Yeah, a fascinating video. Very interesting from a purely mathematical perspective.

I’ve never really understood the can’t go faster than light speed or interstellar travel is impossible argument. Firstly, an advanced society may have completely transitioned to artificial intelligence and 10000 years in a spaceship means nothing. Secondly, stating it is impossible to travel faster than lightspeed is ironically IMO quite an ignorant argument - we should be far more humble given our incomplete knowledge of physics and our technological immaturity.

Faster than light speed is impossible though without breaking the laws of physics as we currently understand them and this appears to be universal, with the exception of the universe's expansion, Only then is it possible for a form of faster than light travel without breaking the laws of physics.

It would still take thousands of years to get to a destination though and anything could happen within that time to the destination. itself. our galaxy alone is 100,00 light years across with the observable universe estimated at 93 billion years across. There may well be aliens and they could simply be too far away which would make coming here pointless. Or maybe we#re actually the most technologically advanced or maybe Aliens are technologically on a pr with us. Too many variables and as was stated earlier, we simply don't know what's out there and have nothing to form any data on re liner stellar life. All we have at present is speculation. Hopefully the James Webb telescope can identify potential biospheres but apart from that it's all just presumption.

We just need to make the speed of light faster

But perhaps it doesn’t involve going faster than the speed of light. There are already theoretical methods that describe faster than light speed like a wormhole. Or perhaps I should say to arrive at your destination faster than lightspeed.

Actually you could go pretty damn far in a human lifetime with time dilation. Most of the galaxy. Of course that is from the travelers view point. They would never be able to send data back and earth would be so much older we would all be dead. Point is not having FTL travel isn't the giant roadblock people think.

Of course, faster than light speed isn't even necessary - a civilisation could in theory populate the entire galaxy in under 300 million years going at 1% speed of light. Not bad on a cosmological time scale.

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/how-l...-entire-galaxy

Ok 2+2 science brains, help me out here.

My understand of propulsion and speed in space is that is completely cumulative or additive??

Meaning if I use a thruster to get to speed X, and then immediately turn off the thruster I will continue at that speed forever, short of hitting something or passing by something with gravity that might slow or speed me up.

Also as I understand now that I have my set cruising speed. any additional firings of the thruster (Y) will just increase my speed to X + Y which then becomes the new speed as I cease using the thruster. I am now traveling the cosmos at the increased speed.

So therefore I could have a theoretical ship with solar capture array providing endless energy to a thruster and have endless acceleration for the vessel with the only limit being how often and long can the thruster be used between recharging cycles.

So do we really need to invent any other forms of propulsion (faster or not) as opposed to inventing protecting and managing a ship that would be traveling at those enormous speeds?

To me it appears we have the tech now to achieve the speeds to travel the cosmos if only we had a craft that could survive such issues.

What am I missing?

(and I suspect it is a lot FWIW)

Well, you'd also need to stop. You can just flip your ship around and de-accelerate, but the closer you are to the limits of its acceleration, the less room for error you have. To use an analogy, it would be fully possible to replace buses with people being shot out of cannons, but it has limitations.

Accelerating an object in motion is also where Newtonian mechanics end and special relativity takes over: E = mc², energy's nasty habit of behaving like mass and vice versa. It has also lead to thousands of physicists telling us they are the same thing and thousands of others telling us that they are not. But when you make something go faster you will increase its kinetic energy, and it will for all intents and purposes have increased mass. Thus you get diminishing returns on your energy in terms of velocity gained.

But I don't even think there is a debate to be had whether we can survive on a spaceship.

We live on on dried crusts of colliding rock floating on a partially molten core, using an atmosphere that is slowly leaking away while the entire habitat spins wildly around on its axis as it hurtles in big circles around a massive nuclear explosion.

We've managed that for a few thousand generations, so a spaceship doesn't seem like a stretch.

But we exist within the context of Earth's environment and gravity.. We don't do well in zero gravity, especially prolonged. Nor do we do well against radiation exposure, which is in abundance in space. In these respects, going to say, Mars isn't actually a good idea practically, desire to explore the unknown aside. Makes far better sense for a rover. Surviving on a spaceship has the same practical pitfalls.

