossible. The “cone of uncertainty” for any trajectory will include the planet we’re aiming for."
"A planet getting hit by a ~1 gram spacecraft moving at 60,000 km/s is going to experience the same level of catastrophic effects as a planet getting hit by a ~1 tonne asteroid moving at ~60 km/s, the equivalent of which happens on Earth just once per decade. Each strike would hit their world with the same energy that the Chelyabinsk meteorite struck Earth: the most energetic collision of the decade."
I don't think a meteorite can be compared to such a tiny ball. The ball will disintegrate when it's still 100km up. You get an intense flash. But I don't think shock waves travel much up there.
Depicted in these magazine articles and artist renditions: in the future (certainly by the 2020s!), we will have bases on the Moon, maybe even Mars, and rotating space stations... all the while wearing stylish futuristic fashions (yet still looking very much 70's), the women sipping from glasses of champagne and laughing to each other while in the background the men play some yet-to-be-invented handball game.