Re: We'll never reach the stars
- From: Jack Tingle <wjtingle@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:54:37 -0400
bm2617@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
But as time has gone by, we've become more concious of just how hard
interplanetary, let alone insterstellar, travel will be, and of how
different the future is likely to be. The notion of the Singularity
has made it more difficult to portray the future as at _all_ like the
present, and the notion that we'll be sending ships to Betelgeuse or
whatever any century now has become rather less tenable.
I think you have a disconnect on a couple of time scales. Interplanetary travel is hard, but not impossible. Just very expensive with the tools we have now. It will be centuries before we sparsely populate the Solar System. (<---I claim this prediction, so that, in a few centuries my shade can come back and say nyah-nyah.)
The Singularity is a very cool idea that one (1) author thought up. It is not a given. Any future might include it, but it also might never occur. Nothing like it has thus far in known history. It might also only occur partially. If development in any given area is exponential, you might see a Singularity in that field. If it's an S-curve, like, for example, sailing ships, you won't.
I'm not holding my breath, or my distant descendants' breaths, waiting for interstellar flight, but there will probably be some attempts, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Probably on the scale of thousands of years. We'll arguably be human 1000 years from now; we were 1000 years ago.
Remember if there's a 0.1% chance of success for any one starship, and you _really_ want to colonize the 100 nearest stars, you just send out 100,000 ships. Yes, it sucks to be no. 9,999, the one that almost succeeded, but you achieved your objective.
The "monkeys in a can" mode of space travel, to paraphrase a bit in
one of Stross's recent novels, looks rather impractical with current
technology levels. OTOH, if we look at the long run, with things like
genetic engineering, effective cybernetics, real understanding and
control of brain chemisty, etc., on the horizon, by the time the
technology really advances, we won't necessarily be the same old
monkeys, either.
Possible, but not guaranteed. Humans are cheap to make, physically reliable, self-repairing, self-replicating, and often tenacious. We might just be the low cost solution. The down side for humans is life support vs. some kind of more robust automated system. It's not a clear choice.
I've followed the 'cloning of _insert animal type_ follies'. It's a clever, expensive hack, but people are cheap. Why bother cloning them, other than in a few special cases? You can just conventionally breed a hundred and kill off the 99 that don't meet your needs, cheaper. (Please don't say 'inconceivable' in a world that included Pol Pot.)
If our descendants (or the descendants of our machines, in a more
pessimistic theme) ever move out of our solar system to seed the
galaxy with life and/or intelligence, they may have by that time as
little in common with us as we have with australopithecines. And
that's a bit hard to write about.
Or they may have as much in common with us as Thales and Democritus, who still sound pretty modern after 2500 years. Australopithecines lived _millions_ of years ago.
So - what authors have best tackled the notion that 1.) interstellar
travel is a thing of the _distant_ future and 2.) something that will
be accomplished by people (so to speak) _very_ different from those of
today?
Cordwainer Smith placed the age of the Instrumentality at C.E. 14,000 or so. Scanners and Habermen were more like your machines than humans. His fictional viewpoints are about as different as one can conceive from the vantage point of 1960.
Poul Anderson postulated a mixed society of men and machines in one of his last books (whose name I forget). You could upload, go to space, come back, and download.
There have been a variety of strange and variegated human galaxies. It often seems that Sean Williams and William Dix have a patent on that strain of sf.
The ultimate in that line is the Culture. Minds run things; people are pets^H^H^H^Hvalued junior partners.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: We'll never reach the stars
- From: Damien Sullivan
- Re: We'll never reach the stars
- References:
- We'll never reach the stars
- From: bm2617
- We'll never reach the stars
- Prev by Date: Re: Dissapointed with "Dragonlance"
- Next by Date: Re: We'll never reach the stars
- Previous by thread: Re: We'll never reach the stars
- Next by thread: Re: We'll never reach the stars
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