Assuming Aliens exist and wish to populate anywhere. On the flip side there's also the dark forest theory where Alien civilisations keep their heads down and try to stay hidden from each other
https://bigthink.com/surprising-scie...om-aliens-yet/

The list of things on this planet that can kill you and maim is so long that a person could literally spend his lifetime listing them. For hostile environments we could also make enormous lists about how we have managed to conquer them. Most of things me and you take for granted in life are the result of humanity carving its place out on this fleck of space-dust.

At some point in human history there was likely no shortage of people who explained why leaving the coasts and going into the blue meant doom. These days it is a very natural thing to do.

with respect, that's not an apt comparison .Leaving the coast didn't cause severe muscle loss due to prolonged weightlessness or potential radiation poisoning simply for venturing out there.. Again we're adapted to live in our environment, even the less hospitable parts. Outer space, which didn't shape our evolution and which our bodies aren't equipped for, is a whole different ball game. Potential aliens could face the same difficulties, especially if carbon based which they most likely would be.
That's not to say it's impossible or non viable, but Aliens may not bother exploring space due to practical problems as well as logistical. They could well send probes instead, assuming they even feel the need to explore beyond their planet.

Appreciate this answer, thx.

I had no doubt when asking that 'if near infinite acceleration was CURRENTLY available to us via the mechanism I detail above, that we would have a host of other issues to deal with, which you point to a few. I was more asking a question along the lines of 'do we have this acceleration thing solved in one form, and if we can just solve for all the problems (no small feat by any means) related to such speed, acceleration, mass, etc, then we would have the ability to traverse the cosmos.

Not to diminish this topic or pretend any idea is the answer but if something like a 'warp bubble' from science fiction could be developed around the ship, which provided for a stable and protected zone for the ship within it, while all the stresses are on the bubble itself which has the technology, to handle them, ...would we not be there?

And i am not suggesting a Warp Bubble or any solution is going to be developed. My question is more 'have we solved for the necessary speed IF we can find a way to deal with the factors that come with such speeds (mass, collision damage, etc)??


I feel the above is confusing and I don't know if this will help but a parallel would be the earliest understanding by mankind of how we can use certain objects to float in the ocean and on the water (a floating tree stump ... progressing to an early boat), but once we learned that we had that part solved, and we knew how to float, we had to solve for many other factors to be able to navigate the wide open oceans. We because we were able to solve for all those other factors, we did in fact have the first part solved (floating) from the earliest iterations.


I hope the above makes sense with regards to what I realize is very theoretical and speculative talk (more sci fi >>> sci fact), that anything available in todays reality, which I feel some people might try to pretend any such talk like this about.

You aren't adapted to survive in the open blue either. You need a vessel, tools, technology and knowledge. If not you'll quickly (well, hopefully quickly) die of disease, thirst, starvation or drowning. It took about 7000 years of maritime tradition to figure out how to leave the coasts and rivers behind.

I don't really have any answers to what technology the future might bring in terms of making distances easier to cross.

But civilizations in the past undertook projects that took centuries to finish, where the generation that started them would never see their completion and they knew they would never see their completion. We can learn to do that again and apply it to space travel.

And many of the places these explorers "discovered" actually had humans living there for thousands of years in prehistory. That's not a possibility now.

Not so positive about the bolded.

Of all the methods theorized about how life began on this planet, I rank alien civilization deliberately seeding this planet with the stuff of life up there with a random asteroid(s) striking the planet containing the seeds of life.

I think it is highly likely in the coming decades, long before mankind can travel the vast distances to habitable planets, we may send satellites containing what we think could become the seeds of life on those planets to terraform them for generations later when mankind can actually travel the vast distances. Start the process of trying to ensure they have a habitual planet we can survive on once we get there.

It also bears mention that the vast majority of open ocean explorers found nothing.

But yes, time is the perspective. We’re reasonably certain on what we need for survival, so it is matter of ensuring those things and mapping out added risks from prolonged stay in space.

And perhaps in 7000 years from now, people will think of these things as so natural that they’ll throw out that “humans are adapted to space travel” just as easily as “humans are adapted to the open ocean” was argued here.

Yeah, but humans “adapted to the open oceans” before they had written language. It’s a very shallow analogy. Like if isolated civilizations had been independently going to the moon for 10s of thousands of years some without writing the analogy would be much better. But that’s laughably far from reality.

Successful blue water travel / navigation started in the middle ages and became a thing in the renaissance, you are thinking of the history of the boat (about 8000 years ago).

And your brain has adapted to overcome such difficulties by building a ship and we can swim and breathe on deck and the open blue while inhospitable is still on Earth where we've adapted to exist on.

Yes our brains can also build a spaceship to take us to the moon but we're out of an environment our bodies evolved to live in. Maybe it'll take us another 7000 years to fully master interstellar space travel . At present though we don't have the technology to survive in space the way we can survive the open blue or Antarctica. Our bodies are in no way equipped to deal with the environment of outer space the way they are for Earth, even the less hospitable parts. That's why I feel the comparison isn't apt.
And again Aliens, assuming they not only exist but are also a civilisation capable of interstellar travel may well face the same problems.

The dominant theory is people reached Australia by boat 47000 years ago. It might have been accidental the first time but it would have been ocean travel harder than island hopping.

I don't have any strong opinions in this area, but does no one think theories on Terra forming have any merit amongst the many options of how life evolved on this planet and how earth like life one day may be on other planets?


If we agree we, earthlings are no where near the sophistication of being able to transport human life to other identified (if/when we do find them) hospitable planets and it could take thousands or ten of thousands or much more years before we both find and can get to any such planet, what about instead the idea of what we can do now?

For instance Mars is theorized to a planet we could not terraform successfully due a few key ingredients missing, such as not enough C02 and an atmosphere being too thin.

But lets say we find a planet that our current satellite technology could reach, that has the ice or water and the necessary atmosphere but was missing other elements that are core to 'life'. Humans may not know the perfect recipe for the soup of life but what we do know, is life tends to find a way (evolution) once certain elements are introduced. When it comes to planet earth those were bacteria, viruses and microbiological.

SO imagine a future where earth is destroyed by a Sun flair or asteroid and all human existence disappears from the cosmos but on many Earth like planets, in the years before mankind was destroyed we sent out satellites with the 'stuff of life' to collide with several planets we identified had the components to be good terraforming candidates and one or more of them in the million years to come goes thru an evolutionary process where they too end up with life that mirrors what evolved here on earth.

They too are pondering whether it all started via a random asteroid strike that just so happened to have the random components to spur life or if some ancient civilization in the cosmos just so happened to deliberately send them???


Does any one feel the 'deliberate satellite' theory is so less likely than the 'random asteroid' theory that it should not be considered???

There is plenty of guesswork about the boat, but the oldest boats we know of are about 8 millennia old and our actual knowledge of maritime tradition starts around there. I suspect the hypotheses you allude to here are more about different landmasses and lower ocean levels (thus more islands), than they are about claiming sophisticated navigation methods and technologically advanced boats.

For navigation without (known) landmarks, you must need directions and ways to monitor your course and position. For shorter or step-wise forays over the horizon, you can get away with just directions and guesstimating, at your own peril. For longer journeys, you can't as drift and wind will mean your heading is not your course, and this difference will lead to increasingly bigger errors.

The closest civilization to your (original) argument would be the Polynesians, who through several thousand years incrementally mapped out the Polynesian Triangle; island by island and route by route, long before the advent of the compass. But while that is certainly one of the most impressive eras of exploration ever undertaken by a civilization (and likely serves a far better analogy for space travel than anything I ever made), it isn't really enough to start conquering the oceans in full, which required the compass, modern cartography and many, many revolutions in ship-building.

Anyways, if you and CV don't want to see open ocean travel as a good comparison to space travel, that's fine by. I find it perfect: A beautiful, deadly, ever-present and (for most of our history as a species) impassable barrier which some madmen in history figured they'd traverse. An idea only made possible by technology and knowledge.